Another factor which distinguishes Hesiodic from Homeric poetry is its interconnectedness. In the case of the Works and Days and the Theogony for example, the ‘‘biographies’’ of the two poems are quite deliberately connected, first in the Theogony’s explicit reference to Hesiod, and then by the Works and Days' reference to the Muses of Mount Helicon. Nor are these the only ties between the poems. The appearance of the Prometheus story in both poems and both poems’ focus on Zeus, alongside the presence in both of a personal narrator, suggests an almost deliberate cross-referencing to a common worldview. Most famously, and apparently most pointedly, the author of the Works and Days begins the poem proper with a particle ara (‘‘then/after all’’), which points backward: ‘‘There is not then, after all, only one Strife... ’’ The point of the particle seems a reference to the single Strife of Th. 225. The point of the reference appears to be a desire to make explicit that this poem forms one element of a greater whole.
The two major Hesiodic poems are not only connected to each other, they are also connected to the minor Hesiodic works, although by rather less definite ties (see further Chapter 24, by Burgess). Although both poems begin, as the Homeric poems do, with a direct invocation, neither poem comes to a clear ending. There is no burial of Hektor, or final settlement of Odysseus’ battle with the suitors. Instead the Theogony trails off into a history of great women and the Works and Days, in the very last line, brings up the entirely new subject of divination by bird-signs. It is impossible to know whether the fragments of the cycle that seem to be being introduced here, the Catalogue of Women and the Divination by Birds, led to the addition of these connections, or whether the references spawned a new collection to be attributed to Hesiod. It may not matter. What does seem significant is the importance of the cycle to the poems.
A reason for that importance has already become apparent. By virtue of its self-inclusion within a cycle, Hesiodic poetry proclaims itself as part of a greater whole. This same sense of composition appears to a small degree in the two major Hesiodic poems. The Theogony, as we will see below, is composed of a patchwork of genealogies and stories which, placed together, create a single overall vision of the divine order. In other words, the poem’s very nature reveals its interest in viewing each of its separate elements as also parts of a whole. The same is true of the Works and Days. Here, although the components are different - a description of the farmer’s year, an account of sailing and trade, a fable, some myths, a study of neighborly relations, a list of lucky and unlucky days - the aim is much the same: to show the single thread of meaning that underlies all the varied phenomena which make up human life. The composition may well reflect a tradition in which sections of a poem would be recited separately (see Chapter 4, by Jensen). It is not at all difficult to imagine a poet, or a poetic tradition, putting together elements of various lengths, any combination of which might make up a particular performance. Nor is it difficult, conversely, to see how the individual components of such a poem might maintain their character by being recited independently. The proem to the Theogony, for example, is often seen as a ‘‘Hymn’’ on its own, and in the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, Hesiod is portrayed as performing on his own the segment of the Works and Days which opens ‘‘The Farmer’s Year,’’ while Homer, challenged to a similar recital, is forced (one might imagine) to resort to a generic battle scene.
The structure of the Works and Days and Theogony thus reflects, in small, what might have been the overall structure of a greater cycle. Connecting passages in the two major poems, for example, often serve simultaneously as the end of one section and the beginning of the next, and so are able to be used as either. It is a collection, moreover, whose parts are related more as they are in a bunch of flowers than as they are in a watch. There is very little “clocklike’’ about Hesiod. Within this relatively fluid structure then, there seems no reason why the Works and Days should not include the Divination by Birds or even the Astronomy, just as one could easily imagine the poem including only one of the two myths which illustrate the hardship of human life, or as leaving out the section on sailing, or as omitting any number of the general precepts governing human life which Hesiod includes. Similarly, the Catalogue of Women, which appears at the end of the Theogony, simply continues the movement of the poem as a whole, from the primeval gods, to the Titans, to the more fully anthropomorphic Olympians, through to the end of purely divine generation that occurs with the completion of Zeus’ order, and the consequent movement to the goddesses who bore children to the great men of old, and from there to the women of that generation. The connection of the Shield ofHerakles to the Catalogue is evident in the poem’s opening phrase ‘‘Or like her... ’’ (is oie, from whence the other name of the Catalogue, ‘‘The Eoiae’’) as well as in the Argument to the Shield. Ifit is true, moreover, as the Argument claims, that only the first 56 lines ofthe Shield formed part ofthe Catalogue it seems that the Shield itself, and the battle of Herakles which introduces it, were also added as an expansion of the text (see Chapter 24, by Burgess).
