VI

Hesiod

The Muses bore Hesiod; the Graces bore Homer.

SIMONIDES¹

Consider the comedown, the loss of scale, of conjuring magic, the decay of dignity: from Orpheus, Arion and Amphion to Homer; and then from Homer to grumbling, litigious, horny-handed-son-of-toil Hesiod. It all started beside divine Olympus, then the windy plain of Troy where legend and history mingle. And now? Askre, in Boeotia, cut off from Thebes (due east) and from Athens (east-south-east) by mountains, from Corinth (due south) by the Gulf.

Here we seek a poet,² the very first who speaks—probably before 700 BC—with an individual voice and whose subject is nothing more, and nothing less, than the hard life he leads. If we could smell him, he would certainly reek of the human. He suffers from a need to make sense of his world and to reduce the troubling, floating legends of gods and goddesses, the rituals of religion and the rules of husbandry, to some kind of connected order. He needs a sense of control, or at least a sense of shape, in his physical, social and spiritual environments. And his tool is language.

Even today it is no easy matter getting to where Hesiod’s farm used to be. Mount Helicon and the so-called Valley of the Muses involve a deal of rather uninteresting (though not difficult) climbing, and if you are looking for traces of Hesiod, you must brace yourself for disappointment. Bear in mind that you are traversing the merest skeleton of Hesiod’s landscape: time and history have been particularly unkind to this part of Greece, removing most of the trees and giving it a parched, forgotten feel, changing its weather from the patterns Hesiod records. Here you do not feel history rising like a fine mist; you feel that it has evaporated quite.

The modern village of Palaiopanayía is as far as a car will take you on your quest. After that you need a guide, ideally a mule, patience and imagination. In about forty minutes you come upon an ancient tower, medieval in origin, perhaps earlier in the materials from which it is constructed. It is called, unsurprisingly, Palaiopirgos (“old tower”) and is located, perhaps, in the site of Keressos. South of the tower are the shards of an old (Turkish?) village with a little church. Beyond a stream rises a hill crowned by a ruined Hellenic structure. It stood there eighteen hundred years ago when the traveller Pausanias passed that way, and, with his obsessive meticulousness (for modern readers a happy pedantry), he made a note of it.³ It represents the only remains of the hamlet called Askre, which may mean “barren oak.”⁴ Hesiod called Askre a town “cursed, intolerable in winter, unendurable in summer, pleasing never,” a Boeotian Lake Wobegon. As settings go, Askre’s is neither grand nor amenable. Still, around Easter the traveller is sometimes surprised, when the sun is half way up the sky, by tiny gusts of exquisite scent: they come from the wild, almost leafless cyclamen, pale dots of purple. There are old olive trees clenched among the rock. And the streams where the Muses bathe, which are named in the Theogony as the Permessos and the Olmeios, come together not far from the remains of the village. From their bath, the Muses rose like wraiths to the summit of Helicon, and they danced and chanted the invocation to Zeus that Hesiod heard.

If you persist and climb on towards midday you reach, in a couple of hours, the Valley of the Muses with its scatter of ruins: an altar, a stoa, the theatre where the contests of the Mouseia were conducted every four years. To the musical and poetic contests in later years were added dramatic competitions as well. The upper valley of the Permessos belonged to the Muses, and therefore to Apollo. The sacred groves, deep shadows and cool springs were the landscape in which Greek builders set fine temples and a famous sanctuary, decorated with statues representing the Muses themselves and their servants, in particular—from our point of view—the epic and lyric poets.

Constantine the Great made off with the treasures of the sanctuary. Deforestation and erosion creased and aged the landscape, leaving bare rock and the exposed ruins. The Muses packed their bags, after coming here originally from the skirts of Mount Olympus, not too far away from where the gods live. Their town of origin was Pieria—watered by the bubbling Pierian spring, a traditional source of poetic inspiration. Thracian peasants paid homage to the feminine spirits of the mountains and the welling water. The Muses wandered south and founded Askre. Mount Helicon and the lyric springs of Hippocrene (a further two and a half hours on foot, on a spur of Mount Helicon) and Aganippe were dedicated to the Muses. Hippocrene, the Spring of the Horse, is so named because Pegasus, landing from the sky, caused it to flow when his hoof-beat struck the ground.

The Muses came from elsewhere before settling (for a time) into this place. So did Hesiod’s father.

But already, in a hot, solid landscape, I am talking of Hesiod as a real person. The cautious modern historian warns us to doubt every word of every ancient biography. We can know nothing. I ought properly to write “‘Hesiod’s’ ‘father,’” making it clear, by using the tongs of quotation marks, that I am aware of my subject’s problematic existence. His “mother” was said by later traditions to be the divine, or divinely fathered, Pycimede (“quietly clever”); his partner—perhaps even his wife—was assigned the name Eoie, and like his father he was said to have had two sons, Mnasiepes and Archiepes, “rememberer” and “beginner of epic verse,” respectively.⁵

If I forego the tongs, it is in part because I want to spare the reader the irritation of so much evidence of caution, and in part because I believe—up to a point—in the Hesiod who emerges from the two substantial poems firmly attributed to him,⁶ the grudging laureate of the Arts of Peace: Works and Days and Theogony. He may have been responsible, too, for the mini-epic Shield of Heracles and other fragments. Cycles of poetry grew out of the work of Hesiod, quite as much as out of Homer’s. Of the poems fathered on Hesiod, the most interesting is The Catalogue of Women, evoking the dynasties established by gods mating with human beings. Because of the repeated phrase e hoie (“or like the woman who”), it is known as Ehoiai (plural). Ostensibly it follows the Theogony, but it grew in fits and starts on into the sixth century BC.

