The handbooks tell us that rhetoric was discovered in Greece during the fifth or even fourth century and required both developed democratic and legal institutions and a literate culture to flourish,1 social conditions Hesiod, a near contemporary of Homer, from a small village in Boeotia could not have known. Moreover, we usually consider rhetoric to refer to speech making in prose, not Hesiod’s traditional hexameter verse. Nevertheless, the Hesiodic poems share an important characteristic of oratory in its usual meaning: both are conceived as spoken performances in front of an audience. All early Greek poetry was performed orally before an audience rather than read, and the occasion of performance determined its character and genre. If we define rhetoric generally as the ‘means by which a writer makes known his vision to the reader and persuades him of its validity’,2 then the term would indeed apply to the Hesiodic poems, but it would also promiscuously embrace just about any form of literary expression. If, on the other hand, we define rhetoric as the formal study or codification of the means and rules of persuasive speech, then to speak of Hesiod’s rhetoric might leave us open to the charge of gross anachronism. Yet if rhetoric means reflecting self-consciously and systematically about the power and efficacy of speech,3 Hesiod, I will argue, not only practiced that art, but also thought about and formulated his views, not, to be sure, in a treatise, but nevertheless in a coherent manner. In fact, I would maintain - with only a little tongue in cheek - that Hesiod might well be considered the father of rhetoric. I will also show that applying certain terms and categories from the Aristotelian rhetorical tradition to Hesiod, while apparently anachronistic, can not only be a useful heuristic tool, but even illuminating.
The Theogony recounts in about one thousand hexameter verses the genesis and evolution of the gods and the other eternal forces that regulate the cosmos and culminates in Zeus’ final and permanent ordering of that cosmos; in the slightly shorter Works and Days Hesiod purports to advise his ne’er-do-well brother Perses how best to live in the world constituted by Zeus, a world that requires human beings to practice justice and to toil for their daily bread. These two poems are
Complementary, the one dealing with the divine and everlasting components of the cosmos while the second focuses on the character of human life. Here we will concentrate on one particular facet of the interrelation between the two compositions: their presentation of the function of eloquence and persuasive speech. To oversimplify a bit, we might say that the proem to the Theogony sets out a theory of rhetoric and the Works and Days puts it into practice.
While the Homeric heroes assign a high value to the ability to speak persuasively (see H. M. Roisman, Chapter 28), Hesiod is the first to extend the Muses’ domain from poetry to rhetoric and thereby to put the power of persuasion under divine patronage. In the proem to the Theogony, Hesiod describes the twofold gift of the Muses to mankind. To the poets they, along with Apollo, grant their gift of song whereby ‘the bards celebrate the glorious deeds of men of old and hymn the blessed gods’ (99-101). This gift of the goddesses has the power to distract (paretrape) us poor mortals, diverting us from the griefs and cares that beset us (98-104). The Muses’ second gift is granted to kings (81-90):4
Whomever of Zeus-nurtured kings the daughters of great Zeus honor,
And look upon favorably at his birth,
On his tongue they pour sweet dew,
And honeyed are the words that flow from his mouth; and the people All look to him as he discerns what is established as right and proper With straight judgments. And he, speaking with assurance,
Straightway makes an end to even a great quarrel;
This is what makes kings prudent, because for those Who have been aggrieved they accomplish deeds of requital With ease, persuading with soft words.
While their royal prerogatives, particularly the dispensation of justice, stem from Zeus, the eloquence of the kings derives from the Muses, more particularly, from Calliope, ‘she of the lovely voice’. Hesiod then would seem to agree with Aristotle that rhetoric is related to the political art (Rhet. 1356a). But Hesiod singles out three special characteristics of royal speech: first, its role in resolving quarrels, ‘even great ones’, second, its soothing quality, which is particularly effective with parties that have been wronged, and, finally, the ability of such speech to distract or divert through persuasion so as to bring about reconciliation. The expression for such diversionary tactics, paraiphamenoi (90), seems to parallel the power of poetry to deflect us (paretrape, 103) from care. For Hesiod, then, both poetry and rhetoric constitute a kind of verbal sleight-of-hand that, on the one hand, gives pleasure by distracting us from human misery and, on the other, allows us to reconcile ourselves to an imperfect world. What may surprise us here is the ambivalent character of eloquence: while its sweetness heals, it also masks an underlying bitterness inherent in the human condition; rhetoric would then perhaps be unnecessary in a perfect world.
