UKRAINIAN MENTALITY THROUGH THE PRISM OF PHRASEMES OF ANCIENT ORIGIN: LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL ASPECTS

The mythology of Ancient Greece and Rome has become an inexhaustible source of images, concepts, deep meanings that have received their consideration in many linguistic cultures of the world and are manifested in a special way in each of them. 
Scientific research analyses the concept of mentality and outlines its main features. The article attempts to record the mental traits of Ukrainians in borrowed phraseological units. The object of the analysis is phraseological units selected from dictionaries, reference books and texts of several languages. 
The phraseological units soar in the empyrean (have one’s head in the clouds), hurl thunderbolts, lares and penates (return to one’s hearth and home), rise like a phoenix from the ashes, etc., have been analyzed. The article is an attempt to trace such features of the Ukrainian mentality as emotionality, cordocentrysm, anteism, love of freedom, etc., through the example of the studied phraseological units. 
The actualization of certain ancient images, the selection of mythologists and phraseological units, their transformations, variations, and the creation of new, proper Ukrainian phrases on the basis of borrowings – all this eloquently speaks of the assimilation of ancient motifs in the Ukrainian language. 
The results of a free associative experiment are indicative, which has made it possible to trace the actualization of the phraseme lares and penates on the modern linguistic soil. 466 respondents aged from 16 to 33 shared their associations. All responses were combined into semantic groups with a common lexical meaning. The survey confirmed the assumption of the presence of specific mental traits of Ukrainians in the internal form of the phraseme-stimulus. 
The collected and analyzed material makes it possible to assert that phraseological units of ancient origin acquired ethno-national features, adapted to the modern language world model and transmit key features of Ukrainian mentality.