In the case of the Catalogue, however, what remains is mostly only the names, cited as genealogical evidence by later authors. What we do not have, as we do in the case of the Theogony or the Works and Days is any idea of the theme which these stories might have been intended to illustrate. Had we such a theme it might become evident that the addition of the Shield, if it was an addition, did, or did not, further the overall theme of the poem. As the poem stands we cannot know, any more than we can know definitely that the Catalogue itself did have such a theme, and was not, as has often been assumed, merely a list of essentially unconnected stories. This is equally true of the rest of the cycle. Given the fragments we possess we cannot know how, or whether, these poems contributed to a ‘‘Hesiodic’’ vision of the world. What we can see, however, is the implications of the cycle itself, and in this, as in so many ways, the great difference between Homer and Hesiod.
The tendency of Hesiodic poetry to operate as a montage almost literally invites additions. Given the poetry’s structure, moreover, these additions may simply expand, rather than violate, the integrity of the work. It is not so with Homer. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a book of the Iliad subsequent to the burial of Hektor. It is nearly as difficult (despite critics of Od. 24) to imagine an addition to the Odyssey which would not ruin the carefully balanced structure of the poem (see Chapter 23, by Slatkin). Given this particular kind of integrity, the tendency to disregard the fact of the Homeric Cycle in interpreting the Iliad or Odyssey is only natural. The case is very different with the Theogony and Works and Days. Here, where, like a fractal, each individual section both mirrors the theme of the whole and goes into making it up, the fact of the Hesiodic Cycle, even in its absence, may provide a crucial clue to the unity of the poems that remain. To ignore the implications of the Cycle in this case would then be to ignore exactly the key to Hesiodic poetry.
The distinctive mark of the Hesiodic tradition seems to be its inclusiveness, both within the individual poems and within the Cycle altogether. It is an inclusiveness, moreover, which branches off into many fields other than epic poetry. The Theogony, for example, is notable for the similarity of its myth cycle to that of Near Eastern texts such as the Enuma Elish, where a cycle of three generations of gods, characterized by a struggle between the male and female, leads finally, after the challenge of a final god of disorder, to the divine kingship ofMarduk (see Mondi 1984, 1990; Walcot 1966; West 1966; 18-31). Similarly, the Works and Days, which has, in particular, been distinguished as an example of didactic poetry, is notable for its similarity to ‘‘Wisdom Literature,’’ another Near Eastern tradition (see Chapter 20, by Burkert). It is particularly notable here, moreover, that a particular persona and a particular situation is often taken as the connecting theme of a given poem’s advice (see West 1978: 25-30). In the case of the Works and Days other, more anthropologically inclined scholars have noted the poem’s links to peasant traditions, many of which continue in the Mediterranean. In this light, Hesiod’s overall vision of human wealth as a ‘‘zero-sum’’ proposition, his inclination towards a ‘‘superstitious’’ and even numinal sense of the divine, the delicate balance he maintains between a sense of the importance of cooperation and a jealous maintenance of his own independence, and even his distrust of women and sailing, are not so much individual peculiarities as they are the reflection of a long peasant tradition (see Detienne 1963; Walcott 1970; Millet 1984).