At the beginning of the Theogony, Hesiod narrates his encounter with the Muses on the slopes of Helicon. On that occasion, the goddesses gave him two gifts: they breathed into him a divine voice and gave him a scepter of laurel, an emblem that unites Apollo with the royal authority of speech. In Homeric epic, the scepter is thrust into the hands of the speaker and signifies his authority to address the Assembly. The gifts given to Hesiod thus correspond to the twofold sphere of the Muses we have traced above: poetry that celebrates the glorious deeds of men and hymns the gods, and the political eloquence of kings that arbitrates and persuades. Hesiod appears to lay claim to both, and we shall observe him practicing both facets of his art.
As Aristotle argues, the ambiguity of eloquence and persuasion arises from the fact that, unlike the other arts, rhetoric deals with means rather than ends; it does not per se deal with, say, justice or virtue (Rhet. 1355b). For Hesiod too, the verbal art of poetry shares such ambiguity; the Muses’ songs may delight not only with truth, but also by means of lies that cannot be distinguished from truth. Hesiod uses a metaphor to express this difference: both truth (aletheia)5 and just judgments (dikai)6 are straight. To bend the truth means to lie; to twist justice renders it crooked. Persuasive speech, however, is precisely the art of bending, of mollifying, of persuasion or seduction. The last act of the Succession Myth whereby Zeus brings stability to Olympus and renders his regime eternal requires just such seduction when Zeus swallows his first wife Metis (‘Cunning’) by tricking her with ‘wheedling words’ (Theogony 890). Decked out by the Graces and Lady Persuasion (potnia Peitho, Works and Days 73), Pandora, the first woman whose jar unleashes baneful miseries upon mankind, likewise possesses ‘lies, wheedling words, and the morals of a thief’ ( epiklopon ethos, Works and Days 78) with which she seduces Epimetheus. Aphrodite’s prerogatives include ‘the babble of maidens, smiles, and deceptions’ (Theogony 205), while the offspring of Strife include ‘Quarrels, Lies, Arguments and Counter-arguments’ (Theogony 229). Hesiod may well be the first to acknowledge the ambiguity of rhetoric, its ability to harm and to heal, to persuade and seduce, and its power to further the truth as well as to dress up lies.
The Theogony’s subject matter is assigned to Hesiod on the occasion of his meeting with the Muses. They grant him divine song and the laurel scepter and command him to sing of the ‘race of the blessed ones who are forever’ (33). This song is very similar to the one the goddesses themselves sing (‘they celebrate in song the revered race of gods’, 44) in order to ‘delight the great mind of their father Zeus on Olympus’, 37). While listening to Hesiod’s song, we can, even if only momentarily, share in that divine delight. As a song praising the cosmos as it has come into being and celebrating Zeus’s eternal dominion, the Theogony can appropriately be assigned to the category of epideictic speech, which, according to Aristotle, deals with praise and blame. The Works and Days, on the other hand, can fruitfully be analyzed as a combination of forensic and deliberative oratory insofar as it presents Hesiod’s indictment of his brother Perses for his past misdeeds, which he accomplished with the connivance of the kings, and advises both Perses and the kings henceforth to mend their wicked ways.
1 Theogony
Of the three categories of rhetoric, epideictic oratory, according to Aristotle, is the closest to poetry.7 Later rhetoricians went so far as to include all of literature and history under this rubric. The audience of an epideictic speech - in Aristotle’s terminology, theoroi or spectators - while not required to render a verdict or vote on a decree, nevertheless pass judgment on the merits of the speech itself ( Rhet. 1358b, 1391b). The epideictic speaker implicitly competes with his predecessors, and the spectators inevitably evaluate him in relation to others.8 Much early Greek poetry closely resembles Aristotle’s definition of epideictic oratory in respect to the occasion of its performance, often a civic or religious festival, its audience, frequently Panhellenic, its concern with praise and blame, as well as its agonistic character.9 The Theogony, like so much of Greek literature, presents itself both explicitly and implicitly as a poem that competes with other theogonies. After all, ‘bard envies bard’ (Works and Days 26). Indeed, Hesiod himself tells us in the Works and Days how he won a prize at the funeral games for a certain Amphidamas, presumably with his Theogony, and that he dedicated his prize tripod to the Muses of Helicon who first initiated him in the art of song (Works and Days 654-659). The competitive character of the Theogony is also indicated by its frequent allusions to other, possibly local, theogonies and Hesiod’s insistence on the Panhellenic completeness and authoritativeness of his own composition. Hesiod’s poem embraces not only the birth of the gods, but also cosmic forces and components; in the invocation proper (105-115), Hesiod calls on the Muses to:
Celebrate the holy race of the immortals who are forever,
Those who were born from Earth and starry Sky,
And from gloomy Night, and those whom the salty Sea nurtured.