Especially from Works and Days a sense emerges of a man with a past, an immigrant father, a litigious layabout of a brother, a farm, and a farmer’s seasonal woes. He is keen to make understanding out of what he knows. At heart he is a philosopher, the first of the Greek philosophers in fact, looking for stable forms, but without—because he comes so early in the history of his culture—the prose instruments of later thinkers. Historians of philosophy generally locate his contribution to the development of Greek thought in the Theogony, his account of the origins of the gods; deeper and more durable is his account of man and his relations with the physical world. The crucial poem, as a poem, is Works and Days.

Hesiod as philosopher does not so much think as affirm and assert; he is conservative, obedient to customs and superstitions, which he sets down unquestioningly: they seem to be pragmatically true, judging from his day-to-day experience. Though he might be a tyrant’s ideal intellectual subject, he is not at one with Voltaire’s Pangloss: “Whatever is is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” His is a glummer motto: “Whatever is, is.” And most of what is is not the best. Hesiod expresses a timeless peasant conservatism. Even today it characterises rural communities which have not been transformed by modern technology, which can still accurately be called communities, that is, in eastern Europe for example, and Tras os Montes in Portugal, remote parts of Spain, Asia and Africa and Latin America.

His father, Hesiod tells us, was from Cyme in Asia Minor. Southern-most of the Aeolic ports, it is a little above Smyrna (Izmir), which claimed Homer for its own. If modern Askre is remote from our expectation, modern Smyrna is worse: an industrial city with a large oil refinery. The ruins of the ancient town are a little to the north, and right on the coast.

Cyme, like other towns in Asia Minor and the islands, sent its people out to colonise. Cyme’s most famous settlement was Cumae, the western-most Greek colony in Italy, where the eponymous Sibyl lived in her cave, a figure Virgil evokes in the Aeneid. The people of Cyme spoke a mixed dialect of Ionian and Aeolic, widely used in northwest Asia Minor and on some of the islands, Lesbos among them.

Hesiod’s poem gives us some details. Around the middle of the eighth century BC, the poet’s father became an economic migrant.

He was fleeing, you can be sure, from something other

Than wealth and good things: loathsome poverty

Zeus visits upon men.⁷

He sailed a long way, landed and then—as if repelled forever by Poseidon—walked and walked until he was out of sound and sight of the sea. (His poet son inherited his aversion to open water.) He settled and started his farm, and here the poet was born. Hesiod makes no mention of his mother. It is tempting to speculate that she was a Boeotian whom the man from Cyme married, rather than a goddess.⁸

At least two sons were born, industrious Hesiod and main-chancer Perses, a thorn in his brother’s side. When their father died, the sons entered into a dispute over their inheritance, the meagre farm. Contention went on and on and we get a sense that Hesiod did not win the argument, though in terms of posterity he has had almost three millennia of last-laughing. His brother, who never replies to his advice or retorts to his taunts in the poem, is a mute villain. Hesiod’s is a formidable voice to speak against. He tells in Works and Days of how he competed in the poetry contest at Chalcis in Euboea,⁹ at the funeral of Amphidamas.

The great man’s sons had put up

Prizes aplenty for the contests, and I’m proud to say

I won in the songfest and took home an eared tripod.

Dedicated it to the Heliconian Muses, on the very spot

Where they first set me on the road to clear song.¹⁰

What is he referring to? We are perilously near to “intertextuality” for the poet draws attention to another of his poems. In Theogony he describes himself as having been unexpectedly inspired by the Muses. He is the first poet to portray himself thus, enabled to sing by some force outside himself. Truth and fiction are the Muses’ initial themes. Some critics suggest mischievously that Hesiod may himself have “made” the Muses on Mount Helicon; indeed, that in the Theogony he first named them.¹¹ This seems unlikely: the poet we encounter in the poems is not inventive or “original” in this way.

Like his successors in the Muses’ favour, he was out pasturing a flock (of sheep in his case) on the slopes of the sacred mountain. Down came the Olympian Muses, offspring of Zeus “the holder of the goat skin,” an epithet which has troubled scholars. It may mean a rustic Zeus, a god wandering like a shepherd himself on the slopes of Helicon. Indeed this may be a way of alluding to a mighty human master who imparted the divine art of song to the young shepherd, his poetic apprentice, and Hesiod translated the man and the debt into a “higher register.”

The Muses address the shepherd-about-to-become-a-poet. They warn him that they know how to lie and deceive peasants and low-life such as he is, but they also know how to tell the truth. They give their elected votary a laurel staff, and then quite literally they inspire, that is, breathe into him, a voice that is not his but is divine. The purpose? So that he might celebrate things past and to come.

… and they breathed in my frame a voice divine,

and the power to tell of the past or future was mine,

and they bade me sing of the gods who never may die, and ever, the first

and the last, on themselves to cry—

But why this wandering tale of a tree or stone?¹²

It is a good story, appropriate for the Mouseia. Enjoined by the Muses to sing, the poet starts by singing about them, and then discloses, with their aid, the structure of the divine world. The inspired poet is a vehicle, of use to the Muses. The “I” of Hesiod survives, as it were, despite their injunctions; their higher rhetoric is hardly credible, as coming from so modest a mouth as his. The poet on this inspirational model is like a spiritualist medium or, worse still, a creature whose mind is occupied and used by an alien force, and then released back to itself in a state of confused exhaustion. It doesn’t quite work: Hesiod remains Hesiod. He starts the Theogony in the third person but soon moves to the first; in the midst of narrative he finds it impossible to withhold a comment. His repetitive demand is for justice, fairness, order. There can be a hectoring petulance in his tone.