The tradition is epic nonetheless. Structurally, in the employment of ring composition, and conceptually, in their focus on a single theme, the Theogony and Works and Days remain essentially Greek and essentially epic (on definitions of epic, see Chapter 1, by Martin). Structurally, the Theogony opens and closes with the Muses (1, 915, 1022), in precisely the way, for example, that the Prometheus episode opens and closes with Zeus rendering Prometheus immobile (517-22; 613-16), or the way in which Hesiod marks off Zeus’ consolidation of his order through his children by beginning and ending the episode with the birth of Athena. In each case, as well, the structural device points out the thematic connection, in the Muses’ dependence upon Zeus, in the lesson that Prometheus learns that one cannot escape the will of Zeus (613), and in Hesiod’s pointed description of Athena as the goddess who, like her father, combines power and wisdom (896). Similarly, in the Works and Days, Hesiod takes care to open and close the poem with Zeus (1, 765) just as he opens and closes the Farmer’s Year with the Pleiades (383, 615), Zeus’ markers, or the ‘‘Days’’ with the importance of noting and understanding the ways of the gods (765-9, 824-8).
One other major difference between the Hesiodic and Homeric traditions should be mentioned. The world of the Homeric poems is a world in which ‘‘one man could lift a stone such that it takes two men to lift now.’’ It is a world distinct and closed off from the contemporary world of Homer’s audience, a quality which fascinates the poet, most particularly of the Odyssey (see Grene 1969). Hesiod’s interests are very different. They lie completely in the here and now. The Works and Days is all but combative in its use of the contemporary world as the world of the poem. The same, despite appearances, is true of the Theogony. Here the past becomes, essentially, ‘‘pre-history,’’ the time before the current reign of Zeus. As such it is told, as ‘‘pre-history’’ most commonly is, in order to illustrate the nature of the cosmos that has emerged from it.
The Theogony
If the Hesiodic tradition works as a fractal, the Theogony might have been designed as its model. The poem combines, as if they were a web and woof, two quite distinct ways of telling a single story. The first set of strands consists of genealogies, from the first appearance of Chaos to the final births of the heroes. The second is the series of myths which chart the narrative progress of the poem. The story told independently by either is of the gradual development of the cosmos from a primeval collection of independent elements into a unified order whose epicenter is Zeus.
Both strands are mythological. Within the Hesiodic tradition this implies that the material in one sense is the poet’s own invention, and in another sense not. Hesiod, or the tradition, clearly felt comfortable tailoring a myth to suit a particular context, as with the story of Prometheus, which appears in quite different versions in the Theogony and the Works and Days. Similarly, as has been noted, many of the names of Hesiod’s genealogies come transparently from his own descriptions (Solmsen 1949; thus the Nereids of Th. 243-64, or the names of the Muses, Th. 77-9 from Th. 65-9). Nor is the poet limited to a single tradition. As in the paralleling of the Prometheus story with the myth of the Five Ages, two very different myths, ‘‘another account’’ as Hesiod puts it, can be used to point out a single, basic truth about human life.
On the other hand it also seems clear that the poet, in his own mind at any rate, is not simply inventing his material. His description of Aphrodite is telling:
And she, Aphrodite
[Foam-born goddess and well-crowned Cytheria]
Is called by the gods and by men, because in the foam [aphros]
She was raised. But also Cytheria, as she touched upon Cythera,
And Cyprus-born, for she was born in famed Cyprus,
And genital-loving [philommeides], as from genitals she came to the light.
(Th. 195-200)
The passage is a justification of the myth. According to Homer, Aphrodite is simply the child of Zeus and Dione. As Hesiod points out, however, Aphrodite’s traditional epithets, ‘‘Cytherean’’ and ‘‘Cyprian,’’ her name itself, and the wonderful reinterpretation of Homer’s philommedes, ‘‘laughter-loving’’, all confirm an alternate account of her birth, the one which he has adopted. There are, after all, many stories for the poet to choose among. His job, as the Muses imply, is to find the true one.
Hesiod’s is thus a double task. On the one hand he must discover the essential truth that the traditions available to him convey. On the other he must, in the light of that truth, choose between those traditions. The challenge, of course, is circular. But then Hesiod, who is deeply aware of the ambivalence of human life, would be the first to acknowledge that.