Tell how from the first the gods and the earth came into being And the rivers and the boundless sea with billowing swell,
The shining stars and the broad heaven above;
And those who were born from them, gods, givers of good things,
How they divided their wealth and chose their honors,
And also how first they came to inhabit Olympus.
These things, Muses who inhabit Olympian homes, tell From the beginning, and say who of them was born first.
Within this table of contents of the poem, Hesiod’s repeated insistence on the proper ordering draws attention to the arrangement of his composition - what Aristotle would have called taxis. Another Greek word for the orderly arrangement of parts into a coherent whole is cosmos. Hesiod’s taxis follows the arrangement of the cosmos from its first beginnings to its final state. Given his genealogical model, the expected arrangement of the material would seem inevitable and transparent, beginning from the first born of the gods and continuing to the last. Yet the ordering of the genealogies itself forms a tour de force, grouping the phenomena into families displaying similarities, differences, and interrelationships. Indeed, even the basic genealogical scheme is interrupted or displaced by various narratives, particularly the different stages of the Succession Myth, and digressions, which reveal the artfulness of Hesiod’s disposition of his material. Thus the catalogue of the dreadful children of Night follows upon the castration of Uranus, the first act of the Succession Myth, that inaugurates the cycle of divine violence and revenge and unleashes those dark forces on the cosmos. Likewise the description of the nether world is delayed until the Titans are defeated by Zeus and imprisoned there. Most important are the various prolepses that allude to Zeus’s triumph and the end of divine succession and generation. The story of Prometheus and his theft of fire, for example, comes out of sequence, not as we might expect after the Titanomachy that ensures Zeus’s victory over the previous generation of the gods, but before. This shift renders Zeus’s triumph over trickery, which now becomes the central episode of the Theogony, prior to his martial victory. Such foreshadowings constitute rhetorical devices that give a teleological character to the whole work by continually pointing to the final arrangement of the cosmos that is imminent in its beginnings. In fact one could argue that Hesiod’s dominant means of persuasion, of convincing his audience of the validity of his vision, lies precisely in its taxis. Hesiod’s description of the cosmos from its primordial beginnings to its present and eternal shape itself constitutes a self-conscious and artful arrangement - a verbal cosmos.
Ethos, which refers to the authority and trustworthiness of the speaker that in turn promotes persuasion, constitutes an important aspect of what Aristotle regarded as one of the primary components of rhetorical heuresis or invention. The Theogony presents an intriguing problem in this regard. In singing of the divine origins of the cosmos, the successive generations of the gods, their battles, and the final triumph of Zeus, Hesiod has set himself a task that is beyond human ken. His first item of business, then, is to establish his credentials to pronounce with authority on such matters. This he accomplishes with great rhetorical ingenuity in the opening lines of the proem where he describes his meeting with the Muses (22-28):
Who once taught Hesiod lovely song
While he shepherded his sheep under holy Helicon.
And then it was that the goddesses first addressed me -
The one right here standing in front of you -
The Olympian Muses, the daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus:
‘Shepherds, wretched disgraces, mere bellies,
We know how to compose many lies indistinguishable from things as they are
And we know, whenever we wish, to declaim things that are true’.
The deictic tonde (‘this one here right in front of you’) assures Hesiod’s audience that the speaker before them is indeed the very same one to whom the Muses appeared. His authority derives from eyewitness, not from hearsay. Even their insulting address lends credence to their epiphany - and stresses the gulf separating gods and men, who are here decidedly lower than the angels - thus guaranteeing the speaker’s trustworthiness. Yet the goddesses’ riddling speech, slyly boasting of their power over both truth and falsehood - and the human inability to distinguish the two - displaces the responsibility for the truthfulness of the subsequent song from Hesiod onto the Muses. Then commanding him to celebrate the eternal gods, which is what they themselves do on Olympus, and to hymn the goddesses themselves first and last, they make him their mouthpiece. Hesiod’s song, the Theogony, thus not only fulfills the divine command but also, while avoiding an overt claim to truth, traces its authority directly to the divine Muses.
