Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras

HESIOD ON HUMAN HISTORY

The focus of this chapter is one passage of barely one hundred lines. This concentration of focus is justified, I hope, by the complexity of the passage in question and by its undoubted relevance to our topic.1 Hesiod’s ‘myth of the races’ (WD 106–201; henceforth ‘MoR’) has been evaluated repeatedly by scholars as a proto-historical account, sometimes in conjunction with the myth of Prometheus and Pandora which precedes it (WD 48–105). Notable discussions include those of T. G. Rosenmeyer, D. J. Stewart and C. J. Rowe.²

What kind of account is provided in these hundred lines? The lead-in (lines 106–8) furnishes tantalising suggestions. It is billed as a λόγος, not μῦθος (cf. Od. 11.368) or αἶνος (cf. WD 202).³ Further, it is ἕτερον λόγον, a different account from the preceding account of Prometheus and Pandora. But it purports to be a different account of the same state of affairs: ‘another account of how gods and mortal men are born of the same origin’.4 Rosenmeyer took ἐκκορυφώσω in 106 to indicate that this was a distinctively historical sketch.⁵ C. Calame on the other hand has pointed to ἐπισταμένως in 107 as an indication that Hesiod is operating as a poet.⁶

THE UNDERLYING CONCEPTION, THE MEANING OF ΓΕΝοΣ, AND THE METALLIC SCHEME

Our first task must be to try to ascertain the underlying conception of Hesiod’s scheme and the precise meaning of γένος, which occurs nine times in the passage (with a single occurrence of γενεή).7 We may proceed deductively (identify the most promising construction of what Hesiod might be trying to say and map this onto the language used) or inductively (identify the most plausible meanings of the language used and work up to a construction of what Hesiod is trying to say). Clearly we must proceed in both ways, but it will be helpful to begin by critiquing some constructions which would make Hesiod’s thinking quite straightforwardly historical.

First, Hesiod’s γένη are not ‘ages’, like the yugas of the Mahābhārata (3.148, 187), despite the Latin rendering saecula and the common English rendering ‘golden (silver, etc.) age’.8 The γένη should not be glossed as ‘epochs’, as they are by Rosenmeyer, who wished to see Hesiod as the originator of ‘a historical imagination which sees the past, and time in general, not as a steady flow toward the present . . . but rather as a succession of epochs’. According to Rosenmeyer, Hesiod’s conception is a fits-and-starts view of history, which he compares with Tacitus’ reference to intervalla ac spiramenta temporum (Agricola 44).⁹ Hesiod’s γένη are, however, not synonymous with ‘periods of history’ (as we may speak for scholarly convenience of ‘archaic-classical-Hellenistic’ or ‘republican-imperial’ as periods of Greek or Roman history); they are actual human ‘races’. While these do occupy discrete historical periods (they have ‘a spatio-temporal extension’),¹⁰ that cannot be said to be the essence of Hesiod’s conception.

Second, Hesiod’s γένη are not ‘civilisations’. We should contrast the analogous passage from the Old Testament book of Daniel (2:31–45), where the vision in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue made of gold, silver, bronze, iron and clay intimates successive historical ‘kingdoms’: to wit (probably), the Babylonian (under Nebuchadnezzar himself), the Persian (under Cyrus the Great), the Greek (under Alexander the Great) and Greek again (under the Seleucids).¹¹ Homeric epic too seems to have a conception of history as defined by the rise and fall of great civilisations, if the end of the age of heroes is synchronous with the ruin of Mycenae, Sparta and Argos (Il. 4.51–3) and Troy itself (Il. 12.15–33, cf. 24.543–6). We, too, readily conceptualise history as a sequence of empires (e.g. Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, etc.). But this is not Hesiod’s conception either, for there is no prospect of correlating Hesiod’s γένη with any civilisations known to him.

Third, Hesiod’s scheme does not simply resolve itself into human generations. When the heroes of the Iliad talk about the past they typically speak of a former generation, superior to the present (e.g. Il. 1.250–2, 260–72: the Lapiths; 4.405: the Argive Seven; 5.636–7: Herakles; etc.).12 This resembles Hesiod’s conception in so far as his successive γένη too are worse than their predecessors, but that is about as far as the resemblance goes; his γένη are not ‘generations’.¹³ Some scholars, including G. W. Most and C. Calame, have argued for taking γενεή at WD 160 as ‘generation’, where the heroes are referred to as προτέρη γενεὴ κατ’ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν.¹⁴ On this view the heroes and the men of the present belong to the same γένος, namely the iron race, of which the heroes are early representatives, an earlier generation (γενεή) within that race.¹⁵ This would bring Hesiod’s account into line with other Greek thinking, which traced the ancestors of certain historical Greeks back to the heroic period.¹⁶ But the attempt to make the heroes just an earlier generation within the race of iron seems to founder on WD 176: ‘now the kind/breed is made of iron’ (νῦν γὰρ δὴ γένος ἐστὶ σιδήρεον). That emphatic ‘now’ indicates that it is only the ‘fifth men’ (WD 174) who are made of iron: by implication, the preceding fourth men (the heroes) were not.17 Hesiod’s is evidently an account of five human races, not four with the fourth subdivided into two. At WD 160 γενεή is better understood as a synonym of γένος¹⁸ in the sense of ‘kind’, ‘breed’, ‘race’.¹⁹ The relationship between the γένη is not expressed in terms of generations, despite the undoubted importance of generationalgenealogical thinking in both Greece and the Near East (cf. e.g. Hdt. 2.121ff. on the Egyptian priests on their kings: 341 γενεαί were counted, Hdt. 2.142.1; see further below).²⁰

The meaning that we must accept for γένος (and γενεή) in MoR is ‘race’, ‘breed’ or similar.²¹ A convenient approximation is offered by the word’s English cognates, ‘kin’ and ‘kind’, as in ‘mankind’, ‘human-kind’ or ‘natural kind’.²² The phrase γένος μερόπων ἀνθρώπων²³ means ‘the breed or kind of men’, i.e. ‘mankind’. We also find ‘the kind of mules’ (ἡμιόνων γένος: Il. 2.852), ‘the kind of oxen’ (βοῶν γένος: Od. 20.212, HHerm 309), ‘the kind of gods’ (Th. 21 = 105 ἀθανάτων ἱερὸν γένος, μακάρων γένος Th. 33, θεῶν γένος Th. 44), ‘the kind of men and [the kind] of giants’ (ἀνθρώπων τε γένος κρατέρων τε γιγάντων: Th. 50), ‘the kind of satyrs’ (γένος . . . σατύρων: Hes. fr. 10(a).18 M-W), ‘the kind of women’ (γένος . . . γυναικῶν: Th. 590), ‘the kind of iron/bronze’ (γένος πολιοῦ ἀδάμαντος: Th. 161).

Hesiod may be doing something more idiosyncratic than is often recognised in multiplying the ‘kinds’ of man and in implying the possibility of an indefinite article, ‘a mankind’, which may be as much of a solecism in Greek as in English. This is a history not of one humankind, but a story of five humankinds. This conception of five humankinds is probably as unconventional as Hesiod’s more explicitly revisionist doctrine of the two Strifes at the beginning of the poem: ‘there is not, after all,24 a single kind of Strifes (οὐκ ἄρα μοῦνον ἐὴν Ἐρίδων γένος), but there are two over the earth’ (WD 11–12). It can hardly be historical thinking that inspires a story of this sort. There is a crucial difference between this conception and a conception of ages (epochs), civilisations or generations.

Technically the relation of these ‘humankinds’ to one another ought to be no closer than that of Homo sapiens to Neanderthal, or even less close, for there is no chronological overlap. MoR presents these as discrete successive races, the one race being destroyed in nihil, the next being created thereafter ex nihilo. Genealogical continuity between successive kinds thus seems excluded, although it is controversial whether continuity between the heroes and the iron race is nevertheless presupposed.²⁵ The creation of genealogical ties between the heroes and Greeks of the historical period has indeed been seen as a necessary first step for the creation of a historical attitude towards the heroic age.²⁶ Yet for all that genealogical continuity between successive kinds seems to be excluded in MoR, the narrative still somehow wishes, and needs, to be considered a narrative of a continuous human history.27 Verse 108 invites us to understand Hesiod’s narrative as ‘[a story of] how gods and mortal men were born of the same origin’. This only seems to work if the other races are seen as being in a linear descent from the golden race, who ‘lived as gods’.²⁸ Moreover, there seems to be an intriguing thematic or ethical progression between successive races; ethically the one race seems to pick up where the last left off. To begin with, the men of the golden race have everything they want apparently without being spoilt by it.²⁹ The men of the silver race are apparently heirs to this externally favoured existence,³⁰ but they are internally less able to deal with it. To have all one wants without any effort resembles the condition of a spoilt child.³¹ Appropriately, therefore, the silver race live as pampered children for one hundred years (130–1), and it seems to follow that when they reach maturity a refusal to share leads to hubris towards one another (134–5) and impiety towards the gods (135–7).³² The men of the bronze race inherit this propensity to hubris (146) and are addicted to the works of war (146), in which they kill one another (152–3).33 The heroes in the following race are killed in wars (161–5), one of which was fought apparently between two brothers over their patrimony (163 μαρναμένους μήλων ἕνεκ’ οἰδιπόδαο, with echoes of Perses and Hesiod in Polyneikes and Eteokles, if indeed it is their dispute which is meant),³⁴ and the other was fought over Helen, that is, over a guest’s abduction of his host’s wife. The men of iron race are to be destroyed when familial and social relations break down, so that guest is at odds with host (183 οὐδὲ ξεῖνος ξεινοδόκῳ, sc. ὁμοίιος) and brother is not as before a dear one (184 οὐδὲ κασίγνητος φίλος ἔσσεται). ‘Not . . . as before’ (ὡς τὸ πάρος περ, 184); but as we have seen this did not go unproblematically for the race of heroes either. The negative traits of each race appear to be passed on to its successor.³⁵ There is then an ethical evolution, even if a genetic or genealogical evolution seems ruled out.