Works and Days is inspired differently than the Theogony. We ought perhaps to say it is occasioned, for the tone is dogged and resigned, by the hard-working countryman’s daily life and family gripes. It can be viewed either as the surviving fragments of a larger poem which, due to the uncertainties of transmission, have reached us in a mutilated state, or as a non-systematic anthology of lore, custom and poetry more or less harnessed by the voice of a single speaker. That speaker is not a continuous presence in the poem: he establishes his existence and then rather forgets himself, or we forget him, much of the time. Yet the poem somehow adds up; what we take away from it is a sense of his presence, without which it would fissure and fall apart.

If we consider the poem an anthology of bits, we can look for natural breaks, changes of tone, idiom and direction; we should not demand of it a coherence and structure which are in effect anachronistic, back-projections from later literature and theory. Not that theorists and critics have not spent two and a half millennia doing just that. If we wish to read Works and Days for pleasure, freed as much as possible from critical patristics, we do best not to make inordinate formal demands of it.

When the poem acquired its title—which describes only two parts of it and therefore mis-describes the “whole”—is uncertain. The first written attestation appears in the second century AD. The text of the poem was unstable even then. The methodical traveller Pausanias not only passed by Askre: he was shown by the Boeotians further along, near Helicon, the text of the poem inscribed on a sheet of lead and even then clearly of considerable antiquity, damaged by time and weather. All this occurred not far from the reedy pool where Narcissus reflected on himself.

Nietzsche was much taken by one particular observation of Pausanias. Not for nothing was Pausanias a recorder of every fact, for among the crowd of little irrelevant ones there is always the promise of a big one that makes a difference. “The Boeotians living around Helicon,” he reports, “hand down a tradition that Hesiod wrote nothing but the Works and Days; and even from that they take away the ‘Prelude to the Muses.’”¹³ Works and Days would start at what we now consider the eleventh line; the invocation to the Muses and the evocation of Zeus would vanish. This alternative poem plunges straight in to the matter of Eris, the last-born and most ambiguous of the children of Night.

It looks like there’s not just one kind of Strife—

That’s Eris—after all, but two on earth.

You’d praise one of them once you got to know her,

But the other’s plain blameworthy.¹⁴

We begin, not with the formal throat-clearing of invocation, Nietzsche says, but with an assertion, “There are two Eris-goddesses on earth.” And from here begins the train of thought which shapes Nietzsche’s radical reading of Greek poetry. “This is one of the most remarkable of Hellenic ideas,” he says, “and deserves to be impressed upon newcomers right at the gate of entry to Hellenic ethics. ‘One should praise the one Eris as much as blame the other, if one has any sense; because the two goddesses have quite separate dispositions.’” He continues with his prose translation: “‘One promotes war and feuding, a cruel one, she is. No man likes her, but the yoke of necessity forces man to honour the heavy burden of this Eris according to the decrees of the gods. Black Night gave birth to this one as the older of the two; but Cronus’ son [Zeus], who reigns above us, placed the other on the roots of the earth and amongst men as a much better one. She drives even the unskilled man to work; and if someone who lacks property sees someone else who is rich, he likewise hurries off to sow and plant and set his house in order; neighbour competes with neighbour for prosperity. This Eris is good for men. Even potters harbour grudges against potters, carpenters against carpenters, beggars envy beggars and poets envy poets.’”¹⁵

The duality of the figure of envious Eris, resolved into twins, the evil elder and the paradoxically benign younger, the spirit of rivalry and the spirit of competition: this is Hesiod’s way of defining and distinguishing human motives and, as it were, laying the thematic groundwork for the human plot. His brother Perses serves the first Eris: vindictive, covetous, and destructive, whereas Hesiod serves the second in his zeal, grudging generosity of spirit, and good husbandry.

Homer is the father of the epic tradition. To Hesiod is attributed the paternity of another tradition. It is hard to define precisely what it is. As with Homer, there are two poems quite different in tone, matter, and manner. The modern poet-translator C. A. Trypannis uses the term “didactic epic.” Is this conflation of two terms that are tangential to one another of any real use? Is there anything epic about Works and Days? In ancient times didactic verse was sometimes regarded as epic of a kind, but a kind which excluded narratives of conflict. There is a sort of heroism in the everyday, humble man’s endurance of poverty and hardship, labour, and the absence of any durable rewards beyond survival. Such “heroism,” not of the classical hero but of the common man, is hardly “epic,” however, and there is no narrative or progression beyond the seasons. What is more, in Works and Days it is not unreasonable to see the conflation of three poems rather than a single poem, and in Theogony a mass of disparate material gathered and organised into a kind of theological anthology.

The word “didactic,” on the other hand, gets us somewhere. The poems undeniably give practical advice and philosophical instruction. The Theogony tries to systematise legends of the gods, goddesses and their offspring and is an account of origins, the recurrent aetiologies that become the obsessive theme of the Alexandrian poets but are a continual concern in Greek verse from the beginning. Works and Days touches upon labour, the farmer’s calendar, and justice, with an uneasy appendix on seafaring and housekeeping. It includes myth, too, and fable. Beside the relative elevation of language in the Theogony, Works and Days stays close to the ground and gives us serious advice.