To summarize: Hesiod is the first to extend the Muses’ dominion over the realm of political and juridical rhetoric, and he is cognizant of the ambiguous character of speech that has the capacity both to persuade and to deceive. His ability to speak about matters that transcend human knowledge and to order them in a persuasive manner derives from the highest authority, the Muses themselves. Nevertheless, the opaqueness of the Muses’ rhetoric does not permit him to assert the truthfulness of his poem. Hesiod then already shows an awareness of the notorious gap between rhetoric and truth and foreshadows the philosophic critique of rhetoric traced in previous chapters of this volume.
2 Works and Days
The Theogony dealt with matters divine, remote from the ken of ordinary mortals. But in the Works and Days Hesiod’s theme focuses on the human sphere: how human beings should live and behave toward each other and the gods, and how they can prosper within the limits established by the laws of Zeus. In the Theogony, Hesiod traced his authority to speak from the Muses, but finessed the issue of their truthfulness. In the Works and Days, however, on his home turf, so to speak, he immediately asserts not only his personal authority to hold forth on matters of concern to mankind, but also he affirms the validity of his assertions: ‘I would declare to Perses the way things are’ (10).
The Muses, so essential to the project of the Theogony, are invoked only briefly at the outset of the Works and Days where they are asked to celebrate their father Zeus, not, however, his supremacy over the gods, but his authority over human beings. Hesiod’s elegant chiasmus would make Gorgias proud (3-8):
[Zeus] through whom mortal men are both disreputable and reputable,
Famous and infamous by the will of great Zeus.
For easily he gives strength, and easily trips up the strong;
Easily he diminishes the great and makes great the obscure;
Easily he straightens the crooked and shrivels the proud,
High-thundering Zeus, who inhabits the most exalted halls.
The power Zeus wields over mortals is not only absolute but also has an ethical and punitive dimension. Furthermore, he here seems to usurp the Muses’ traditional prerogative to bestow fame upon mortals, with the implication that good repute depends on Zeus’s favor, which in turn derives from moral considerations. The main themes of the poem are thus adumbrated in its proem.
The Works and Days as a whole purport to present a speech addressed primarily to Perses, who may be real or a fictional persona, and, secondarily, to the kings and occasionally to an anonymous ‘you’. While not denying the differences between the political and legal institutions of fourth century Athens and Hesiod’s Ascra, we may nevertheless identify elements of both forensic and deliberative rhetoric in Hesiod’s harangue. Critics have indeed likened the Works and Days to a court case presenting Hesiod’s indictment of his brother for his past misdeeds as well as the kings, who have abetted his nefarious schemes. But the poem also fits Aristotle’s definition of a deliberative speech although, to be sure, Hesiod does not offer advice concerning a specific motion before an Assembly; rather, he presents a protreptic that argues for the beneficial character ofjustice and work and the harmful consequences ofinjustice and sloth.
The mise en scene for the Works and Days, while obscure in some details, is sufficient for an understanding of the general situation. Hesiod and his brother had divided their inheritance, but Perses wanted more. In the meantime he has been engaging in various shady dealings, picking quarrels, bringing trumped-up charges, committing perjury, and suborning the judges; the kings for their part have collaborated by accepting bribes and pronouncing dishonest ‘crooked’ judgments. The misdeeds of Perses and the kings all involve the misuse of speech. The proper corrective to such abuse of language will be Hesiod’s response, the Works and Days itself. Apparently, Perses’ get rich quick schemes have not, however, been successful, and he has run out of options. Hesiod now declares (35-36):
Let us decide our quarrel here and now With straight judgments, which from Zeus are the best.
Hesiod’s language echoes his earlier description of the king favored by the Muses in Theogony 84-87:
The people
All look to him as he discerns what is established as right and proper With straight judgments. And he, speaking with assurance,
Straightway makes an end to even a great quarrel.