We have not yet considered the association with a metal that is found with four of the five ‘mankinds’, which is plainly fundamental to any understanding of Hesiod’s conception. The association with a metal can be seen as literal or metaphorical or both.³⁶

Taking the metallic association literally would permit one to see MoR as a history of mankind through technological, and specifically metallurgical, innovations. We might compare Lucretius’ account of early man, whose weapons progressed from hands, nails and teeth to stones and branches to fire to bronze and finally iron.37 Real historical thinking can be in play here; a similar conception, after all, underlies the modern archaeological-historical categories of ‘Stone Age’, ‘Bronze Age’ and ‘Iron Age’. Such was the view of J. G. Griffiths: ‘[WD 150–1] makes [Hesiod’s] idea clear. The “bronze race” lived until the discovery of a new metal, that is iron. Apart from these lines, it is true, there is no mention of the use of metals . . . But there can be little doubt that this is the underlying idea. If the poet had chosen the metals merely as symbols of increasing degeneration, he would not have referred so clearly to the use of two of them.’ For Griffiths, MoR was ‘an amalgam of history and myth, where myth undoubtedly predominates but where history lies behind the sequence of metals’.³⁸ On this view MoR would preserve a historical memory of people first widely using gold, then silver, then bronze, then iron.³⁹

This is not the place to pursue the questions whether there really was any such historical memory in Hesiod’s time or whether there ever had been such a historical reality to be remembered; a more urgent question is whether such a historical interpretation is supported by Hesiod’s language. The most natural understanding of 109 and 128 is, surely, ‘the gods made a race of men out of gold (silver)’, with the adjectives as predicative complements of ποίησαν denoting the substance out of which these first two humankinds were fashioned.⁴⁰ The bronze race deviates from this (WD 143–51), but the deviation is signalled by two additions: this race was made ‘from ash trees’ (WD 145), i.e. was not fashioned from the metal in question; and this race used bronze for everything under the sun (WD 150–1). That is, the bronze race, for whom the association with a metal is literal, represents a clear departure from the scheme that has obtained thus far in the narrative.

Taken metaphorically, on the other hand, the association of the races with a metal would be a way of expressing the differing ethos of these various ‘human kinds’. We might compare Semonides fr. 7 West, on womankind: ‘god first made the mind of woman in different ways: one [he made] from a shaggy-haired sow’ – and the others he made from a vixen, a bitch, the earth, the sea, an ass, a weasel, a monkey and a bee. Not so dissimilar (but with reversed sexism) is the English nursery rhyme: ‘What are little boys made of? / Frogs and snails / And puppy-dogs’ tails / . . . What are little girls made of? / Sugar and spice / And all things nice.’ Again this is not very historical, or very scientific, thinking. R. G. A. Buxton is right to observe that in MoR ‘metals are used to make statements about the moral world’41 and to recognise that this constitutes a difference between ‘traditional’ and ‘scientific’ – we might add ‘historical’ – categories of thought.⁴² B. M. W. Knox has also knocked on the head the kind of historical interpretation argued for by Griffiths: ‘There is not much use pretending that Hesiod is thinking in modern terms of the Bronze and Iron ages; for one thing his own age used bronze as well as iron and so, clearly, did the Homeric heroes of the fourth age. And the gold and silver ages have to be passed over in silence.’⁴³

It must be right that the basic conception underlying Hesiod’s metallic scheme is the metaphorical one. But there is no reason why the scheme should be monovalent: no reason why the metals should not start off being used symbolically with the gold and silver races, but then also acquire a literal dimension with the bronze and iron races. A quasi-historical notion seems to be grafted on with these two races; there seems little point otherwise in insisting that the bronze race used bronze because ‘black iron did not exist’ (WD 151). One of the ways in which Homeric epic seems keen to distinguish the world of the heroes from the contemporary world is their inhabitants’ differential uses of bronze and iron, and this seems to be a way of capturing genuine historical difference between the Mycenaean and the archaic worlds.⁴⁴ The tradition (probably Near Eastern: see below) that gave Hesiod the (metaphorical) metallic scheme gold–silver–bronze–iron is evidently distinct from the Greek epic tradition, which implicitly contrasted the bygone heroes as predominantly (literal) users of bronze with contemporary men as predominantly (literal) users of iron; but Hesiod found a neat way of combining the two traditions.45 Thanks to this combination his account wins a genuine historical dimension. But the historical thinking in question is the product of the heroic epic tradition, and cannot be considered an original intellectual contribution of Hesiod.

REFINEMENTS AND QUALIFICATIONS TO THE SCHEME

The sequence gold–silver–bronze–iron implies a clear devaluation. But there is, several scholars have recognised, no straight linear deterioriation in Hesiod’s scheme.46 The descent in value of the metals is disrupted by the heroes, who are explicitly said to be superior to the preceding bronze race (WD 158).⁴⁷ The breakdown of any linear decline with the race of heroes should not be seen as a flaw in the narrative.⁴⁸ The fact that there is a possibility of halting, even reversing, the decline is a vital aspect of MoR. I would see significance in the facts, first, that it is the race of heroes which breaks the decline; second, that this race is an ambivalent race, being divided into two contrasting groups (166 τοὺς μέν, 167 τοῖς δέ); and third, that this race is the race immediately preceding the present race. The heroes are our immediate predecessors on the earth and are our most pressing moral exemplars; our race, like theirs, is ambivalent and has a chance of stemming the decline.49 The ‘fortunate’ heroes, those hailed ὄλβιοι ἥρωες in WD 172, stem the decline by dint of recapturing, after their death, the conditions enjoyed by the golden race (170 echoes 112; 172–3 echoes 117; the interpolated 173a echoes 111). The notion that decline is not inevitable, that alternative fates are possible, is an important idea that emerges also from other parts of the poem, especially the so-called ‘diptych of the Just and the Unjust City’ (WD 225–47).

The diptych illustrates in a way MoR had not prepared us for the ambivalence of the present (iron) race. Verbal and thematic echoes reveal this passage to be in a continuing dialectic with MoR. The conditions enjoyed by the citizens of the Just City evoke those enjoyed both by the men of the golden race and, posthumously, by the ‘fortunate’ heroes on the isles of the blessed (231 echoes 115; 236 echoes 116–17; 237 echoes both 117 and 172–3).⁵⁰ The plight of the citizens of the Unjust City evokes that of the heroes in their more negative aspects: annihilation in warfare or on the sea (WD 246–7, cf. 161–5). A similar passage that illustrates the ambivalence of the present race is WD 280–5, which we may for convenience call the ‘syncrisis of the just man and the unjust man’. This passage describes Zeus giving prosperity and a flourishing progeny to the just man, while the progeny of the unjust man is blighted.51

Another passage of WD which importantly continues the dialectic with MoR is the ‘nautilia’ (618–94, esp. 632–62). Here, in the context of his sea-passage from Aulis to Chalcis, the narrator mentions the ‘Achaeans’ who once sailed from Greece to Troy (WD 651–3). These Achaeans are, of course, identical with the heroes of MoR whom war ‘brought in their ships over the great expanse of sea to Troy for the sake of fair-haired Helen’ (WD 164–5). The Amphidamas for whose funeral games the narrator crossed from Aulis to Euboea was, according to Plutarch (Sept. sap. conv. 153F), a casualty of the Lelantine War, a contemporary conflict which, if any, might be seen as a latter-day Trojan War (compare the remarks of Archilochus, fr. 3 West, and Thucydides, 1.15.3); the epithet δαΐφρονος (WD 654) may hint at his warrior status. Amphidamas’ funeral games with their lavish prizes (WD 655–6) evoke a heroic model, most obviously Patroklos’ funeral games in the twenty-third book of the Iliad. Perhaps Amphidamas was even heroised, as other casualties of the Lelantine War may have been.⁵² But if Amphidamas is honourably approximated to the heroes, the narrator in this passage is, no less honourably, contrasted with the Achaeans. They sailed from Greece to Troy (‘over a great expanse of sea’) and were killed in war; he sailed (a voyage of some hundred yards) from Aulis to Euboea to triumph in a singing contest. There is, further, a strong contrast between the narrator and his own father. The latter sailed frequently (πλωίζεσκ’) for want of a good livelihood, and was given poverty by Zeus (WD 634, 638). By contrast the narrator has never sailed but once, when he was enriched with a tripod which he promptly reinvested in the economy of the sacred by dedicating it to the Muses, through whom he knows the mind of Zeus (WD 650–1, 661). The narrator – ‘Hesiod’⁵³ – leads a life of self-sufficiency, exemption from sea-faring, and good relations with the gods. His life thus quietly evokes that of the men of the golden race. His life seems more straightforwardly positive in ethical terms than the largely positive but also somewhat ambivalent lives of the heroes and Amphidamas.

The preceding tells us something about Hesiod’s view of human history. A first and important point to be made concerns Hesiod’s way of discoursing about the past (rather than just his view of the past). MoR delivers not the definitive word, but a version of the ‘truth’, exaggerated for rhetorical effect, that is subject to qualification in other, later, parts of the poem. Hesiod’s procedure here resembles that of Virgil, perhaps especially in his most Hesiodic work, the Georgics (though Virgil’s tendency is to qualify an optimistic passage with pessimistic touches scattered throughout the poem, rather than to temper an initial pessimistic account with subsequent optimistic refinements).54

Second, reading MoR alongside the diptych and the nautilia shows MoR to have a crucial synchronic as well as a diachronic dimension. This important point has been emphasised by various scholars, notably J.-P. Vernant and J. Fontenrose.⁵⁵ The γένη, ‘humankinds’, represent not just past realities, but present possibilities. One could characterise MoR as a retrojection onto the past of possibilities in the present. ‘History’ under this guise appears not as an investigation into what the past was really like, but a reification (presentation as historical reality) of ethical alternatives available to us in our contemporary lives. This ‘history’ is a fictional construct whose purpose is to illuminate the present from an ethical standpoint. Not that this is all MoR is. There seems to be also, for instance, an irreducible diachronic-historical component, in the bronze–iron races, as I argued above. And there seems also to be a significant attempt to correlate the account with independently known mythical and cultic data (as we shall see below; only the bronze race, who depart the earth ‘nameless’, WD 154 νώνυμνοι, do not leave behind them palpable traces of their presence in the world).⁵⁶ But the synchronic reading is an important part of MoR, and it finds a resonance in Hesiod’s ancient reception.57 The poem as a whole shows us how to ‘read’ MoR, with at least two shifts of perspective. First, as we have already noted, what starts off as a diachronic account gets reinterpreted as a synchronic account. Second, there is a progressive narrowing of focus, whereby what was presented to begin with, in MoR, as a fate befalling a whole γένος indiscriminately (but with a distinction made for the heroes: WD 166–8) gets successively redefined: first, in the diptych, as the fate befalling one whole city-state (WD 240 ξύμπασα πόλις) but not another; second, in the ‘syncrisis’ and nautilia sections, as the fate befalling one individual but not another.⁵⁸ The progressive narrowing of focus means that the ‘lesson’ of ‘history’ is devolved onto us with increasing immediacy:⁵⁹ the conditions of our life are largely of our own making.⁶⁰ Even now the life of the golden race may be, to an extent, recoverable.⁶¹