The narrative side of the Theogony describes the coming to power of Zeus as a series of confrontations and victories. The genealogies of the poem tell the same story, seen now as a spontaneous evolution. As the original beings, Chaos (or ‘‘Gap’’), Earth (Gaia), Tartarus, and Eros (the driving principle of all which is to come) begin to produce new generations, divinity differentiates itself into three major lines. From Chaos, through Night, come the descendants primarily catalogued in Th. 211-32, the negative abstractions whose positive counterparts will be born to Zeus at the end of the poem. From Sea (Pontos), the child of Earth and Heaven, come the monsters who will be largely overcome by the heroic sons of Zeus (Th. 233-336). And in the third, central line, Earth herself gives rise first to Heaven (Ouranos) and the features of nature, the Sea and Hills, and then with Heaven to the Titans, and finally to the Olympians and Zeus (see Nelson 1998). A divinity immanent in the cosmos thus develops into an order whose center is Zeus, the focal point of the central line.
The narrative of the Theogony tells the same story, only in more detail. Here we see the ratification of this order as Zeus distributes their timai (‘‘honors’’ or ‘‘privileges’’) to the gods, confirming, denying, or renewing the timai of gods of the earlier generations, locating the timai of the gods of his own generation in relation to himself, and essentially begetting into existence a new kind of time, that of the gods who are his children. The older gods come first. In a series of asides on Hecate, Styx, and the Hundred-Handers, we are shown Zeus determining the honors of the generation which came before him. The theme is made explicit in Zeus’ conquests over the Titans, Atlas, and Prometheus, in the Titanomachy and in what is essentially a defeat of Earth and Tartarus in the person of their son Typhoeus.
Zeus’ leadership in relation to the gods of his own generation is established first in the trick played on Kronos, through which Zeus, the youngest son, is enabled (like the stone which replaced him) to become the first child to emerge fTom his parents (Th. 488-97). This primacy is confirmed in Zeus’ leadership of the battles against the Titans and Typhoeus. Finally we see Zeus’ predominance, both among the gods of his generation and among the gods of the future, in his assumption of the power of generation itself. With the swallowing of Metis the possibility of genuine generation among the gods virtually ceases. The gods of the next generation are almost entirely the children of Zeus, and are all, essentially, simply aspects of Zeus’ new order. The exceptions, Triton, the son of Poseidon, and Panic, Fear, and Harmonia, children of Ares and Aphrodite, are simply dim reflections of their fathers’ divine time. In the final, mini-narrative of the poem, Hera’s attempt to match Zeus’ generation of Athena is able to produce only the crippled god, Hephaistos. The narrative, essentially, thus shows us where the other strand of the poem, the tale of divine generation, has come to an end.
The narrative elements of the Theogony serve another function as well; they reveal the essential nature of Zeus’ order. This lies in the coming together of force and intelligence within Zeus. Throughout the poem, force and intelligence, remaining separate, have rendered both each other and the overall order unstable. In the three episodes which portray first Heaven, then Kronos, and finally Zeus as threatened with overthrow, the female element originates a ‘‘cunning plan’’ violently executed by the son. Earth thus supplies Kronos with the cunning needed to castrate his father, and then supplies Rhea with the trick needed to overthrow Kronos. This pattern is ended by Zeus.
Heaven suppressed his children within their mother; Kronos swallowed them himself. Zeus finds the correct solution by swallowing not the child but the mother, ensuring that the female element is not left behind to plot against him. By so doing, moreover, Zeus incorporates the female element of cunning within himself. Hesiod underlines the point by naming Zeus’ consort ‘‘Metis,’’ or Intelligence (for Hesiod’s combination of myths see West 1966: 401-2), and by pointing out the combination of power and wisdom which makes Athena, the only child of this union, so resemble her father.