Both justice and injustice have turned out to be speech acts. The full significance of Hesiod’s extension of the Muses’ domain in the Theogony only emerges here; for in the Works and Days he will adopt the role of the Muse-inspired king whose emblem was the laurel scepter that united royal authority with eloquence. For while the kings are quite willing to arbitrate the dispute between the two brothers ( Works and Days 39), they have become ‘gift-eaters’, corrupted by bribery and their own crooked decrees. Bypassing the kings and arrogating to himself their power and rhetoric, Hesiod will wield the scepter, resolving his differences with Perses on the spot ( authi) with straight judgments. The Works and Days, then, itself enacts that just resolution and gives a demonstration of the royal rhetoric announced in the Theogony.
If Hesiod plays both complainant and judge, the parties he must bring into harmony are not merely himself and his brother; his brief also implicates the kings since Perses’ crimes have only succeeded with their collaboration. But in addition to an indictment of past wrongdoing, Hesiod makes the case that justice, which seems to go against one’s self-interest, is profitable and makes work, which is inherently unpleasant, palatable and rewarded.
The complex form and arrangement of Hesiod’s oration is necessitated by the multiplicity of his arguments for work and justice and the multiple parties involved. The Works and Days display an astonishing variety of rhetorical strategies and tropes as Hesiod tailors his advice to his addressees. Almost all can be paralleled in speeches of Homeric characters, especially paraenetic ones like Phoenix’s plea to Achilles; both employ mythological exemplars, personification, allegory, parables, and gnomic statements. What matters here is not so much the skillfulness of the oration Hesiod constructs, but rather the self-conscious and, yes, rhetorical, exploitation of such verbal devices and persuasive ploys that demonstrate his awareness that one must speak differently to different people. In addition, the poem incorporates a dynamic progression as Hesiod’s arguments are assumed to be persuasive and his lessons absorbed step by step in the course of his oration. Thus, a full appreciation of
Hesiod’s rhetoric requires us to follow the dramatic development of his multipronged maneuvers and to evaluate their effectiveness.
A brief outline of the first three hundred lines of the poem will give a taste of the range and variety of Hesiod’s rhetorical tactics. It begins with a self-conscious correction, not unworthy of the sophists, of his earlier negative depiction of Eris, ‘Strife’, in the Theogony; there, as we have seen, she was personified as the mother of ‘Quarrels, Lies, Arguments and Counter-arguments’. In the Works and Days, however, she turns out to have a beneficial sister of the same name who inspires human beings to healthy competition with their fellow men. The link between the two compositions is further underlined, as we have seen, by the similarity between Hesiod's stated intention to resolve his differences with Perses and his definition of the righteous king in the Theogony These general reflections are then applied to Perses’ situation: he has become a devote of the evil Eris rather than her good sister. Two proverbs directed at both stupid Perses and the foolish kings with whom he has allied himself form a transition to two mythical accounts that outline the twin themes of Hesiod’s protreptic: the origins of the need for work (Prometheus Myth) and the need for justice (the Myth of the Five Races). At the beginning of the Works and Days the recasting of the Prometheus myth that appeared at the center of the Theogony again reveals Hesiod’s awareness of how the same story can be reworked for very different ends. For if in the earlier poem the story demonstrated Zeus’ invincible cunning that guaranteed the permanence of his rule, in the Works and Days it reveals the divinely-decreed need for human toil. The Myth of the Five Races constitutes a second argument (eteros logos) that Perses is to take to heart; it culminates in Hesiod’s passionate outburst decrying the viciousness of his own times and culminating in an apocalyptic warning of far worse to come, thus lending an urgency to his message. These two logoi, we may note, present incompatible versions of the early history of mankind. Hesiod is quite conscious that they are indeed myths: the two accounts cannot both simply be true. Myths, he is aware, are not fixed, but can be manipulated to persuade their addressees.