CONFRONTATION OF MoR WITH THE MYTH OF PROMETHEUS AND PANDORA

A key question in evaluating MoR as a proto-historical account is what claim to truth it makes. This question is raised in particular by the Wahrheitsanspruch at the beginning of each Hesiodic poem (WD 10, Th. 26–8).62 Rosenmeyer surely exaggerates Hesiod’s commitment to truth when he writes of ‘Hesiod’s striking insistence on the importance of his own person and on the veracity of his account; an insistence which is equalled by Hecataeus later on . . . Hesiod, in his emphasis on the truth, sets himself apart from the lies, the illusory beauty and polish of the epic poetry . . . Truth is the chief objective of Hesiod’s enterprise.’⁶³ Others, for instance Leclerc, have seen it as a consciously fictional discourse.⁶⁴ It is reasonable to be suspicious of attempts to hive off MoR from other parts of the narrative of the Erga, such as the myth of Prometheus and Pandora and the fable of the hawk and the nightingale, and claim a quite special veridical status for MoR.⁶⁵

The relationship between MoR and the myth of Prometheus and Pandora (WD 48–105; henceforth PromPand) is particularly important for the question of what kind of narrative about the past each is. For if the two narratives straightforwardly conflict, it would appear that Hesiod cannot be in the business of uncovering historical truth.⁶⁶ The two narratives are often seen as simply incompatible.⁶⁷ But equally it is hard not to be struck by the thematic links that can be discovered between them.68 The following six links deserve attention. (1) In PromPand during Zeus’ reign a ‘separation’ (or ‘settlement’) occurred between gods and men (Th. 535), implying that previously they existed on a more equal footing; in MoR during Kronos’ reign men lived ‘as gods’ (WD 111–12). (2) In PromPand Prometheus swindled Zeus at a sacrifice (Th. 538–41); in MoR the silver race was unwilling to sacrifice to the gods (WD 135–6). (3) In PromPand Zeus grew angry at Prometheus’ deception (WD 47); in MoR Zeus grew angry at the silver race (WD 138). (4) In PromPand Zeus hid fire from men (WD 50, cf. 47, 42);⁶⁹ in MoR Zeus hid the silver race (WD 138). (5) At the end of PromPand, countless ‘banes’ (λυγρά, substantive) are dispersed among men by Pandora’s action, and only the personified Elpis remains in the jar (WD 94–104); at the end of MoR, personified Zelos accompanies all men while personified Aidos and Nemesis abandon men, and ‘baneful pains’ (λυγρά, adjective) are left for men (WD 195–201). (6) In PromPand the ambivalence of woman (WD 57, but cf. 702–5) and of Elpis (WD 96–9)⁷⁰ is matched in MoR by the ambivalence of the heroes (WD 166–8) and of the iron race (WD 179);⁷¹ in each case terms initially presumed to be wholly negative turn out to be at least potentially or partially positive. Undoubtedly, it is possible to add to or subtract from this list of correspondences; but in general their weight renders problematic the view stated baldly by M. L. West that Hesiod ‘presents [the Myth of Ages] simply as ἕτερος λόγος and does not attempt to reconcile it with the Prometheus-Pandora myth, with which it is in fact incompatible’.⁷² Perhaps we should be struck as much by the congruence between these accounts as by their incongruity, or more so (see further below).⁷³

Attempts to explain the juxtaposition of contradictory accounts of the past in PromPand and MoR may take us down various avenues.

One approach is to see each of the two accounts as having truth-values, and incompatible ones; if one is true, the other is false (though both could of course be false). It is because the truth-value of each is unclear that Hesiod has determined to give us both: either one could be true. The juxtaposition of PromPand and MoR thus invites comparison with Herodotus’ inclusion of alternative and mutually exclusive logoi: Hesiod feels in such a case bound to λέγειν τὰ λεγόμενα but not committed to any view regarding their truth or falsity (cf. Hdt. 7.152.3). This is the approach of Rosenmeyer to the collocation of PromPand and MoR.74 Hesiod would then operate as a historian, though not so much for his view of the past as for his respect for others’ views of the past. A historian may properly be interested in people’s beliefs as historical data in their own right.⁷⁵ But it is hard to accept that Hesiod ‘decided not to select’, but just report, what had been said by others on human history.⁷⁶ We have seen that both Hesiodic accounts resonate with the thematic interests of WD. Both PromPand and MoR are thus redolent of authorial selection, manipulation, interpretation. And in fact just the same can be said of Herodotus’ inclusion in his narrative of ‘uncriticised variants’. Here too we have in all likelihood not a decision not to select, not abstention from interpretation, but rather a decision to include at least one version that the historian knows must be false precisely for its thematic contribution to the wider narrative.⁷⁷

A second approach is to deny PromPand and MoR truth-values in that sense. Though disguised as an account of the past, each is really concerned to convey ever-present moral truths. Prima facie descriptive and past-tense narratives, they are in fact protreptics to piety and justice in the present and future. This in essence is the approach of Rowe and Buxton, of whom the latter compares the conflict between PromPand and MoR with the situation presented by conflicting proverbs (‘many hands make light work’, but ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’).78 If Hesiod’s interests are unlike those of a historian or scientist, if he does not purport to describe and explain the real world as they do, then his attitude to inconsistency can be unlike theirs. This is not the place to discuss whether proverbs as a system do or do not tolerate contradiction.⁷⁹ One disconcerting consequence of this view Herodotus to include some false versions and not others? Despite the commonly held view that he is unable to resist any really good story, Herodotus’ false versions of events almost always contain identifiable themes that are significant in the Histories as a whole’; p. 68: ‘two versions of a story exist, neither is contradicted by material evidence, but both contain themes that interest Herodotus. In this case Herodotus tells both versions without discrimination or disclaimer.’ is that it risks leaving too little difference between MoR and the fable (WD 202–12), a moralising narrative with no pretensions to describe the real world (as MoR, in places, apparently does have). Can we be happy to accord MoR just the status of a parable?80 We may also hesitate in an early Greek context to contrast a description of the real world that leads to scientific (historical or physical) explanations of the world’s processes with an account that purports (at least) to be of the real world but leads to the formulation of moral truths. The difficulty here is that the physical and historical investigations of Anaximander and Herodotus themselves ultimately serve to demonstrate the operation in the physical and human worlds of dikē and tisis: two distinctly moral, and very Hesiodic, concepts.⁸¹ An overriding concern with moral principles that underlie the working of the world does not clearly distinguish Hesiod from the early Greek scientist or historian.⁸²

A third approach is to take the ensemble ‘PromPand+MoR’ as self-refuting in so far as some of its parts contradict one another, but as self-validating in so far as other of its parts agree. In this way the juxtaposition of the two accounts can reveal the truth as much as the fiction. It is the coincidence in the ‘substrate’ of PromPand and MoR that will indicate what should count as ‘true’.⁸³ Guided by Hesiod’s two contiguous accounts we (Hesiod’s audience) may construct our own narrative of human history approximately as follows: mankind has had a very long history; men were once much closer to the gods; life for man was once much better than it is now; while there has been a succession of cultural and technological developments, there has also been in tandem with these an ethical deterioration and an increasing alienation of man from the gods; yet in the past that deterioration and alienation could be arrested, and so (and here comes the ‘lesson’ of history) it can be arrested again in the present and the future. Such a procedure of including mutually self-refuting accounts that are also self-validating should not be assumed to be intrinsically unhistorical. Herodotus can be held to have done something very similar: to have included unreconciled, incompatible alternatives in his narrative in order that their agreement on certain key points might highlight what is meant to stand as historical fact.84 This approach to PromPand and MoR presupposes that it is possible, indeed necessary, to separate an untrue ‘casing’ from a true ‘core’ within each of PromPand and MoR.⁸⁵ Then Hesiod would implicitly have assumed something like what the fifth-century mythographers assumed in their rationalisation of myth, for example Hecataeus (frr. 26–7 Fowler) or Herodotus himself (2.55–7).⁸⁶ The shared assumption is that there is an underlying truth to a mythical account that can be freed by a critical mind from the distortions worked on it by successive story-tellers’ embellishments. The difference is that the mythographer does the thinking for us and sets out prosaically what he thinks the truth is; Hesiod with a poet’s indirectness requires us to do the thinking for ourselves. This approach to the problem of PromPand and MoR, unlike the last, takes Hesiod to be implying a discourse with truth-values: there are facts about the world implied in this narrative, but Hesiod leaves us to dig and sift them ourselves. Or is this indirectness in fact distinctively a poet’s modus operandi, rather than a historian’s? Herodotus once again can be argued to do something very similar, to work his readers similarly hard.87

Probably none of these approaches to the problem of PromPand and MoR can fully satisfy. Yet it is a merit of the third is that it takes seriously the presence of striking and extensive correspondences between PromPand and MoR. Two things in all this are worth emphasising. First, Hesiod surely juxtaposes PromPand and MoR with some understanding of his own as to how they cohere, but that understanding remains entirely implicit: we can do no more than impute an understanding to him. And second, the size of the gap that we perceive between Hesiod and Herodotus depends on how we choose to nuance our conception not just of Hesiod’s but also of Herodotus’ historiographical method.

CONFRONTATION OF MoR WITH A NEAR EASTERN MYTH OF RACES

Let us leave for a moment the question of the relationship and compatibility of MoR and PromPand and consider a parallel question: the relationship and compatibility of MoR and the putative Near Eastern myth that is often claimed as Hesiod’s ‘source’.88 It must first be admitted that Near Eastern origins of MoR are not universally acknowledged. MoR has variously been seen as Hesiod’s own extrapolation from the Greek epic tradition, an Indo-European inheritance, and simply an instance of a very ancient and widespread theme.⁸⁹ The extant Indo-European parallels for MoR from Sanskrit (Mahābhārata3.148, 3.187) and Pahlavi texts (Vahman Yašt;Dēnkard) are arguably more impressive than the extant parallels in texts from the Near East (e.g. Old Testament, Daniel 2:32–6, 39–41).90 Nevertheless Near Eastern influence perhaps remains the most reasonable assumption.⁹¹ Near Eastern influence is generally granted for the succession myth of the Theogony ⁹² and it seems the conception of Works and Days as a whole must be allowed a Near Eastern pedigree.⁹³ Moreover, Hesiod’s handling of the MoR narrative, and of the succession myth, suggests to me ‘horizontal’ rather than ‘vertical’ transmission and a relatively recent import rather than an ancient inheritance.⁹⁴ That question cannot be settled here, if indeed anywhere. Suffice it to say that the assumption of Near Eastern inspiration for MoR is viable enough, though unproven, for its consequences to be worth exploring.