The narrative episodes that have led up to this point have brought out the same theme. In the challenge of Prometheus Zeus counters cunning with cunning. In the challenge of the Titans he counters force with force. And in the final challenge, the challenge of Typhoeus, Zeus uses both, employing first ‘‘his sharp mind’’ and then his thunder (Th. 836-41).
The result of this combination of force and intelligence within Zeus is, quite simply, the emergence of order itself. Zeus’ ability to first perceive and then overcome the threat of disorder personified in Typhoeus marks the final step in the establishment of his reign (see Mondi 1984). Zeus’ winds, the well-ordered Notus and Boreas and Zephyr, exist in contrast to the unordered destructive winds that stem from Typhoeus, but now as elements locked within Tartarus, his own father (Th. 868-80). Hesiod concludes:
But when the blessed gods had finally accomplished their labor And with the Titans decided their honors by force,
Then it was that they urged, all through the counsels of Earth,
Zeus to be king and to rule, far-seeing Olympian Zeus,
Over the immortals. And he divided their honors amongst them.
(Th. 881-5)
After the last challenge of her final son, Typhoeus, Earth with her paradigmatic cunning has joined the force of the male gods. The result is a new distribution of divine time and a new order, personified in a new generation sprung from Zeus and characterized by order and harmony. The poem has come full circle, back to the Muses of the invocation and the world of the poet. In other words we have returned to the world of ordinary life. As such it is the world, informed by the divine order of Zeus, which will appear again in the Works and Days.
The deepest connection between the Theogony and the Works and Days lies in their sense of a divine order which informs human life (see Clay 2003). We see this, for example, in Hesiod’s focus on peace. Whether one sees Hesiod as a peasant farmer unimpressed by the aristocracy’s obsession with war, or whether one sees a tradition interested in essentially non-Homeric values creating a poetic persona to fit, the message is unmistakable. The Homeric tradition focuses on war. In the Hesiodic tradition arete is achieved by the sweat of one’s brow (WD 289), and the sweat is not from bearing one’s shield against the enemy.
In the Contest of Homer and Hesiod Hesiod is given his backhanded victory because he sings of peace and productivity while Homer sings of war. Although the Theogony could challenge a dozen Iliads for violence, and violence of a grotesquerie very alien to Homer, the characterization is a fair one (see Otto 1954). The violence of the Theogony is the violence of prehistory. The same vision reappears in the Works and Days in the myth of the Five Ages, a mini-history of the human race, where men move from the Golden Age and the protracted adolescence of the Silver Age, through two generations of warriors, the Bronze Age and the Heroes, to our current position, where not violence, but injustice, is the primary problem in human life.
Precisely the same contrast appears in Hesiod’s depiction of the gods. The world of the Homeric gods is the world of the Homeric kings, both of whom occupy themselves in feasting, competition, patronage, and jealously guarding their time, their personal honor, against all challenges. Hesiod’s is a radically different sense of the divine, marked by a very different sense of time. Time in the Theogony is not a mark of a god’s individual power. It is a prerogative distributed by Zeus, and so the mark of each god’s particular place within a greater divine order. As such the gods’ timai are marked by their names (as the Muses, Th. 75-80), their attendants (as Aphrodite, Th. 201-6), or their children (as Styx, Th. 383-5, or Ares, Th. 933-6). Nowhere, in either the Theogony or the Works and Days, do the gods feast. Nowhere do they come to earth to inspire a favorite. After the establishment of Zeus’ reign they do not even compete among themselves. Instead they attend to business, and in the Works and Days just as in the Theogony: Poseidon at sea, Demeter on land, Justice in the law-courts, and Zeus supervising it all.
This compartmentalization, however, does not imply that man’s relation to the gods is any easier or more predictable in Hesiod than it is in Homer. A peculiarity of Hesiod’s conception of peace will illustrate. The myth of the Five Ages, which describes mankind’s movement away from war, is a myth not of progress but of degeneration. Evil has not been eliminated from human life; violence has only been replaced by injustice. The sense, moreover, in which injustice might be considered the worse evil, appears in Hesiod’s characterization of the diseases which escaped from Pandora’s jar: ‘‘On their own they wander among mortals, bringing evil/In silence - since the counselor Zeus took out their voices’’ (WD 104-5). The reason why it is so hard to guard against injustice is similar: because its threat is not an open one. This, it will turn out, is the nature of Zeus’ new order when it is seen, as it is in the Works and Days, from the human perspective.
