Hesiod’s means of capturing his
audience? A possibility for Works and
Days 1-105
Read at the annual meeting
of the Classical Association of Atlantic States, Baltimore, MD, October 14,
2011
(Subsequent
additions are enclosed in curly brackets:{})
{First, a visual perspective:}
Presenters at Paper Session A, Early Greek Literature, from left to
right: Patrick R. Callahan, E. F. Beall,
Helaine L. Smith and Kristen Baxter.
(For further information see the program.) Photo: Patrick McIntyre.
{The handout for this paper that was distributed at the meeting
is also on this site. Links to it appear in the paper here, as follows:}
If you will refer to entry #1 in
your handout,
let’s first review the text. The audience hears that the Muses are to come and
sing of their father Zeus. He is
responsible for a man’s fame, etc. Heed
me and attend to justice, Zeus, but Perses, I hope to state the reality (or: I
hope to state the reality to
Perses). It was not true that there was
only one lineage of Strifes: there are two.
One is good; it is the other who supervises cruel conflicts. The first rouses men to work in envy of their
neighbors. Keep this in mind, Perses,
and don’t let the bad Strife make you attend quarrels at the agora, which
prevents the needy man from seeing to his grain. You have followed those ways to bribe the kings
and take more than your share of our inheritance. But they do not know how much half is more
than whole, nor the profit found in cheap vegetables. For the gods keep our livelihood concealed,
or else you would have an easy life. But
Zeus engaged in concealment out of his anger at Prometheus. He hid fire. But Prometheus stole it back for
humans. Zeus said that therefore he
would make an evil that men would love, and laughed. Zeus told some Olympian gods to make a
creature with certain mostly negative characteristics, and a somewhat different
set made the thing with more or less those characteristics. The deity Hermes named it Pandora, All-gift,
because all the gods gave a gift. He
then took this gift to Epimetheus, who forgot the warning of Prometheus never
to accept such a gift, but when he had the evil he knew it. For men lived before this time far from
evils, pain and diseases, but woman dispersed the contents of some jar and
wrought evil for humanity. Only Elpis
remained inside, while numerous silent diseases roam among mortals. It is impossible to evade the mind of Zeus.
Now interpreters almost universally
approach this opening, as well as the rest of the poem, by first dividing into
sections. For the opening itself (see handout entry #2) the
sections are held to be: a proemium for the entire poem comprising the first
ten lines; a theory of two races or kinds of Strife, from v. 11 to 27;
admonition to the poet’s brother to settle their quarrel in an equitable manner
(27-41 or -46, it being disputed where this section ends and the next one
begins); and finally the so-called Prometheus-Pandora myth (42- or
47-105). From there interpreters often
feel that in asking Zeus to ensure justice the so-called proemium prefigures
the poem’s later treatment of that subject; or that the division of the Strifes
prefigures the division between good and bad activities later in the poem; or
that the presumed authentically historical conflict of Hesiod and Perses
provides the occasion for the poem itself; or, especially, that the
Prometheus-Pandora verses amount to another version of the Prometheus myth told
in the other Hesiodic poem Theogony,
but a version which is tailored to explain the need for human labor that is the
subject of much of our poem. It is
generally assumed that this poem is for the purpose of offering instruction per
se, and that its versification into epic meter is of little consequence. Rather than detail these points today, I also
include in handout
#2 summaries of the readings of the overall poem that I know to have been
published after 2005, by Robert Bartlett, Flora Manakidou, Glenn Most, Cesare
Cassanmagnago, Jenny Strauss Clay and Andrea Ercolani, for you to examine at
your leisure the extent to which such features are upheld, should you wish (and
I apologize for the length of the handout, although I don’t know how else to
handle the situation). Then in handout #3 I indicate
some criticisms of the general approach.