Greek thinking about human (pre)history must always have received a jolt when confronted with Near Eastern traditions.⁹⁵ Greek heroic genealogies do not extend back more than a few generations before the Trojan War, at which point human ancestors peter out and divine ancestors take over.⁹⁶ By contrast, Herodotus heard Egyptian priests indicate kings going back 341 generations, i.e. 11,340 years, before the reign of the early seventh-century ‘Sethos’ (Hdt. 2.142.1). The situation in Sumer was even more extreme. ‘Sometime early in the second millennium BC, let us say ca. 1800, a scribe in the temple of Isin compiled a list of all the kings who had ruled over Sumer. Supporting himself upon archives of hoary antiquity, this priest began his story 273,444 years, three months, and three and a half days before his own time.’97 Greek narratives of the classical period themselves highlighted the problem. When Hecataeus traced his own genealogy back sixteen generations to a divine ancestor for the benefit of priests of Amun in Egyptian Thebes, the priests reciprocated with their own account of 345 preceding human generations (Hdt. 2.143.4).⁹⁸ When Solon asked the most experienced of the Egyptian priests about ‘ancient history’ (τὰ παλαιά) he discovered that he, like all the other Greeks, was clueless: he told them the myths of Phoroneus and Niobe, Deukalion and Pyrrha and rehearsed the generations starting from them, only to get from an elderly Egyptian priest the rejoinder, ‘You Greeks are always children . . . You are all young in your souls’; for their own historical records went back 8,000 years (Plat. Tim. 22a–b, 23e). The huge disparity in chronological perspectives presented a major challenge for any Greek who wished to opine on the past and who was acquainted with Near Eastern traditions. It is plausible that Hesiod in MoR was exercised by the problem of chronological disparity arising from the confrontation of Greek with Near Eastern traditions, and that Hesiod’s way of dealing with that problem resembles that of the ‘Father of History’ in a well-known passage.

Herodotus in his second book describes becoming acquainted in Egypt, Tyre and Thasos with a god whom he had no hesitation in identifying with the Greek Herakles but whom he found persistently assigned a date of birth far earlier than the Greek Herakles, by a margin of up to 16 millennia (2.43–4)!⁹⁹ In the face of this cross-cultural data Herodotus makes two noteworthy assumptions: first, that a Greek, an Egyptian and a Phoenician divine figure are to be identified with each other;¹⁰⁰ second, that the truth of the matter is recoverable (‘the current inquiries show clearly that Herakles is an ancient god’, 2.44.5). Herodotus does not, here, take the relativist route, à la Xenophanes (‘for the Greeks Herakles is so-and-so, for the Egyptians so-and-so, for the Phoenicians so-and-so; the truth is not to be found in any of these’), although he is evidently acquainted with that route (cf. 3.38.1–4).101 Here the assumption is rather that both Greek and eastern traditions are truth-bearing and that conflict between them must be resolved. Herodotus’ solution involves a multiplication of categories: the positing of two Herakleses, one an Olympian god and son of Zeus, the other a hero and son of Amphitryon, of which the former, much the elder, can be identified with the Near Eastern Herakles.¹⁰² And this solution finds confirmation for Herodotus in existing Greek cult practice, for there are Greeks who (properly, in his eyes) observed distinct forms of worship for the Olympian and the heroic Herakles (2.44.5).

A comparable procedure can be imputed to Hesiod in MoR. Here too there was an issue of chronological discrepancy. Greek epic tradition knew of only one race prior to the present race, the heroes or ‘demigods’ (earlier and later generations may be distinguished within the heroic race, and there may be ‘earlier men’, Il. 21.405, 23.332, 23.790; but there is no antecedent race: see above). By contrast the metallic scheme of the Near East (if Near Eastern it is) knows several races prior to the present race.¹⁰³ Hesiod, like Herodotus, seems willing to identify figures of Near Eastern tradition with figures of Greek tradition: he imaginatively associates the last two metallic races from the Near Eastern sequence gold–silver–bronze–iron with the users of bronze and of iron familiar to Greek conceptions through epic. Like Herodotus’, Hesiod’s solution involves a multiplication of existing categories: four earlier races of man instead of the traditional one. Finally, Hesiod’s innovative analysis is justified, like Herodotus’, by an appeal to the realities of Greek cult practice. Greek popular religion recognised a plethora of indeterminate divine beings of lesser status than the gods; Hesiod now recognises these as specific races of bygone men. The golden and silver races have a continuing presence in seventh-century cultic reality as respectively ‘deities above the earth’ (daimones . . . epichthonioi) and ‘blessed mortals below the earth’ (hypochthonioi makares thnetoi). The use of καλέονται (WD 141, 159) makes it clear that these are meant to correspond to categories of deity recognizable to contemporaries (which is not to say that modern scholars can agree who made up these two groups).104

This construction of Hesiod’s procedure in MoR attributes a notable common methodology to Hesiod and Herodotus. (1) There is the cognizance of alternative and discrepant accounts in Greece and the Near East as a result of wide data-gathering through Herodotean historiē and Hesiodic polymathiē (cf. Heracl. fr. 22 B40 D–K). (2) There is the identification of these accounts as competing accounts of the same situation and thus a need to resolve the conflict. (3) The resolution involves a multiplication of terms, so that identification of Greek with Near Eastern terms becomes possible while conflict is avoided. (4) The solution is justified by an appeal to the ‘evidence’ of tradition (cult and myth) to support the new terms introduced. (5) The traditional Greek chronology is radically revised and becomes vastly more extended.

This is of course a speculative account of how and why Hesiod may have approximated a Greek tradition of human history to a putative Near Eastern story of human history. It will be clear, however, how such an account parallels our thinking about how and why Hesiod may have approximated the narratives of PromPand and MoR. In each case we see a concern to establish coherence between alternative versions of the past. This concern for coherence could be interpreted as a concern for historical truth, but it is far from clear that it must or should be. The difficulty is that coherence is not just a criterion of truth but can also be a more purely aesthetic quality. When archaic Greek poets offered a new version of a traditional tale they typically took pains to make the new version cohere in certain key details with the old.¹⁰⁵ But it would be rash to assume they must have done so because of a conviction of the historical truth of the details retained.¹⁰⁶ This mode of innovation in which the new was thoroughly integrated with the old is at once more satisfying and calls for more ingenuity than invention ab initio; such a mode of innovation seems to have become something like a ‘rule of the game’ for Greek poets.107 It is obvious that there is an issue here of poetic virtuosity as well as any simple concern for historicity. There is without doubt a self-conscious display of poetic virtuosity in Hesiod’s fitting of Greek traditions of human history to Near Eastern traditions of human history within MoR and in his fitting of MoR to PromPand (that poetic virtuosity is proclaimed in εὖ καὶ ἐπισταμένως, WD 107!). The question is whether the coherence for which Hesiod strives pertains solely to a closed poetic system or is meant further to argue a faithful fit with reality. Consider for a moment the uses made of etymology and aetiology, devices which may serve to connect a novel account with independently existing features of language or of the world. The mythographers and Herodotus employ etymology to confirm the veracity of an account; but Hesiod’s etymologies (e.g. Pandora, WD 81–2; Aphrodite, Th. 195–8; etc.) must frequently be regarded as ‘merely heuristic or playful’.¹⁰⁸ The same might be said of aetiologies. When Hesiod identifies daimones as the posthumous spirits of the golden race (WD 121–6) or the Delphic stone as the one swallowed by Kronos (Th. 498–500), these need not be more seriously meant than, say, the identification of a rock formation at Sipylos as the petrified Niobe (Il. 24.614–17). It is thus unclear whether the similarities in method observed between Hesiod and Herodotus are profound or superficial, whether they go beyond the merely formal to encompass the ends of the works in question. There is no mistaking that Herodotus is interested not only in how Greek beliefs about Herakles fit non-Greek beliefs but in how these mutually accommodated beliefs fit the real world (‘my inquiries show clearly [δηλοῖ σαφέως] that Herakles is [ἐόντα] an ancient god’, 2.44.5). Precisely because there is no such clarity with Hesiod, it is hard to combined with poetic invention’; P. Burian, ‘Myth into mythos: The shaping of tragic plot’, in P. E. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 178–208, at p. 185: ‘myth is subject to interpretation and revision, but not to complete overturn, because it is also history’; A. Kelly, Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus (London: Duckworth, 2009), p. 36 ‘Greek poets could not move in utterly new directions . . . for the new to be believable, it had to accommodate itself to the old, to grant to the audience that the stories they knew were not very far from the truth.’ demonstrate Hesiod the historian who deals in truth as opposed to Hesiod the poet who deals in traditional tales.109

CONCLUSION

By way of conclusion it may be helpful to reiterate the ambiguities and indeterminacies inherent in MoR’s view of the past. First, this is a history of discrete ‘mankinds’; but it is also somehow a history of a unified mankind. Second, it is an account of discrete races, but not entirely discrete races (one race bleeds into the other; ethical attitudes, moral behaviours, seem to be passed on, almost like genes). Third, the scheme is premised on a decline, but this turns out not to be a complete or irreversible decline. Fourth, the identification with metals is symbolic, but it also becomes literal. Fifth, it starts out as a diachronic account, but it is also (no less importantly) synchronic.110 Sixth, the account appears to be simply descriptive, but it is also normative and prescriptive (there is an implicit, but fundamental, ethical dimension to the account). Seventh, the account of the past is different from PromPand, but not entirely different; it can be approximated to PromPand, but not completely. Last, Hesiod is arguably interested in accommodating Greek with non-Greek traditions about the past and in making a wide range of data cohere (in this very like Herodotus); but that does not necessarily equate to a concern for historical truth.

It is obvious that MoR is a remarkably fluid form of discourse that defies reductive analysis. A great many different, and contradictory, views of the past can be discerned in these hundred lines. It does not seem absurd to see MoR as some kind of potential precursor to a historical account. But there is too much that remains implicit in Hesiod’s methodology, and too much that requires scholarly construction, to make us confident about seeing it so. The comparisons that can be drawn between Hesiod’s method and Herodotus’ are striking both for their quantity and quality, but these do not clinch the issue: MoR remains tantalisingly poised between poetic fiction and history.