The Works and Days
The Works and Days covers a dazzling array of materials: “autobiography,’’ myth, fable, proverbs, practical observation, nature-writing, economic description, and astrology. Even the briefest glance at the various ‘‘sections’’ that the poem is commonly divided into -
Proem to Zeus (1-10)
Autobiography (11-41)
The Prometheus myth (42-105)
The myth of the Five Ages (106-201)
The fable of the hawk and the nightingale (201-11)
Justice and reciprocity (212-383)
The farmer’s year (384-617)
Sailing and trading by sea (618-94)
Marriage and religious precepts (695-764)
The ‘‘Days’’ (765-828)
Reveals why scholars have found it difficult to discover unity in the poem. The problem, however, is often that scholars are looking in the wrong place.
Like the Theogony, the unity of the Works and Days lies not in particular connections, or in any particular arrangement of its sections, but in its theme. Hesiod is not coy about what that theme is. It appears immediately, in the warning that Hesiod gives to Perses through his picture of the two kinds of Strife. The evil Strife, which Perses is following, encourages violence and cheating and brings disaster. The good Strife, Hesiod’s patroness, leads men to competition and hard work, but brings wealth. The message is a simple one: human beings never get something for nothing.
Hesiod’s argument, essentially, is that human life is not hard by accident; it is hard because Zeus has willed it to be so. We can see this, for example, in the simple fact that the earth does not yield men food without work. If Zeus did not want men to have hardship, Hesiod argues, a single day’s work could yield us food enough for a year (WD 42-6). And this lesson, observable all around us, turns out to be precisely the same as that contained by tradition, in the personal picture of Zeus bringing hardship to human life in the Prometheus myth, and in the impersonal depiction of the growing difficulty of human life in the myth of the Five Ages.
From here Hesiod will go on to observe the same lesson, that for human beings good is always blended with evil, in all the disparate aspects of human life that he covers. It will appear in the fable, which depicts (as in the Proem) the strong suddenly shown to be weak; it will appear in the punishment which follows ill-gotten wealth, in the human tendency to give only after having gotten something oneself, in the drawbacks and benefits of lending one’s goods, in the fact that there is no harvest without a plowing and no spring without a winter to precede it. The smallest details of life show the same pattern: the balance of risk against profit in trading by sea, or in loading a wagon, the risks and benefits inherent in marriage, the hidden bonuses and dangers of entertaining neighbors, of gossip, of pot-luck feasts, and finally of lucky and unlucky days. Perses, it turns out, simply fits into this pattern. The evil Strife encourages a man to gain wealth without hardship. But, as no human good comes without evil, unearned wealth can only be followed by retribution. The better way is the good Strife, which faces its evil, hard work, and then enjoys its consequent wealth in safety. As Hesiod points out, a secure half is much better than a precarious whole (WD 40-1).
The idea that human good is never unmixed with evil is a commonplace of Greek thought. What is new is Hesiod’s application of the idea to the punishment which follows injustice. What is even more new is Hesiod’s sense of how good and evil are related. For the two kinds of Strife, within Hesiod’s vision, are not only opposites, they are also twins, and the difficulty of telling them apart is apparent in the very discovery that they were not one, but two.