Don’t piss standing up while facing the sun.

Between sunset and sunrise, remember,

Don’t piss on the road or on the roadside,

Or naked. The blessed gods own the night.

A religious man squats down, if he’s got any sense,

Or he goes by the wall of an enclosed courtyard.¹⁶

It is the kind of practical-spiritual counselling that proves how inseparable the physical is from the metaphysical world. We are always watched, we are always “performing,” and our performance—even the most fundamental—is judged:

Don’t let your privates be seen smeared with semen

Near the hearth at home. Be careful to avoid this.¹⁷

The lines instruct us, and “we” are always men. In order to teach a wide band of men, the language chosen is less heightened, less deliberately rhetorical, than the language Homer uses in recounting heroic deeds or Hesiod in providing the gods with pedigrees. It may be remote from the language that a simple farmer working on the slopes of Mount Helicon might speak, but such a farmer, familiar with Homer’s verse, and with the local poet’s themes, would have no trouble in understanding it. This more relaxed, less decorous language allows a greater variety of specifically human, rather than Muse-dictated, tones. Rancour, pettiness, individual melancholy, Polonius-like pomposity, humour: all can be accommodated in the narrator’s voice, rather than being confined to the dramatis personae of the narrative. Tonal variations occur close together—he condescends to give advice, then suddenly he loses his temper—since consistency is not a rule Hesiod has to obey.

… But if you bear false witness

Or lie under oath, and by damaging Justice

Ruin yourself beyond hope of cure, your bloodline

Will weaken and your descendants die out. But a man

Who stands by his word leaves a long line of kinfolk.

Now I’m speaking sense to you, Perses you fool.

It’s easy to get all of Wickedness you want.

She lives just down the road a piece, and it’s a smooth road too.

But the gods put Goodness where we have to sweat

To climb to her. It’s a long, uphill pull

And tough going at first. But once you reach the top

She’s as easy to have as she was hard at first.¹⁸

The ingredients of a speaking, satirical, iambic and finally comic verse (and comedy itself) are in the kernel of Hesiod’s generically indeterminate poems. It is odd that Aristotle in the Poetics makes no mention of Hesiod or his achievement.

And the genre that Hesiod invents is the first to come, not from Ionia, but from the mainland of Greece itself. He does employ hexameters, like Homer, only they are (to use M. L. West’s candid phrase) “hobnailed.” Like Homer’s, his diction mixes various dialect elements, though—unsurprisingly—Boeotian elements are in the ascendant. Athenians of the fifth century BC saw the language as bucolic and comic. The style is that of the oral tradition, and no doubt the poem survived in an oral tradition, too, even though it may have been written down or (though this is mere conjecture) composed in written form. When an oral tradition makes the momentous transition to the leaden sheet or the page of parchment or papyrus, the poet or scribe is writing from the ear, as it were, rather than from the silence of earlier pages. The writing exists to score what is conceived as an adjunct to musically accompanied, and dance-accompanied, recitation.

They say that at Delphi, at a poetic competition, Hesiod was disqualified because he could not play the harp. What does this tell us (assuming it is true)? That Hesiod practised a different kind of recitation, appropriate to a different genre of verse? This may be another of his virtues, and why his poetry is closer to speech than Homer’s: a lack of skill in one component area of the art led to the development of greater skill in another. Or he composed in writing and found the task of lifting the poem off the page with music too difficult, or at odds with the content of the poem. Or he played another instrument.

Pausanias describes the statues of the poets at Thespiae, and he knows things about Hesiod which critics overlook.¹⁹ Here is Hesiod as a statue in a context of poets, and the statue, Pausanias is in no doubt, misrepresents him: “There are portraits dedicated of poets and other distinguished musicians,” he writes (and note how for him, in the second century AD, poets are musicians); “Thamyris is blind, touching at a broken harp, and Arion of Methymne is riding on a dolphin. The sculptor of the statue of Skadas of Argos, not knowing Pindar’s prelude about him, has made a wind-player with a body no bigger than his instrument. Hesiod sits holding a harp on his knees, not at all a proper adjunct for Hesiod: it is perfectly clear from his verses that he sang holding a wand of laurel.” Then he makes a comment with which every lover of poetry who has set critical or historical pen to paper will feel some sympathy: “I have made a deep study of the dates of Hesiod and Homer but I take no pleasure in writing about them, being familiar with the extraordinary censoriousness of pundits nowadays in the field of poetry.” And after that deeply felt aside, he continues with his catalogue: “Mystery is carved standing beside Orpheus the Thracian; all around him beasts in stone and bronze are listening to his song …”

In the British Museum there are two heads thought to represent Hesiod, one in bronze—the younger man, lively and focussed—and one in marble, older, with a look of wise resignation, set on a pillar at eye-level so that he looks hauntingly into his interlocutor. Homer is to his right, with abundant and coiffed hair, a more elaborate wreath, sightless and listening.

The texts of Hesiod, like those of Homer, were assembled between 800 and 600 BC. Robert Lamberton suggests that both Works and Days and the Theogony may have been “appropriated” and doctored for use in the festivals.²⁰ It is possible, too, that the poems were composed for the festivals; Hesiod tells us he travelled to recite, and tradition insists that he performed, even in competition with blind Homer. In Works and Days the presence of Perses gives a dramatic frame to the didactic content. The poem is eminently suitable for a rural festival. The institution of the festival and of competition may have generated some of the formal elements and even imposed a Hesiodic identity on the reciter. Whether he was reciting his own poem or adapting a work of earlier composition we will know only if a variety of drafts can be found. The Egyptian desert is generous, but it is unlikely to yield Hesiod papyruses in quantity or in chronological order.