1	The Catalogue of Women would have a place in a discussion of ‘Hesiod on human history’ which pretended to greater inclusivity; and it would raise quite different questions from those considered here.
2	T. G. Rosenmeyer, ‘Hesiod and historiography’, Hermes 85 (1957), pp. 257–85; D. J. Stewart, ‘Hesiod and history’, Bucknell Review 18 (1970), pp. 37–52; C. J. Rowe, ‘Archaic thought in Hesiod’, JHS 103 (1983), pp. 124–35. The following quotations may be illustrative. Rosenmeyer, ‘Hesiod and historiography’, p. 260: ‘On the scores of systematisation, of secularisation, of the revolt against epic untruthfulness or epic narrowness, and of the skilful collection of recognised data under the aegis of a moral theme, Hesiod’s Five Ages ought to be ranked as an early piece of Greek historical writing . . . It is the objective of this paper to plead Hesiod’s case, if not as a historian, at least as a forerunner of the historical perspective.’ Rowe, ‘Archaic thought’, p. 126 n. 27: ‘The ultimate question will be how Hesiod works in contexts which appear to raise issues likely to interest the scientist or the historian; in particular, contexts which are apparently concerned with explanation’; p. 134: ‘if we assume that Hesiod is in competition with an Anaximander or a Herodotus (or a Thucydides), then he comes off badly; but though there is some overlapping, as for example in Hesiod’s description of the birth of the world, he is really playing a different game, under different rules.’ Cf. also P. Smith, ‘History and the individual in Hesiod’s myth of five races’, CW 74 (1980), pp. 145–63, at pp. 150–1.
3	M.-C. Leclerc, ‘Le mythe des races: Une fiction aux sentiers qui bifurquent’, Kernos 6 (1993), pp. 207–24, at p. 220; C. Calame, ‘Succession des âges et pragmatique poétique de la justice: Le récit hésiodique des cinq espèces humaines’, Kernos 17 (2004), pp. 67–102, at p. 67: ‘ces vers ne représentent pas un “mythe”, mais un lógos; il s’agit donc d’un simple récit.’ Not that these function reliably as technical terms; cf. R. G. A. Buxton, Imaginary Greece: The Contexts of Mythology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 12–13, on the interchangeability of mythos and logos in the archaic period.
4	For Leclerc, ‘Mythe des races’, p. 224, this verse (WD 108) ‘donne la clé de l’histoire’. Cf. Calame, ‘Succession des âges’, p. 72.
5	Rosenmeyer, ‘Hesiod and historiography’, p. 269: ‘Hesiod does not wish to go into detail; like Thucydides in his archaeology, he realizes that he cannot supply as full a picture as he wishes.’ Criticized by Rowe, ‘Archaic thought’, pp. 132–3; L. Bertelli, ‘Hecataeus: From genealogy to historiography’, in N. Luraghi (ed.), The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 67–94, at p. 82. The inference from the narrative’s sketchiness to its historical intent is weak; for mythological ‘sketches’, cf. Hygin. Fab., and of course Hesiod (and ‘Hesiod’) himself in several passages of Th. (and Cat.).
6	Calame, ‘Succession des âges’, p. 72 on ἐπιστάμενος: ‘Le lógos proféré est bien celui d’un sage, par référence au savoir du poète homérique ou mieux encore par allusion au savoir faire du poète élégiaque’ (referring to Od. 11.368, Theogn. 769–72, Solon fr.13.51–5 West; add Archil. fr. 1.2 West); cf. M. L. West, Hesiod: Works and Days (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 178; M. Griffith, ‘Contest and contradiction in early Greek poetry’, in Griffith and D. Mastronarde (eds), The Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), pp. 185–207, at p. 196. It seems εὖ καὶ ἐπισταμένως was used especially of a skilled craftsman (and hence of a craftsman of words?): Od. 17.341 = 21.44, 23.197, cf. 5.245, Il. 10.265.
7	WD 109 = 143 = 180 γένος μερόπων ἀνθρώπων, 121, 127, 140, 156, 159, 176. Cf. WD 160 γενεή.
8	H. C. Baldry, ‘Who invented the golden age?’, CQ n.s. 2 (1952), pp. 83–92, at p. 88; Rosenmeyer, ‘Hesiod and historiography’, p. 265 and n. 3; B. Gatz, Weltalter, goldene Zeit und sinnverwandte Vorstellungen (Hildesheim: Olms, 1967), pp. 205–6. J. Fontenrose, ‘Work, justice, and Hesiod’s five ages’, CP 69 (1974), pp. 1–16, at p. 1 n.1, with reservations retains ‘ages’, finding ‘races’ ‘misleading and inaccurate’; cf. L. Koenen, ‘Greece, the Near East, and Egypt: Cyclic destruction in Hesiod and the Catalogue of Women’, TAPA 124 (1994), pp. 1–34, at p. 2 n. 3; Calame, ‘Succession des âges’, pp. 68, 71.
9	Rosenmeyer, ‘Hesiod and historiography’, p. 267.
10	Calame, ‘Succession des âges’, p. 68.
11	Calame, ‘Succession des âges’, p. 95.
12	E.g. G. W. Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth of the five (or three or four) races’, PCPS 43 (1997), pp. 104–27, at pp. 121–2.
13	Except in an obsolete sense recognized by OED: ‘Family, breed, race; class, kind, or “set” of persons.’ Cf. Stewart, ‘Hesiod and history’, p. 44 n. 17: ‘The word genos is better translated “generation” – though not one of ours only – or “race” than as “age”.’ M. Schmidt, ‘γένος’, in B. Snell et al. (eds), Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1955–2010), vol. ii, pp. 130–2, at p. 131, gives γένος throughout MoR (WD 109, 121, 127, 140, 143, 156, 159, 173d, 176, 180) and at Il. 12.23 the translation ‘Generation der Menschenheitsgesch[ichte]’ (s.v. γένος 5a), and similarly of γενεή at WD 160 (p. 127, s.v. γενεή 5b).
14	Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, pp. 112–13; cf. Calame, ‘Succession des ages’, p. 81 and n. 26.
15	Fontenrose, ‘Work, justice’, p. 10: ‘In effect, [the heroic genos] is not a separate age, but the first part of the fourth and final age of iron’; J. Rudhardt, ‘Le mythe hésiodique des races et celui de Prométhée: Recherches des structures et des significations’, in Rudhardt, Du mythe, de la religion grecque et de la compréhension d’autrui = Revue Européenne des Sciences Sociales 19 (Geneva: Droz, 1981), pp. 246–81, at p. 249: ‘l’introduction des héros dans le mythe des âges métalliques n’en altère pas le schéma autant qu’il le paraît à première vue; conformement à la donnée traditionelle le récit hésiodique connaît quatre races créées par les dieux; son originalité consiste seulement à distinguer deux phases dans l’histoire de la quatrième’; Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, p. 113: ‘there is good reason to believe that Hesiod wanted to suggest not so much that that the heroes belonged to a γένος different from that of the iron men as rather that both belonged to the same γένος – call it iron’.
16	M. L. West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 9.
17	According to Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, p. 113 n. 41, ‘this particular race could already previously have been called by the name of iron, but only now has it demonstrated . . . that it deserves the name’. But there is little to support a ‘use of δή to strengthen the claim that a name is appropriate’ (ibid.). On the other hand, the emphatic temporal use of νῦν γὰρ δή is well attested (cf. Xenophanes fr. 1.1 West νῦν γὰρ δὴ ζάπεδον καθαρὸν κτλ.), and for the antithesis between WD 176 νῦν γὰρ δή and 109 πρώτιστα, cf. Calame, ‘Succession des âges’, pp. 83–4 ‘Le point axial de ce temps présent, en contraste avec le prótista du vers 109, est signifié par le connecteur nûn gàr dé, “car maintenant précisément”, situé en position forte au vers 176’, cf. 99. Cf. R. Gagné, ‘Invisible kin: Works and Days 280–285’, Hermes 138 (2010), pp. 1–21 at p. 10.
18	Pace Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, pp. 111–12.
19	The notion of the heroes as a separate race (γένος or γενεή) from contemporary men recurs at Il. 12.23 ἠμιθέων γένος ἀνδρῶν. Cf. R. Scodel, ‘The Achaean wall and the myth of destruction’, HSCP 86 (1982), pp. 35–50, at p. 35: ‘The phrase ἡμιθέων γένος ἀνδρῶν evokes the Hesiodic depiction of the heroes as a separate race, for γένος in such a context can mean nothing else.’ Similarly Herodotus’ ‘the so-called human race’ (τῆς . . . ἀνθρωπηίης λεγομένης γενεῆς, 3.122), in an implied contrast to a heroic γενεή. For the antithesis in Pindar: ἥρωες versus ἄνδρες, cf. P. 8.27–8, O. 6.24–5.
20	On ‘genealogical thinking’ in Greece, see R. L. Fowler, ‘Genealogical thinking, Hesiod’s Catalogue and the creation of the Hellenes’, PCPS 44 (1998), pp. 1–19.
21	See Schmidt, ‘γένος’; R. D. Woodard, ‘Hesiod and Greek myth’, in Woodard (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 83–165, at pp. 141–2. Compare the use of φῦλον: one φῦλον of men and another of gods, Il. 5.441–2; cf. WD 90 φῦλ’ ἀνθρώπων, 199 ἀθανάτων . . . φῦλον.
22	OED s.v. ‘kind’ 10; cf. s.v. ‘kin’ 5.
23	Three times in MoR (WD 109, 143, 180), otherwise at Cat. fr. 204.98 M-W and HDem 310, both times in the context of the destruction of mankind. Cf. Th. 50.
24	οὐκ ἄρα . . . ἔην: J. D. Denniston, The Greek Particles, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 36–7; West, Hesiod: Works and Days, p. 143; Rowe, ‘Archaic thought’, p. 133; W. J. Verdenius, A Commentary on Hesiod Works and Days, vv. 1–382 (Leiden: Brill, 1985), p. 15 and n. 57.
25	Genealogical continuity is assumed by Fontenrose, ‘Work, justice’, p. 2; Rudhardt, ‘Le mythe hésiodique’, p. 248 and n. 11, cf. pp. 257–8 n. 66; Leclerc, ‘Le mythe des races’, p. 219; Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, p. 113; C. Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘The Hesiodic myth of the five races and the tolerance of plurality in Greek mythology’, in O. Palagia (ed.), Greek Offerings: Essays on Greek Art in Honour of John Boardman (Oxford: Oxbow, 1997), pp. 1–21, at pp. 8, 11–12. Differently, K. Matthiessen, ‘Form und Funktion des Weltaltermythos bei Hesiod’, in G. W. Bowersock, W. Burkert and M. C. J. Putnam (eds), Arktouros: Hellenic Studies Presented to B.M. W. Knox on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979), pp. 25–32, at p. 31: ‘Wenn nun Hesiod in seiner Erzählung das Geschlecht der Heroen vom gegenwärtigen eisernen Geschlecht als ein vergangenes abhebt, dann betont er die Diskontinuität zwischen den adligen Herren seiner Gegenwart und ihren angeblichen heroischen Vorfahren. Diese deutlich antiaristokratische Auffassung entspricht der auch sonst vom Selbstbewußtsein des Bauernstandes geprägten Denkweise Hesiods.’