This idea appears in the Theogony as well. The Hesiodic world as it emerges in the course of the Theogony is one of doubles: the twinning of Sleep and Death, of Heaven and Tartarus, of the dark abstractions born from Night, including the Fates, with their positive counterparts born from Zeus, again including the Fates (on Hesiod’s sense of ambiguity see Vernant 1983: 240, 1988: 199-201; Nagler 1990). The Works and Days, similarly, views good and evil as often difficult to distinguish: neighbors, wives, children, the kings, plowing late (which may also succeed), or thrift (which can be harmful), or even idle gossip, who is herself a goddess, can all be good or evil. This also is the nature of women, and the way in which they have introduced evil into the world, in the Works and Days in the jar which carries both Hope and Diseases, and in the Theogony in the new parameters: that a man must marry, and so have the evil of a wife, or not marry, and see his life’s work descend to his useless relatives (Th. 602-12).
Even more importantly, however, women are a paradigm for evil because they are deceptive: they are an evil which looks like a good (see Arthur 1982, 1983). Like the portions in Prometheus’ sacrifice, good, among human beings, is concealed inside evil, and evil lies within apparent good. This is also true of the two Strifes; work, which looks evil, is in fact good, while cheating, which seems an attractive alternative, is evil. Zeus’ divine order, from the point of view of the Muses, is settled. From the human point of view, however, the point of view of the poet, it is deeply ambiguous. This is why the quality men need, for Hesiod, is not a good will, but a good intelligence (WD 293-4). Where good and evil are twins the crucial task in human life is to tell the one from the other.
This is not, however, the end of the story. Zeus’ order, for Hesiod, is not a corporation, impersonally and mechanically slotting each request into its appropriate department. Nor is it simply a malevolent hall of mirrors. It is rather a dynamic world, where good and evil are twinned, most significantly, as they develop over time. What is critical, Hesiod points out, is to know what will be better “afterwards, and in the end’’ (WD 294). This obsession with time is apparent from the very opening of the Works and Days, where Hesiod reworks yet another Homeric value by undermining the stability of kleos (WD 1-4). It continues in the poem’s focus on cause and effect, and in the surprising revelations about Perses (WD 394-97). It appears most deeply however, in Hesiod’s depiction of the Farmer’s Year.
Viewed as a teaching manual Hesiod’s account of farming is woefully inadequate. Seen as an evocation of the experience of farming, however, the reason for Hesiod’s vagaries, repetitions, omissions, and extended description becomes clear (see Nelson 1998). So also does the section’s place within the poem as a whole. For it is in the world of the Seasons, who are, in the great double-identification of the Theogony, both the natural Seasons which govern man’s fields (erga), and the social forces, Dike (both ‘‘Justice’’ and ‘‘Penalty’’), Good Order, and Peace which govern his ‘‘works’’ (also erga) (Th. 901-2), that Hesiod finds his greatest image for both the structure and the ambiguity of human life. In describing farming Hesiod describes what it is like to live within a regular order which is constantly shifting and which demands constant watchfulness. In the great order of the Seasons good and evil, winter and summer, drought and rain, heat and cold, scarcity and plenty, succeed one another. But within that order any individual drought, storm, or harvest may bring salvation or disaster. As Hesiod says about a spring rainfall: ‘‘One way at one time, and another at another is Zeus’ mind who holds the aegis; / it is hard for mortal men to know’’ (WD 483-4).
Hesiod, as he is depicted by the tradition, is not only a farmer; he is also a poet, and as such operates within a similarly ambiguous world. The most famous declaration of
Hesiod’s Muses may be that they can speak truth, and they can also speak lies that seem like truth. The declaration creates a new kind of liminality (see, e. g., Vernant 1983; Detienne 1986; Bowie 1993). The poet of the Homeric tradition mediates between those who do great deeds and those who hear about them. Among the Phaeacians he sets the rhythm for a dance he cannot see. In Ithaca he is the teller of a tale whose completion he himself will be part of. In the Iliad the only singer is Achilles - at the moment when he ceases to be a part of the war being sung (Il. 9.185-91). Hesiod’s liminality is rather different. He is caught not between actors and audience, but between lies and the truth.