“Homer and Hesiod were the first to compose Theogonies,” Herodotus says, “and give the gods their epithets, to allot them their several offices and occupations, and describe their forms; and they lived but four hundred years before my time, as I believe.” Four centuries seemed short to Herodotus because memory was strict and relatively stable. This had something to do with the Muses, for memory herself is their mother.

Hesiod’s Theogony, an early formulation of Greek religion and the evolution of the gods, is particularly important in what it preserves. It is also in parts obscure and confusing. In the beginning was Chaos, a yawning chasm, a darkness or an absence of light, morally neutral and less sinister than Milton’s Chaos (Milton owes debts to Hesiod’s account). The earliest figures in the Theogony are not anthropomorphic deities like Zeus, who wins and becomes king of the gods in a third-generation struggle against his father. They are forces, rather: Chaos, then Earth, Tartarus (in the guts of Earth) and eventually, Eros, who emerges as a power of nature which begins to sort the chaotic, scattered elements into wholes and beings. The power of Eros keeps the new forms and beings together; gradually Cosmos becomes a possibility.

Though Hesiod composed in the eighth century BC, the traditions he brings together in his poem have much earlier origins. His myth of creation and the succession of the gods has much in common with Hittite and earlier accounts, some dating back to Sumerian times. His chronological catalogues may be based in the succession myths of Mesopotamia: king lists, god lists, with origins and the occasional identifying epithet. His cosmic vision is a synthesis of received elements, though we have no way of knowing how these stories reached the farmer in Askre. He composed the poem, but his function, as he himself might have seen it, was more that of an editor than a maker, harmonising received material within a metrical construction. His function, if this was the case, would be analogous to that of Eros working on and through Chaos, making sense and shape of it. It is an apt analogy for what a poet with Hesiod’s ambitions was setting out to do.

Chaos, Earth, Tartarus and Eros are entities, self-created and not in necessary relation to one another. From Chaos emerged Erebus and Night, from Night emerged Aether and Day. We are into material genealogies of the most cosmic sort in the Theogony. Earth first begets Uranus (Heaven), then Mountains and Pontus. After lying with her son Uranus, she brings forth six sons—Oceanus, Coeus, Hyperion, Crius, Iapetus, Cronus—and for the sake of symmetry, six daughters—Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys. These are the Titans and Titanesses.

Endlessly fecund, Earth is delivered then of the Cyclops and the Hundred-handed. Uranus conceals them in the bowels of the Earth. Annoyed at their exclusion, she stirs them up against their father. Of all the Titans, Cronus loathes Uranus most intensely and sets out to punish him. He puts his father down with cruel violence, hacking off his testicles. From the mess emerges none other than Aphrodite:

The genitalia themselves, fresh cut with flint, were thrown

Clear of the mainland into the restless, white-capped sea,

Where they floated a long time. A white foam from the god-flesh

Collected around them, and in that foam a maiden developed

And grew. Her first approach to land was near holy Kythera,

And from there she floated on to the island of Cyprus.

There she came ashore, an awesome, beautiful divinity.

Tender grass sprouted up under her slender feet.²¹

Cronus, learning that he himself is destined to die at the hands of his offspring, decides to devour them as they are born. His wife flees to Crete when the youngest, Zeus, is to be born, and Zeus survives, finally overthrowing Cronus and the Titans, liberating his swallowed siblings and himself becoming supreme.

Hesiod is not Homer, and the strange creatures and gods that fight across the heavens are not as human as heroes, but the verse dealing with the conflicts is vigorous and in a different key, as it were, from the reflective and the aphoristic passages that surround it. The destruction feels quite close and real, and despite the absence of human scale and human interest, we experience something of the horror of this not unfamiliar kind of war. Modern technology has made Hesiod’s hyperboles comprehensible. And we have read of such things in Dante, Milton and Blake. And in the Apocalypse.

Zeus rules wisely and is just. He is also irrepressibly fertile, fathering gods and heroes by different mothers and means. Athena was born out of his head after he had consumed her mother, Metis; Themis bore him Eunomia (Order), Dike (Justice) and Eirene (Peace), the three Fates. Another mother bore him the Graces; Demeter gave him ill-fated, almost-mortal Persephone. Part of Hesiod’s radicalism is in his insistence that dike is more important than time (honour) in the ordering of affairs in the age of Iron. His emphasis was to become that of the emerging civic units of Greece at large.

Zeus slept with Mnemosyne (Memory) for nine nights—he must have been in love to have stayed with her for such a long time—and set her apart from the other Immortals. She provided him with nine daughters, bearing them close to the summit of Olympus, near the houses of Grace and Desire. From our point of view, they are crucial children, the Muses: Cleio, Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polyhymnia, Urania and Calliope. The Muses inspire poets (Hesiod asks them to dictate to him: his modest ambition is to be their stenographer) but they also, Calliope in particular, legitimise the eloquence of kings.