26	F. Graf, Greek Mythology: An Introduction, tr. T. Marier (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 129–30 ‘[The practice of linking historically real genealogies with those of the heroic age] marked a highly significant conceptual development . . . The age of the heroes enters into a datable relation to the present age . . . With the elaboration of a chronology, the Greeks had a rational way of including the heroic age in their past, which they understood as a quantifiable time continuum.’ Cf. Smith, ‘History and the individual’, p. 150. However, this step appears to have been taken already by the time of Homer (cf. Il. 20.300–8; A. Faulkner, The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite: Introduction, Text, and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 5–6) and Hesiod (cf. Th. 1011–16; N. J. Richardson, Review of P. Dräger, Untersuchungen zu den Frauenkatalogen Hesiods, CR 50 (2000), pp. 263–4, at p. 263), even though they have a clear sense of the distinctness of the ‘race of heroes’ (Il. 12.23;WD 160).
27	We may compare and contrast, for the continuity of mankind through heaven-sent destruction, the Mesopotamian flood myth (cf. Atrahasis) and the Greek Deukalion myth; cf. Plat. Tim. 22a–23a, Laws 677a–c.
28	Cf. B. G. F. Currie, ‘Heroes and holy men in early Greece: Hesiod’s theios aner’, in A. Coppola (ed.), Eroi, eroismi, eroizzazzioni (Padua: SARGON, 2007), pp. 163–203, at pp. 178–81.
29	Contrast Virg. Geo. 1.121–4.
30	Cf. Rudhardt, ‘Le mythe hésiodique’, p. 253: ‘La race d’argent est moins bonne [sc. que la race d’or] mais son infériorité ne réside pas dans les conditions extérieurs auxquelles elle se trouve soumise. Hésiode ne dit pas que ces conditions aient changé: la terre continue de fournir aux hommes ce qui leur est nécessaire et rien ne leur impose l’obligation de travailler.’
31	For a comparison of the condition of the golden race with childhood, cf. Smith, ‘History and the individual’, pp. 156–7.
32	Compare and contrast Fontenrose, ‘Work, justice’, p. 7, on the silver race; J. S. Clay, Hesiod’s Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 88; Stewart, ‘Hesiod and history’, p. 46: ‘[The silver and bronze races] are destroyed for and by their hubris towards one another.’ Calame, ‘Succession des âges’, p. 76, describes the silver race as ‘un âge adulte abrégé par la démesure, la violence et l’impiété qui conduit ces hommes à une rapide disparition’. The short life of the men of the silver race after reaching maturity may reasonably be seen as caused by acts of violence (WD 134–5), rather than just genetics (Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Myth of the five races’, p. 5: ‘their biological cycle’, cf. 2 ‘the “proper” proportion between childhood and maturity was reversed’; Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, p. 109: ‘biological lore’; cf. Rudhardt, ‘Le mythe hésiodique’, pp. 250, 253). The role of Zeus in their destruction (WD 138) can be seen as double motivation (cf. WD 239, 245).
33	On the thematic transition from silver race to bronze race, cf. Calame, ‘Succession des âges’, p. 78: ‘Même s’il est dit “en rien semblable à la famille d’argent” (vers 144), le génos de bronze partage avec les hommes précédents des traits assez nombreux pour s’inscrire dans leur suite non seulement du point de vue temporel, mais également du point de vue sémantique. Comme les hommes d’argent, les hommes tout de bronze vêtus font preuve d’une folie et d’une démesure qui les engage à retourner leur violence contre eux-mêmes.’
34	So West, Hesiod: Works and Days, p. 192; differently, Verdenius, Commentary, p. 101.
35	An anticipation of the degenerate ethos of the iron race is seen in the race of heroes by Rudhardt, ‘Le mythe hésiodique’, p. 257: ‘C’est donc l’immoralité qui caractérise la race de fer et produit sa dégénérescence. Elle se trouvait sans doute en germe dans la race des héros dont certains représentants s’adonnèrent à l’injustice et à la démesure, même si elle n’était pas alors si générale’; p. 258 (on the heroes): ‘Les uns plus justes, les autres plus enclins à l’hybris, leurs actions se combinent, produisent des conséquences et l’humanité évolue. A partir de la race des héros que leurs qualités apparentent aux dieux, cette évolution produit la race de fer qui lui est inférieure’; cf. p. 261.
36	Cf. Baldry, ‘Who invented the golden age?’, p. 86: ‘How far were the words literally meant, and how far was their use metaphorical or symbolic? For Hesiod the question probably did not exist. His “bronze race” and “iron race” are so called because they use these metals . . ., but he does not explain – and presumably did not ask himself – in what sense the first race was χρυσέον.’
37	Lucr. 5.1281–96. Cf. Lucr. 5.1241–2. J. G. Griffiths, ‘Archaeology and Hesiod’s five ages’, JHI 17 (1956), pp. 109–19, at p. 114.
38	Griffiths, ‘Archaeology and Hesiod’s five ages’, quotations from pp. 112 and 119. H. C. Baldry, ‘Hesiod’s five ages’, JHI 17 (1956), pp. 553–4, esp. p. 553, is a reply to Griffiths, ‘Archaeology and Hesiod’s five ages’ (and Griffiths, ‘Did Hesiod invent the golden age?’, JHI 19 (1958), pp. 91–3 is a reply to Baldry, ‘Hesiod’s five ages’).
39	Griffiths also suggests that historical memory lies behind the metallic myths of the Near East: Griffiths, ‘Archaeology and Hesiod’s five ages’, pp. 115–19.
40	With the idea that humankind might be ‘made of’ gold or silver, compare womankind (Pandora) as made of earth and water (WD 61), men being made from ash trees (WD 145: bronze race), men made from stones in the Deukalion myth (cf. ‘Hes.’Cat. fr. 234 M-W, Pind. O.9.42–6).
41	Cf. already ‘Socrates’ at Plat. Crat. 398a4–6: ‘I think that [Hesiod] spoke of the golden race not as created from gold, but as noble and fine.’
42	Buxton, Imaginary Greece, pp. 202–4, at pp. 203 and 204.
43	B. M. W. Knox, ‘Work and justice in archaic Greece’, in Knox, Essays: Ancient and Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 12.
44	Cf. Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, pp. 122–3. Differently, West, Hesiod: Works and Days, pp. 188–9: ‘probably due more to the conservatism of the formulaic language . . . than to deliberate avoidance of anachronism’.
45	Cf. A. Heubeck, ‘Mythologische Vorstellungen des Alten Orients im archaischen Griechentum’, Gymnasium 68 (1955), pp. 508–25, at p. 510.
46	Rosenmeyer, ‘Hesiod and historiography’, pp. 270–1, esp. p. 271: ‘even if we disregard the heroic age, the other four γένη do not, contrary to the popular assumption, present us with a steady decline’; Fontenrose, ‘Work, justice’, p. 8; Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Myth of the five races’, p. 3 and 17 nn. 22–3, 9, 15: ‘this myth is not structured by strict linear logic but by a more complex multivocal schema’; Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, p. 108, cf. p. 120.
47	It is sometimes argued that, before the heroes, the decline is broken by the bronze race, who are said just to be ‘nothing like’ the silver race (WD 144), but not ‘worse’ than them: cf. Fontenrose, ‘Work, justice’, p. 8; Rudhardt, ‘Le mythe hésiodique’, p. 254; C. W. Querbach, ‘Hesiod’s myth of the four races’, CJ 81 (1985), pp. 1–12, at p. 3; Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Myth of the five races’, p. 3; Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, p. 108. But WD 144 probably intends inferiority, not just difference. The silver race had similarly been said to be unlike the golden race (‘like the golden race in neither body nor mind’, WD 129) and is explicitly said to be ‘much worse’ than the golden race (WD 127). WD 144 is probably an abbreviated form of the same statement.
48	Cf. M. Heath, ‘Hesiod’s didactic poetry’, CQ 35 (1985), pp. 245–63, at p. 248 n. 10; Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, p. 120. Differently, West, Hesiod: Works and Days, p. 174: ‘the Heroes have been inserted . . . into a system of four metallic races’; J. Griffin, ‘Greek myth and Hesiod’, in J. Boardman, J. Griffin and O. Murray (eds), The Oxford History of the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 78–98, at p. 96.
49	Cf. Koenen, ‘Greece, the Near East and Egypt’, p. 8: ‘the paradigm of the heroic age exemplifies the possibility of reversal, for, at that time, humankind was better and more just than in the previous ages (δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον, 158). The deterioration in the other series of ages is underscored by the descending value of the metals – gold, silver, bronze, and iron . . . Because the age of heroes reverses this deterioration and is not named after a metal, it is not fully integrated into the rest of the series and signals the possibility of a return to the better.’ Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, p. 119: ‘the heroes hold out to us paradigms of good and bad behaviour in which our own possibilities for success or failure are spelled out in a grander and more intelligible form. They share our biological constitution and our moral chances in a way that the golden, silver, and bronze men did not . . . We may see in them models of moral choice which we can choose to emulate or to avoid.’ Rudhardt, ‘Le mythe hésiodique’, p. 256: ‘A la différence de toutes les races antérieures, la race héroique et la race de fer sont formées d’individus différénciés, appelés chacun d’un nom propre, et qui n’ont pas tous de pareilles qualités et de pareils défauts’; cf. p. 258. Currie, ‘Heroes and holy men’, pp. 169–71.
50	Fontenrose, ‘Work, justice’, p. 15: ‘The truth is that men through justice and work can improve their condition. The righteous city has much of the happiness and abundance of the golden age’; J.-P. Vernant, ‘Hesiod’s myth of the races: An essay in structural analysis’, in Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, tr. of Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 3–32, at pp. 10 and 28 n. 39; Knox, ‘Work and justice’, pp. 15–16; Querbach, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, p. 6; P. Rousseau, ‘Instruire Persès: Notes sur l’ouverture des Travaux d’Hésiode’, in F. Blaise, P. Judet de La Combe and P. Rousseau (eds), Le métier du mythe: Lecture d’Hésiode (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1996), pp. 93–167, at p. 156 n. 163; Calame, ‘Succession des âges’, p. 89. Currie, ‘Heroes and holy men’, p. 170.
51	Cf. Gagné, ‘Invisible kin’, p. 11.
52	B. G. F. Currie, Pindar and the Cult of Heroes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 106.