Hesiod is (or is made to be) a poet of strong opinions. He approves of plowing early, of diligence and thrift, and of kings who do their job. He dislikes women, sailing, his brother Perses, kings who take bribes, and idle chatter. And yet each of these elements of human life end up, finally, as ambiguous. Although the persona may seem to imply a world of black and white, a world within which choices are simply right or wrong, the world, in short, of didactic poetry in its implicitly derogatory sense, the Hesiodic world is far more complex than this, and less easy to operate within. In this way Hesiod’s liminality reflects more than just his ‘‘in-between’’ position. It also reflects the ambivalence inherent in his vision of reality. The poet, whose task is to find the true figure among the deceptive ones, cannot stand simply in one camp or the other.
The final reason that Hesiod gives for his belief in justice follows an admission of uncertainty:
Now indeed would I not myself be just among men Nor have my son just - since it’s bad for a man to be just If the greater right is held by the less righteous man.
But these things I don’t yet expect counselor Zeus to accomplish.
(WD 270-3)
The reason for the expectation reveals also what, to Hesiod, it means to be human:
Now Perses, you cast these things into your heart,
And listen to Justice, and forget about force altogether.
For this is the nomos [‘‘law, way’’] for men, assigned by Cronos’ son,
That for fish and for beasts and for birds that are winged,
They eat one another, since there is no justice among them.
But to man he gave justice, which by far is the best As it turns out.
(WD 274-80)
The ‘‘as it turns out’’ is Hesiod’s special ambivalent touch.
Achilles’ description of the two jars upon Zeus’ threshold (Il. 24.525-33) sees human life, as Hesiod does, as at best a blend of good and of evil. Similarly Homer, like Hesiod, locates the meaning of human life as between animals on the one hand, and gods on the other (see, e. g. Redfield 1975; Schein 1984). What is different is the measuring rod. For Homer mortality is the essential feature of human life. If human life is a balance of evil and good it is because we are both mortal, unlike the gods, and aware of our mortality, unlike the animals, and in this lies both the bitterness and the ever-fleeting sweetness of human life. This is not Hesiod’s vision. For him the essential mark of humanity, and the basis of the balance of good and evil, is not mortality but work. The limitation on human life that maintains this balance is not death, but dike (‘‘justice’’). It may be a less grand vision than Homer's, but it is a far more immediate one, and this, for Hesiod, appears to be precisely its validation.
The seamlessness of Homeric narrative, a seamlessness created largely through distancing, is one of its great beauties. Hesiod’s cragginess, in contrast, jams together fable and myth, the common observation that men must work to eat, the ‘‘superstitious’’ prescriptions of days and actions, and the feel of the plow in a farmer’s hands. It is a cragginess, however, that has its own beauty, and a poetry that, in its own rough way, knows itself. If the immediacy of the discourse allows the seams to show, it also teaches us to regard the seams as part of the discourse.
What we see in Hesiod is an involvement with the physical world, and a mutual interinvolvement of the ethical and the physical, that will not finally compartmentalize human life - even under a divine system whose hallmark is precisely a compartmentalized order. Hesiod, in his new vision of what constitutes divine time, and his correspondingly new vision of human arete, may seem to present us with a flat new world, with all the vivid colors of the heroes drained out. One glance at the farmer’s calendar, if done with a genuine desire to see, dissipates any such impression. The beauty of Hesiod’s world lies in the tiny things, in the snail who crawls up the branch in springtime, in the leaves falling from the trees in the autumn cool, in the fleeting luxury of the life of a young girl not yet learned in the ways of golden Aphrodite. As a fractal, each of these moments captures the same message that was learned by Prometheus, that Perses is on his way towards, that is embodied in the ship broken up in a sudden spring squall, and that is held in the constant mind of Zeus. Within the Hesiodic tradition this message was a stark one: that there is no good without suffering, no wealth without work, no harvest without planting. But the poem, not so much in its message as in its way of conveying that message, has something else to say to us as well: that there is a great whole; that within that whole the smallest and the greatest have finally the same meaning; and that not everything can be judged by the standard of Homer.
World History