Turning now to a different genre whose addressee must take an active part in deciphering its message, Hesiod recounts the fable of the hawk and the nightingale, specifically inviting the kings to ponder its meaning. Caught in the claws of the hawk, the nightingale (aldon) laments her fate, but the hawk responds brutally: even though she may be a fine singer (aoidos), he will do whatever he wants with her, even eat her up. The fable’s apparent message is that in a bird-eat-bird world, speech, even the just speech of Hesiod, like the poor nightingale, is powerless against brute force. Now, abruptly, Perses is addressed and told to hearken to justice and reject hybris. The lesson is illustrated with two allegories that resemble Phoenix’s parable in Iliad 9 of the Prayers; in a race with Hybris, Dike (Justice) will win out in the end. Second, the corrupt practices of the kings are depicted as a violent rape of Justice, which arouses popular indignation. In two tableaux, Hesiod contrasts the fates of the Just and the Unjust City whose welfare depends on the justice dispensed by the kings: the former flourishes, but the latter is visited by all sorts of disasters sent by Zeus.
Throughout this section, Hesiod addresses Perses, but speaks about the kings and their reprehensible behavior that threatens the well-being of the whole community - including Perses himself. As if he has convinced Perses where his true self-interest lies, Hesiod now addresses the kings directly with thunderous threats of divine punishment. Hesiod launches a threefold frontal attack, warning that the kings’ injustice cannot escape detection: Zeus’ 30,000 guardians observe their crooked decrees, Justice herself denounces them to her father Zeus, and, finally, nothing escapes the eye of Zeus himself, ‘seeing and noticing all’ (Works and Days 267). The kings are left to weigh these threats as Hesiod returns to Perses, repeating his earlier injunction to ‘hearken to Justice’ and now explicating the fable from which his discourse on justice began. The fable’s premise turns out to be false: Zeus’s decree forbids humans to eat each other; might does not make right. Brute force and violence can indeed be overcome by persuasive speech. At this point, the heavy artillery of Hesiod’s rhetoric is assumed to have successfully convinced both the kings and Perses of the benefits and rewards of justice.
The kings now disappear from Hesiod’s discourse, but Perses will require further instruction. Hesiod’s protreptic toward justice culminates in the famous allegory of the two ways; a steep and arduous path leads to virtue, while an easily accessible and broad highway leads to vice. Now set upon the right path, Perses must turn his attention to honest labor, i. e., agricultural work, since it alone leads to just prosperity. In the rest of the Works and Days, Hesiod will instruct his brother on the proper way to live and farm. Hesiod caps his demonstration by declaring his own excellence (293-297):
Altogether best is he who thinks for himself
And understands how things will turn out in the end;
Excellent too is he who is persuaded by the one who speaks well;
But the one who can neither think for himself nor when listening to another Takes his advice to heart: that man is totally useless.
The Perses of the poem’s beginning is indeed useless; if he has listened to Hesiod’s advice and obeyed his instructions, he can become an esthlos - or at least a decent human being. On a completely different level, however, is the one who is ‘altogether best’, the one who constructs the persuasive argument of the Works and Days.
My analysis has concentrated on the Works and Days in large part because discussions of Hesiod’s rhetoric have focused primarily on the Theogony proem. I have emphasized not only the virtuosity of Hesiod’s eloquence but also its self-consciousness that takes into account both his explicit addressees and his audience. From the very beginning ofthe Works and Days, Hesiod lays claim to yet another witness to the proceedings by invoking Zeus to observe his undertaking (9-10):
Hearken, watching and listening, and straighten the established ordinances with justice,
For your part, but I would tell Perses the way things are.
As the poem progresses, first the kings, now converted to the cause of justice and henceforth presumably occupied with dispensing just verdicts, vanish from the poem. Moreover, Perses, likewise persuaded that being just is expedient and instructed how to manage his farm, is now presumed to be urgently attending to his agricultural chores. Throughout Hesiod’s dramatic monologue we have been silent observers, but toward the end of the poem, Hesiod increasingly directs his teaching to a nameless ‘you’ who is invited to evaluate, and absorb Hesiod’s teaching concerning ‘things as they are’.
Having offered a definition of the nature and function of rhetoric that unites the authority of Zeus with the honeyed discourse of the Muses in the Theogony, Hesiod presents a paradigmatic demonstration, which the Greeks would have called an epideixis of just such rhetoric in the Works and Days. Indeed, the Greek word for justice, dike, and the term epideictic, share the same verbal root, deiknumi, to show or demonstrate.10 By showing forth justice as praiseworthy for both king and peasant, by countering the unjust speech of both Perses and the kings with his just speech, and resolving the great quarrel with his brother, Hesiod in fact practices justice, and we his audience can award him the prize to which he himself lays claim: ‘best is he who can think for himself’.
World History