For she keeps the company of reverend kings

When the daughters of great Zeus will honour a lord

Whose lineage is divine, and look upon his birth,

They distil a sweet dew upon his tongue,

And from his mouth words flow like honey.²²

Hesiod’s ostensibly historical narration takes us from the beginning of creation to the very fringes of Homer’s Odyssey and the heroic world Hesiod never quite shares with his fellow-founder of Greek poetry, a world he describes but cannot enter. In the Theogony Hesiod is a seeming historian, but the real model for the divergent traditions of Greek historical writing is Homer.

It is hard to see how a religious practice could be based on the Theogony, yet it is a kind of permanent point of religious reference and a text susceptible to multiple readings and perspectives. Because of its ambiguities and irresolutions, it gave rise, among its audiences and readers, to that busy and vexed form of humanity, the critic. One kind of critic is the king. In his Life of Theseus Plutarch quotes Hesiod’s lines about Theseus deserting Ariadne—“A passionate love for Aigle burned in his breast, / Panopeus’ daughter”—and reports that these lines were removed from Hesiod’s poem by no less a figure than Pisistratus, to “protect his ancestor.” The same tyrant inserted into Homer’s description of the underworld the verse “Theseus and Peri-thous, illustrious children of the gods,” in order to please the Athenians.²³

A tyrant could change a text; and a text—Hesiod or Homer—was regarded as important enough, politically, to merit tampering with, to censor information or flatter sentiment. Who were the audiences for Hesiod’s poems? We know they were largely male, given the nature of the poems and of the world into which they came. As with Homer’s two poems, we can imagine different audiences for each. The Theogony has the feel of a piece composed for recitation at a festival, conveying information in a beautiful and more or less structured form, with points in the poem at which an audience or chorus might interject. We are tempted to reverse the generally accepted chronology of composition and to infer from this that it was composed when Hesiod was already known. The way in which he depicts himself in the poem as the shepherd surprised by the Muses is a kind of packaging, building on the known fact of his rustic origins.

Works and Days would appear, in its cruder shape and more direct approach, to have come first. It addresses (albeit intermittently) Perses, a single silent interlocutor. The reader can imagine this poem performed in a smaller circle, as evening entertainment; certainly the subject-matter, the coarseness of address, and the basic quality of some of the counsel given suggest a humbler audience. The sense of a local audience is also conveyed in the concern with specific-seeming issues: Perses’ unjust claims are part and parcel of the wider corruption the poem brings to light, the local lords who behave unfairly. The physical world is alive in the lines, and the voice of a man who has lived a hard life.

Poetry is a form of oral memory, kleos; in the Theogony²⁴ its function is described as conveying klea proteron anthropon (“the glorious achievements of the people of old”). Works and Days is different, conveying the lived experience of a present time in which the poet himself is living.

Whether the audience was local or festive, it understood the nature and language of Hesiod’s verse. It was trained, to use Taplin’s over-deliberate expression. It was second nature to a Greek man to understand, through the curious amalgam of dialects, geographic and temporal variegations, what the poetry was doing. “Yet this special poetic language will not have struck its hearers as artificial or outlandish, precisely because they knew it and expected it as the language of hexameter poetry. It is the language proper to the occasion that they will have assimilated from childhood.”²⁵

In all likelihood, the myths and legends the poet told were almost as familiar as the language he used: his audience was entertained and instructed by how he sounded and by the ordering of the stories, what the poet added to the familiar, what originality of detail or structure he brought to bear. In the case of Hesiod, the first person singular may have been the key. When he writes of Pandora, for example, the first written account of the myth that we possess, his audience could have known a version of the story already; in his Pandora they would have found new connections to other myths, and a striking vehemence in his conclusions. She makes her poetic début in Theogony as the first woman, a “lovely evil”:

And they were stunned,

Immortal gods and mortal men, when they saw

The sheer deception, irresistible to men.

From her is the race of female women,

The deadly race and population of women,

A great infestation among mortal men.²⁶

She makes a vivid appearance in Works and Days, coming among men with her jar (pithos), not box, of evils. Zeus was not wilful in having her sent, with a curse donated by each of the gods: Pan-dora, “all gift.” Prometheus had stolen fire from heaven for men, and Pandora was sent to Epimetheus, Prometheus’ brother, as divine punishment. Epimetheus, despite his fated brother’s warning not to accept gifts from the gods, could not resist and took Pandora in. She is one of the earliest examples of the vilification of the female. Misogyny is a crucial ingredient in both Hesiod’s poems. There are goddesses on the one hand, and there are women on the other, drones in the hive, layabouts of leisure, gluttons to boot. Woman is a curse; with her, unhappiness is inevitable; without her, there is no heir.

The religion Hesiod presents is human in terms of the ways the gods vie with one another and the ways they relate to the world. We also get a sense of natural balances, symmetries, dualities, complementarities. We considered the double nature of Eris, with whom Works and Days opens. In the Prometheus-versus-Pandora story, we have theft and retribution. Prometheus himself has a contrasting brother, Epimetheus. Their names relate them and at the same time place them at opposite ends of time’s see-saw: forethought and afterthought, foresight and hindsight. For most evils there is a balancing good; the just act and the unjust act are rewarded appropriately, symmetrically if you like. The absence of a balancing element can lead, as in the history of the early gods, to violence, “war in heaven”; it is no wonder that imbalances on earth have similar consequences. In the little anecdote of the hawk with the nightingale clutched in its talons (the first fable of its kind in Greek literature) the nightingale may have a sweet voice and beauty on its side, but the hoarse-voiced hawk has power, and he is hungry. He declares,

Only a fool struggles against his superiors.