53	It is WD 658–9, referencing Th. 22–34, where the narrator names himself as ‘Hesiod’, that justifies the identification of the narrator of WD as Hesiod.
54	E.g. D. O. Ross, Virgil’s Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 109–28; J. J. O’Hara, Inconsistency in Roman Epic: Studies in Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid and Lucan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 83–4.
55	Cf. Fontenrose, ‘Work, justice’, p. 15: ‘The myth is a paradigm, an exemplum of his argument, a synchronic scheme presented as history . . . There are silver, bronze, and iron men among his contemporaries – and there are some golden men too, though now they live under Zeus and have to work for their bread’; Matthiessen, ‘Form und Funktion des Weltaltermythos bei Hesiod’, p. 28; Rowe, ‘Archaic thought’, p. 134; Currie, ‘Heroes and holy men’, p. 169. MoR is analysed rather differently as synchronic not diachronic (as structural not genetic) by Vernant, ‘Hesiod’s myth of the races’, esp. pp. 5–6; cf. V. Goldschmidt, ‘Théologia’, REG 63 (1950), pp. 20–42, at pp. 33–9.
56	Cf. Matthiessen, ‘Form und Funktion’, p. 27; Rudhardt, ‘Le mythe hésiodique’, p. 256; Querbach, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, p. 3; Leclerc, ‘Le mythe des races’, p. 210; Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Myth of the five races’, p. 8; Calame, ‘Succession des âges’, p. 79 and n. 22.
57	Plat. Crat. 398a8–b1; Orph. fr. 216 Bernabé (Proclus in Plat. Resp. 2.74.26 Kroll); Isodorus apud Suda s.v. Σαραπίων. People of the present after their death likened to the golden race: Plat. Rep. 468e4–469a3; Heracl. 22 B63 D–K (C. H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 254–6, 261; T. M. Robinson, Heraclitus: Fragments (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), pp. 125–6). See Currie, ‘Heroes and holy men’, pp. 171 and n. 38, 191 n. 157.
58	In the ‘syncrisis’ the individuals are left indefinite (τὶς, ὃς δέ κε), but named in the nautilia (the narrator ‘Hesiod’ versus his father and Amphidamas).
59	Cf. Gagné, ‘Invisible kin’, p. 13: ‘The degressive sequence Race–City– Family is clear.’
60	Fontenrose, ‘Work, justice’, pp. 15–16: ‘when rulers and citizens are just, Zeus and the gods prosper their cities, and they come near to the happy existence of the golden men and of the heroes in the Blessed Isles (225–37). In Hesiod’s age, as distinct from the iron age of myth, men can live this happier life, if they follow the ordinance of work and the way of justice.’ Rudhardt, ‘Le mythe hésiodique’, p. 261: ‘les hommes sont aujourd’hui responsables de leur propre destin. Le malheur qui les accable résulte de leurs propres fautes.’ Leclerc, ‘Le mythe des races’, p. 220: ‘Suspendus entre l’âge antérieur, qui offre un modèle de justice et une promesse de récompense, et l’âge postérieur, qui en est l’inverse exact, les auditeurs d’Hésiode doivent choisir. La curieuse expression “plût au ciel que je fusse ou mort plus tôt ou né plus tard” [WD 174–5] pourrait témoigner, plutôt que d’une conception cyclique du temps, de la confiance d’Hésiode dans un avenir qui, “hommes et dieux ayant même origine” [cf. WD 108], reste ouvert à des évolutions positives’; ibid.: ‘Il y a ce qui nous échappe: l’état dans lequel nous a mis l’évolution du monde voulue par les dieux; il y a ce qui nous revient: la manière dont nous disposons de cet état est de notre responsabilité.’ Cf. Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Myth of the five races’, pp. 10–11, 16 (downward movement and an upward movement). Cf. G. W. Most, Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. xli. Currie, ‘Heroes and holy men’, p. 169.
61	N. Brout, ‘La mauve ou l’asphodèle ou Comment manger pour s’élever au-dessus de la condition humaine’, DHA 29/2 (2003), pp. 97–108; Currie, ‘Heroes and holy men’, pp. 165–85.
62	Th. 26–8 is considered in the context of the development towards historiography by Bertelli, ‘Hecataeus’, p. 81.
63	Rosenmeyer, ‘Hesiod and historiography’, p. 261.
64	Cf. Leclerc, ‘Le mythe des races’, pp. 220, 221 (MoR has the ‘statut de récit fictif assumé comme tel par le poète’). Cf. West, Hesiod: Works and Days, p. 177: ‘Hesiod presents the story not as absolute truth but as something that people tell, worth serious attention.’
65	Rosenmeyer, ‘Hesiod and historiography’, p. 269: ‘whereas the Pandora story is myth, the Five Ages is history’ (Stewart, ‘Hesiod and history’, on the other hand, regards the myth of Prometheus and Pandora as a step towards historical analysis). Criticized, Rowe, ‘Archaic thought’, pp. 132–3.
66	Rowe, ‘Archaic thought’, p. 133: ‘the charge of inconsistency goes deeper: if Hesiod’s purpose is to explain, he must choose between the explanations offered. In so far as he does not, he is neither Fränkel’s philosopher nor Rosenmeyer’s historian.’ Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Myth of the five races’, p. 14: ‘if the audience saw the two myths as contradicting each other, they would have perceived them as mutually falsifying’. Smith, ‘History and the individual’, p. 151.
67	Fontenrose, ‘Work, justice’, p. 2; West, Hesiod: Works and Days, p. 172; S. A. Nelson, God and the Land: The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 68 and 190 n. 42.
68	Cf. Rudhardt, ‘Le mythe hésiodique’, pp. 273–7.
69	Rudhardt, ‘Le mythe hésiodique’, p. 273 and n. 96 on the equivalence between πῦρ and βίος.
70	E.g. Buxton, Imaginary Greece, pp. 212–13.
71	I take it that WD 179 ἀλλ’ ἔμπης καὶ τοῖσι μεμείξεται ἐσθλὰ κακοῖσι means ‘for these men too [sc. the men of the iron race] good things will be mixed with bad’. The verse invites us to compare the iron with the golden race, of whom it was said ‘they had all good things’, ‘with many good things’ (115–16 ἐσθλὰ δὲ πάντα / τοῖσιν ἔην, 119 σὺν ἐσθλοῖσιν πολέεσσιν). Differently, Woodard, ‘Hesiod and Greek myth’, pp. 137–47, who argues that at WD 179 and at Theogn. 192 σὺν γὰρ μίσγεται ἐσθλὰ κακοῖσι the nouns γένεα, γένεσσι should be understood with the respective adjectives.
72	West, Hesiod: Works and Days, p. 172. Cf. Buxton, Imaginary Greece, p. 178: ‘there is no way in which the two stories can be exactly integrated with one another’.
73	Rudhardt, ‘Le mythe hésiodique’, p. 262: ‘Même si le poète n’établit point entre eux de relations systematiques, ces mythes ne sont donc pas contradictoire à ses yeux; leurs significations se complètent pour fonder l’enseignement qu’il donne à Persès’. Cf. Querbach, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, p. 9 and n. 24.
74	Rosenmeyer, ‘Hesiod and historiography’, p. 268: ‘Hesiod . . . tries to account for the social and moral situation of his own world. To do this, he collects a certain class of data and arranges them to fit the aetiological and moral purposes of his design. The data with which he is concerned are what Herodotus calls τὰ λεγόμενα. In trying to arrange the λεγόμενα, he finds he has more material than was needed for his objective, and what is more, some of his material is contradictory. His task then is twofold; first, he must reconcile conflicting τὰ λεγόμενα, and second, he must decide which of them to select, or whether to select at all. Herodotus, in similar moments of quandary, often decided not to select . . . Over against the proud rationalism of Hecataeus, ever ready to select, remodel, or reject, Herodotus introduces the patient resignation of the empiricist who knows that the truth is neither simple nor one-sided . . . Some of that same spirit may be seen in Hesiod.’
75	D. Lateiner, The Historical Method of Herodotus (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1989), p. 77: ‘The historian finds cultural meaning and historical significance even in fictions.’
76	Quotation from Rosenmeyer, ‘Hesiod and historiography’, p. 268 (see above for full context).
77	S. Flory, The Archaic Smile of Herodotus (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), p. 63: ‘At times [Herodotus] even says explicitly that he feels obligated to give all possible versions . . . Many readers of Herodotus have believed that such passages amount to a pledge by the author to give us, to the best of his ability, all the evidence: every version of every story and every fact he ever heard . . . We cannot, I believe, accept such statements uncritically’; p. 67: ‘What influences
78	Rowe, ‘Archaic thought’, p. 134: ‘[Hesiod] proceeds as he does in the case of the myths of Prometheus and Pandora and the Five Races, and elsewhere, not because of a lack of capacity on his part, or of the “primitiveness” of his habits of thought, but rather because of the nature of his fundamental preoccupations: it is that in the end the business of explanation, in the sense of looking for causes, matters rather less to him than reflection of a different sort, and especially of a moralising sort’; cf. Rowe, Essential Hesiod (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1978), p. 7: ‘It is typical of Hesiod’s methods of composition generally . . . that he works in sections. . . What is particularly interesting is that even adjoining sections are often developed independently of each other, so that they say things which seem either incompatible, or at least difficult to reconcile . . . [This habit of Hesiod’s of composing in what are almost watertight, self-contained units] has something to do with the absence from Hesiod of a clear distinction between what is factual and what is non-factual. Questions of compatibility worry us because of our obsession with the idea that there is, ideally, only a single proper way of describing what is the case or was the case; and Hesiod does not share this obsession.’ Buxton, Imaginary Greece, pp. 178–9: ‘What concerns us here is . . . the fact that immediately after the Prometheus/Pandora explanation of why things are so rough nowadays comes a story which is explicitly said by Hesiod to be a different one . . . The point to note is that there is no way in which the two stories can be exactly integrated with one another . . . To accuse Hesiod of inconsistency, of being unable to sustain a logical argument, would be wholly to misunderstand him. He signals the fact that the two stories are different. The contrast between past and present is there in each case, but is worked out in different ways, first with an emphasis on guile and concealment, then through a set of variations on the opposition between fair dealing and aggressive violence. The compatibility of alternatives is basic to Greek mythology. We come back to the question of belief, and of proverbs. “Look at it this way; or if you like, look at it this way”’; cf. pp. 163–4.