He not only gets beaten, but humiliated as well.²⁷

Part of Hesiod’s subject-matter is, inevitably, the generations of man, where he comes from, how he has developed. The poet speaks of five ages: Golden, Silver, Bronze, the age of the heroes, Iron. By adding the age of the heroes he disrupts a traditional eastern symmetry, for the progression does have its origins in eastern thought. He gives it a specifically Greek inflection. But the thrust of his genealogy is conventional: it is an old story of decline and corruption. The age of Iron is our own. What can we do about it? Work hard, respect the gods and respect justice. The advice is not unlike that of Samuel Smiles, though without Smiles’s optimism.

The Theogony is a useful place for readers to familiarise themselves with the Olympians. All the gods are there: Zeus first, then mighty, neglected and treacherous Hera, Aphrodite, Ares, Artemis with her bow and arrows, wise Athene, Demeter who brings the fields alive, unbridled Dionysus, Hephaistus the smith, Hermes the inventor of the lyre, and so on. Hesiod’s catalogues are rather bare and peremptory compared with Homer’s, but then they are very different. That difference was recognised and dramatised in a festival confrontation.

It was at Chalcis in Euboea, the funeral occasion already mentioned, and a sufficiently neutral ground for both Boeotian Hesiod and for floating Homer, that the legendary match between them took place. Here Hesiod won the coveted tripod. Homer, representing in his voice the heroic and aristocratic values, the pan-Greek spirit, confronts the everyman from Askre with his dirty fingernails, his daily concerns, his rancours and timidity, his peasant values,²⁸ which are in some respects bourgeois avant-la-lettre in their concern with legacies and lucre.

Homer, we remember, travelled around Greece as a celebrated performer. He learned that Ganyctor was organising funeral games for his father, Amphidamas, the Euboean king, and invited not only athletes but poets too, with the promise of a generous purse. Homer decided to attend; Hesiod attended, too, and there a head-to-head contest was arranged. Before their hosts, the chief Chalcidians and the brother of the dead king, Paneides, now king himself, Hesiod subjected Homer to a series of questions. Here is a flavour of their exchanges. To begin with, Hesiod asks,

“Homer, son of Meles, inspired with wisdom from
heaven, come, tell me first what is best for mortal man?”

“For men on earth ’tis best never to be born at all; or being
born, to pass through the gates of Hades with all speed.”

Homer’s is a famous response. Hesiod has found a formidable rival. He decides to lighten the tone of the proceedings.

“Come, tell me now this also, godlike Homer: what think
you in your heart is most delightsome to men?”

“When mirth reigns throughout the town, and feasters
about the house, sitting in order, listening to a minstrel; when the
tables beside them are laden with bread and meat, and a wine-
bearer draws sweet drink from the mixing-bowl and fills the
cups: this I think in my heart to be most delightsome.”

The judges are ready to give Homer the prize, he has replied with such clarity and assurance, and in verse of course. Hesiod, irritated by his facility, rummages in his mind for a real poser: “Come, Muse; sing not to me of things that are, or that shall be, or that were of old; but think of another song.” Homer, nonplussed and unable to think of an apt answer, replies, “Never shall horses with clattering hoofs break chariots, striving for victory about the tomb of Zeus.”

There is a touch of surrealism about it, and certainly it follows Hesiod’s injunction. Now Hesiod begins the game of consequences, reciting a line or more and requiring Homer to finish the sense and form of each passage, some being quotations from the work of one or the other poet. We can set out Hesiod’s lines in roman type and Homer’s in italic, to see how the consequences unfolded:

Then they dined on the flesh of oxen and their horses’ necks—

They unyoked dripping with sweat, when they had had enough of war.

And the Phrygians, who of all men are handiest at ships—

To filch their dinner from pirates on the beach.

To shoot forth arrows against the tribes of cursed giants with his hands—

Herakles unslung his curved bow from his shoulders.

This man is the son of a brave father and a weakling—

Mother; for war is too stern for any woman.

And so the contest continues, with sequiturs and nonsequiturs.

But for you, your father and lady mother lay in love—

When they begot you by the aid of golden Aphrodite.

But when she had been made subject in love, Artemis, who delights in arrows—

Slew Callisto with a shot of her silver bow.

When they had feasted, they gathered among the glowing ashes The bones of the dead Zeus—

Born Sarpedon, that bold and godlike man.

Now we have lingered thus about the plain of Simois,

Forth from the ships let us go our way, upon our shoulders—

Having our hilted swords and long-helved spears.

Eat, my guests, and drink, and may no one of you

Return home to his dear country—

Distressed; but may you all reach home again unscathed.

Hesiod changes tactics. He asks Homer factual questions: How many people from Achaea went to Ilium? Homer answers with a mathematical exercise: “There were fifty hearths, and at each hearth were fifty spits, and on each spit were fifty carcasses, and there were thrice three hundred Achaeans to each joint.” Hesiod and the audience begin working out this huge hyperbole: fifty hearths, 2500 spits, 125,000 carcasses …

Hesiod poses him moral questions and Homer replies with subtlety and ambiguity, like a rabbinical teacher who knows there are no right answers but only not wrong ones. “How would men best live in cities, and with what observances?” asks Hesiod. “By refusing to get unclean gain and if the good were honoured, but justice fell upon the unjust,” Homer replies with wise facility.

“What is the best thing of all for a man to ask of the gods in prayer?”

“That he may be always at peace with himself continually.”

“Of what effect are righteousness and courage?”

“To advance the common good by private pains.”

“What do men mean by happiness?”

Again, that appalling reply: “Death after a life of least pain and greatest pleasure.” Homer gets the better of Hesiod at every turn; the people call for him to be declared victor. But King Paneides orders both of them to recite what they regard as the best lines from their own poems. Hesiod begins with a passage from Works and Days about the Pleiades, times for harvest, times to plough, lore lyricised. Homer comes back with a conflation of two passages from Book XIII of the Iliad.²⁹ It has to be said that Homer chooses magnificent fragments; but then he is spoiled for choice. Hesiod’s verse looks functional and pale beside even a prose version such as this: “The ranks stood firm about the two Aiantes, such that not even Ares would have scorned them had he met them, nor yet Athena who saves armies. For there the chosen best awaited the charge of the Trojans and noble Hector, making a fence of spears and serried shields. Shield closed with shield, and helm with helm, and each man with his fellow, and the peaks of their head-pieces with crests of horse-hair touched as they bent their heads: so close they stood together. The murderous battle bristled with the long, flesh-rending spears they held, and the flash of bronze from polished helms and new-burnished breast-plates and gleaming shields blinded the eyes. Very hard of heart would he have been, who could then have seen that strife with joy and felt no pang.”

Hesiod cannot stand up to such complete visualisation and, we imagine, Homer’s riveting prosodic control and delivery. But the new king has a mind of his own. He overrules the crowd and crowns Hesiod on the grounds that the man who enjoined his fellows to pursue peace and good husbandry should be rewarded, not the man who celebrated war. Hesiod’s was, therefore, not a poetic but a moral crown of laurel. He received also the tripod made of brass, which he immediately dedicated to the Muses, to whom he owed so much, appending this inscription: “Hesiod dedicated this tripod to the Muses of Helicon after he overcame divine Homer at Chalcis in a contest of song.”

He went from Chalcis to Delphi to dedicate himself to Apollo. The prophetess, excited at his approach, called out a blessing to him in anticipation: “… surely his fame shall be as wide as the spreading light of morning.”³⁰ She had a warning, however: “beware of the pleasant grove of Nemean Zeus; for there death is destined to overtake you.” The poet avoided the Peloponnese, assuming the prophetess had that Nemea in mind. But coming to Oenoë in Locris, he stayed with the sons of Phegeus, unconsciously fulfilling the oracle; that area was sacred to Nemean Zeus.

He overstayed his welcome at Oenoë, until his young hosts, suspecting him of seducing their sister Ctimene, murdered him.³¹ They threw his corpse into the sea. On the third day, as legend often has it, his body was rolled ashore by dolphins, during a local feast. The people hurried to the strand, recognised the body, lamented and buried it. They began to seek the assassins, who, in terror, had set to sea in a fishing boat, pointing the prow towards Crete. Halfway across, Zeus sent them to the bottom with a bolt of lightning. That is Alcidamas’ version of events. Eratosthenes has a variant story, more grimly entertaining if less miraculous: Hesiod’s travelling companion Demodes seduced the girl and was murdered along with Hesiod. The girl hanged herself. Hesiod’s dog, Eratosthenes tells us, identified the murderers. The brothers were sacrificed to the gods of hospitality. It is the stuff of Jacobean theatre.

Hesiod, shepherd and hill farmer, elect of the Muses, first poet of the arts of peace, was murdered, then. Thucydides agrees that he was killed in Locris, by local people and—that prophesy—in a sanctuary of Nemean Zeus. Plutarch’s version implies, says Peter Levi,³² “the cult of Hesiod as a divine hero”—a demigod like Archilochus at Paros was to become? “He had a named companion … he was washed up by dolphins like Palaimon at the isthmus, his grave was a local secret like Dirke’s at Thebes, and his relics were envied by the people of Orchomenos” (IX, 38, 3) in central Boeotia, as far from the sea as Hesiod could have wished.

Despite the misogyny of the poems, legend unanimously places a woman at the heart of the tragic affair. We turn to trusty Pausanias: “everyone agrees that the sons of Ganyctor”—who organised the games for his father, Amphidamas—“fled from Naupactos to Molykria because of Hesiod’s murder, and there they paid Poseidon the penalty of sacrilege; but one story is that someone else disgraced their sister and Hesiod was wrongly blamed for it; another is that Hesiod was guilty.”³³

On this subject Pausanias allows himself to express no opinion. He does take the story a little further, establishing where the poet was finally interred. At Orchomenos, he declares, is Hesiod’s tomb. This is how the men of Orchomenos got their hands on the coveted bones: “a plague had seized on men and cattle, so they sent off ambassadors to the god, who were told by the Pythian priestess to bring the bones of Hesiod from Naupactos, or otherwise there was no cure.” They inquired how to find them at Naupactos: the priestess said that a crow, one of Apollo’s sacred birds, would tell them. So when they landed on Naupactian ground they saw a rock quite near a road with the bird perching on it, and in a hollow in that rock they found the bones of Hesiod.

A funeral verse was written on the tomb:

Askre and the plough land were his country:

The soil of the horse-whipping Minyai

Covers his bones: his name rang loudest

On the stone of Wisdom: Hesiod lies here.

That is another name critics have given to his kind of writing: not epic, but “wisdom literature.” Given that wisdom advances more slowly than knowledge and outlives the vagaries of taste, the poetry of Hesiod, a constant resource for three millennia despite its archaisms, conventionality and prejudice, can be considered wise.