79	Cf. T. J. Morgan, Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 15, taking a different view from Buxton, Imaginary Greece, pp. 163–4.
80	Cf. Smith, ‘History and the individual’, pp. 151–2.
81	Anaxim. 12 B1 D–K (cf. Heracl. 22 B94 D–K); Hdt. 3.126.1, 4.205, 6.84.3, 8.105, etc.. Cf. Lateiner, Historical Method, pp. 203–4 ‘[In Anaximander] the physical universe is expressed in moral or judicial terms by an Ionian “scientist”; history is similarly conceived by the Ionian historian.’
82	Cf. Rowe, ‘Archaic thought’, p. 134 (cited above, n. 2), for the contrast between Hesiod on the one hand and Anaximander and Herodotus on the other.
83	Cf. in general G. S. Kirk, ‘On defining myths’, in E. N. Lee, A. P. D. Mourelatos and R. M. Rorty (eds), Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented to Gregory Vlastos (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1973), pp. 61–9, at p. 66 on the ὑποκείμενον (‘substrate’) of a myth, the ‘narrative structure’ that persists through retelling. This is comparable with the ‘deep structure’ discerned by structuralistformalist critics of myth (cf. E. Csapo, Theories of Mythology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 190–201).
84	Flory, Archaic Smile, p. 70: ‘Often Herodotus tells a story in two or more variants without any comment about their relative truth or falsity. Is he reluctant or for some reason unable to make a judgment? Yet these variant versions rarely present clearly opposed points of view or important contradictions but actually confirm a single point of view he wishes to establish’; p. 70: ‘Herodotus gives two versions of how [Cambyses’ wife] angers her husband . . . [3.32]. Both versions, and that is their purpose, make a similar point about Cambyses’ violent and impetuous character . . . This fact Herodotus does not question. The effect of his alternative stories about Cambyses is not to introduce a note of caution or uncertainty about what actually happened, but just the opposite. He emphasizes Cambyses’ stupidity and cruelty even more intensely through two stories with a similar point.’
85	Somewhat in this vein Leclerc, ‘Le mythe des races’, pp. 223–4, distinguishes between ‘coffrage’ and ‘l’essentiel’ of MoR. Cf. Stewart, ‘Hesiod and history’, p. 44: ‘Obviously Hesiod is not interested in the literal details of the two stories but in their general agreement on “ideological” matters.’ This route is rejected by Rowe, ‘Archaic thought’, p. 132: ‘They [sc. PromPand and MoR] follow the same broad pattern, in the shape of the idea of man’s fall from an original and better state. But this cannot by itself be the common truth Hesiod is trying to convey, since if it were, we should have to treat the myths as such simply as fictional elaborations of a basic theme; and this they cannot be, unless the Prometheus episode in the Theogony is fiction too – and that will take the rest of the Theogony with it. But how can the Theogony be fiction? It bears all the marks of serious theology.’
86	The methods of Hesiod and Hecataeus are contrasted rather than compared by Bertelli, ‘Hecataeus’, pp. 82–3; V. Pirenne-Delforge, ‘Under which conditions did the Greeks “believe” in their myths? The religious criteria of adherence’, in U. Dill and C. Walde (eds), Antike Mythen: Medien, Transformationen und Konstruktionen (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 38–54, at p. 48.
87	Lateiner, Historical Method, p. 164: ‘Explicit, authorial evaluation and analysis are subordinated to the presentation of additional stories with similar issues’; p. 167: ‘Patterns . . . occur and recur in order to guide the reader through the maze of historical data and to lead him to an interpretation lurking in the text, the intellectual result of a vast and obscure sorting process on the author’s part.’ E. Baragwanath, Motivation and Narrative in Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 33: ‘Herodotus’ narrative technique appears to require attentive and perceptive readers, who may sense the subtleties and complexities of his account, and even develop them’; p. 126 ‘readers frequently suspect that the alternatives are not mutually exclusive, but rather that each of the two has played some part in precipitating the outcome, even though the narrative presents them as alternatives.’
88	So esp. West, Hesiod: Works and Days, pp. 176–7; West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 312–19.
89	An extrapolation from native Greek epic tradition: Most, ‘Hesiod’s myth’, pp. 120–3. An Indo-European inheritance: Woodard, ‘Hesiod and Greek myth’, pp. 124–48 (attaching much weight to a questionable interpretation of WD 179; see above). An ancient and widespread motif: I. C. Rutherford, ‘Hesiod and the literary traditions of the Near East’, in F. Montanari, A. Rengakos and C. Tsagalis (eds), Brill’s Companion to Hesiod (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), pp. 9–35, at pp. 20–2 (differently, Gatz, Weltalter, goldene Zeit, p. 11; cf. Woodard, ‘Hesiod and Greek myth’, p. 127, text to n. 160).
90	Woodard, ‘Hesiod and Greek myth’, pp. 115–18.
91	For reasons reiterated by M. L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 23. Differently, Woodard, ‘Hesiod and Greek myth’, p. 124.
92	West, East Face of Helicon, pp. 276–86; Woodard, ‘Hesiod and Greek myth’, pp. 92–104; Rutherford, ‘Hesiod and the literary traditions’, pp. 22–35. Differently, R. Mondi, ‘Greek mythic thought in the light of the Near East’, in L. Edmunds (ed.), Approaches to Greek Myth (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 141–98, at pp. 151–7.
93	West, East Face of Helicon, pp. 306–33; Rutherford, ‘Hesiod and the literary traditions’, pp. 17–19; Woodard, ‘Hesiod and Greek myth’, p. 108.
94	M. L. West, ‘The rise of the Greek epic’, JHS 108 (1988), pp. 151–72, at p. 170, would see in the Iliad’s reception of Near Eastern motifs ‘a freshness and vividness . . . which suggests that it is comparatively modern material’; and I would see the same in these two Hesiodic narratives. On ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal transmission’, cf. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth, pp. 19–24.
95	A. Dihle, Hellas und der Orient: Phasen wechselzeitiger Rezeption (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 12–13, mentions ‘das Alter der “barbarischen” Überlieferung’ as one of three things that especially amazed the Greeks about the civilisations of the Near East (the other two being the Egyptians’ monumental buildings and the importance of religion in their daily life); cf. p. 58.
96	Cf. West, Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, pp. 173–82; J. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 79–85.
97	J. M. Sasson, ‘Some literary motifs in the composition of the Gilgamesh epic’, Studies in Philology 69 (1972), pp. 259–79, at p. 259. For the Sumerian king list, see T. Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List (Assyriological Studies 11; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939).
98	See I. S. Moyer, ‘Herodotus and an Egyptian mirage: The genealogies of the Theban priests’, JHS 122 (2002), pp. 70–90.
99	Cf. P. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, tr. P. Wissing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 32–3; Moyer, ‘Herodotus’, pp. 85–6. Cf. Hdt. 2.145–6.
100	On the identification of non-Greek with Greek deities, cf. T. Harrison, Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 208–22.
101	Cf. S. Scullion, ‘Herodotus and Greek religion’, in C. Dewald and J. Marincola (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 192–208, at pp. 198–204.
102	On this expedient of postulating homonymies, cf. Veyne, Did the Greeks?, pp. 75 and 147 n. 154.
103	Koenen, ‘Greece, the Near East and Egypt’, pp. 24–5, disputes that the metallic scheme is Near Eastern.
104	Cf. Clay, Hesiod’s Cosmos, pp. 89–90; Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Myth of the five races’, pp. 6–9; Currie, ‘Heroes and holy men’, p. 168 n. 27.
105	See, famously, Pind. O. 1.26b–27, with J. G. Howie, ‘The revision of myth in Pindar Olympian 1: The death and revival of Pelops (25–27; 36–66)’, PLLS 4 (1983), pp. 277–313, at p. 288: ‘The audience can . . . simultaneously see the roots of both the traditional myth and the revised version in these lines’; E. Krummen, Pyrsos Hymnon: Festliche Gegenwart und mythisch-traditionelle Tradition als Voraussetzung einer Pindarinterpretation (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1990), p. 176: ‘Pindar behält offensichtlich Struktur und Material des alten Mythos . . . vollständig, wie sie uberliefert sind, bei, gibt ihnen aber als ganzes eine neue Erklärung.’ See Currie, Pindar and the Cult of Heroes, pp. 50–2; Currie, ‘L’Ode 11 di Bacchilide: il mito delle Pretidi nella lirica corale, nella poesia epica e nella mitografia’, in E. Cingano (ed.), Tra panellenismo e tradizioni locali: Generi poetici e storiografia (Alexandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2010), pp. 211–53, at pp. 222–3, for further examples and references.
106	The assumption is often made, e.g. W. Kullmann, ‘Oral poetry theory and neo-analysis in Homeric research’, GRBS 25 (1984), pp. 307–23, at p. 313: ‘mytho-logical characters were taken to be historical persons’, ‘respect for tradition is
107	On the tragic poets, cf. Burian, ‘Myth into mythos’, pp. 183–6. A notable exception to this ‘rule of the game’ is Agathon’s Anthos/Antheus (Aristot. Poet. 1451b21–2), where the tragic mythos was invented ab initio.
108	Griffith, ‘Contest and contradiction’, p. 195. Etymology in the mythographers: R. L. Fowler, ‘Herodotus and his contemporaries’, JHS 116 (1996), pp. 62–87, at pp. 72–3.
109	For this distinction in the possible objects of a poet’s discourse, cf. Aristot. Poet. 1460b10.
110	Cf. R. G. A. Buxton, ‘Introduction’, in Buxton (ed.), From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 1–21, at pp. 9–10: ‘the myth of the Races stresses that things now are . . . not as they once were: iron is not gold. And yet . . . the sequence of Races exhibits, albeit in different blends, the same, recurring traits: aggressive violence, and righteousness’; cf. p. 9, on ‘the past in the present’ in Hesiod.