But my purpose today is not to offer
criticism as such of published readings of the section, but to outline a different
one. In general, my inclination is to
set aside the idea that our poem offers instruction, so as to focus on its
poetry as such. In doing so, it strikes
me first that this opening does not proceed discontinuously, as if a collection
of disparate materials, but mostly in a smooth fashion. Thus v. 10 says Perses is to hear the truth
and 11 implies that the truth is that two Strifes exist. Or, the one Strife is good, so Perses should
follow it. Or, the gods hide the livelihood as a principle, and
Zeus did some hiding at some point in
the narrative past. This continuity as a
structural feature has long been noted, especially by Willem Verdenius in a
1962 essay, although it is usually ignored or considered a mere device to
connect sections assumed to be autonomous.
I next notice that the lines refer
heavily to traditional material, frequently to the presumably earlier Theogony, if not only to it. Thus in line 9 Zeus is asked to straighten
the decisions of the authorities with justice.
A common view is that this anticipates the treatment of justice later in
the poem, but it actually looks like an allusion to a segment in Theogony where authorities give straight
decision with justice (as I’ve noted in handout #3). The statement that there are two Strifes, the
first born from Night, is usually recognized as a correction of the earlier
poem’s birth of a single Strife from Night (as handout #4 suggests). To be sure, the war-imagery of the bad Strife
draws on epic of the sort attested in Homer (handout #5). The
statement about Prometheus tricking Zeus and the creation of the first woman
evidently refers to precisely that event in Theogony. Still, from that point on our text deviates
drastically from the sequel in the other poem.
I believe different material comes in, first, from a previous tradition
where specifically Pandora was dressed by deities like the Graces and the
Seasons. I say this because, as Laszlo
Berczelly delineates in an article on the classical period sculpture Athena
Parthenos (handout
#6), a panel at the base of that piece depicted figures resembling the Graces
or the Seasons attending a Pandora who was viewed positively, unlike with
Hesiod. This suggests that he perverted
an existing tradition to make her negative.
In any case, the only possible hint of the earth deity Pandora in the Theogony account is that the first woman
is made from earth, whereas the full entity is introduced here, if while
perverting her meaning as “all-giver” to “all-gift.” Then, as I argue in a 1991 article (handout #7), the
previous story that we must posit to account for the jar was some otherwise
lost Greek example of a meta-narrative attested worldwide, whereby First Woman
did something foolish to cause disaster.
Finally, although v. 105 is usually considered equivalent to the
conclusion of the Theogony myth,
inspection of language (handout
#8) suggests that it is at least as likely to allude to the Odyssey line where Polyphemus is told by
the other Cyclopes that it is impossible to escape the disease of Zeus. (It’s a small world, as this is another example
of humor in the Odyssey. {The paper read
previously to this one in the same session was “Humor in the Odyssey,” by Helaine L. Smith.}
Polyphemus has just told his brethren that the person who wounded him was what
translates in English as “no one,” as a result of a play on words in the Greek,
so they interpret his speech as evidence of his mental disease.)
Another feature that strikes me is
that these 105 lines contain some alluring verse qua verse. Already in the first few lines (discussion in
handout #9), as is
especially noted in the articles by Manakidou in 2006 and by Christos Tsagalis
in 2006 and 2009, the praise of Zeus in lines 2-8 is graced by artful contrasts
of terms, by polyptoton that cites him in three grammatical cases, and by word
play between one of these, Dia, and
the preposition dia. Then (handout #10) there is
some long noticed artistry in the segment on the plan for Pandora, 60-68, in
that the names of the deities are artfully placed in their verses. Then in the delivery of Pandora there is the
feature that the names Prometheus and Epimetheus mean fore-thought and
after-thought, respectively, whereas in fact the one knew in advance that the
creature Zeus sent would bring trouble but the other only found out too
late. Also, the word play continues in
the matter of Elpis: As Clay, for one, observes in her article, here an
important feature is its contrast with Prometheus: fore-seeming, not
fore-thought.
But I do not find a coherent thematic
structure in all this artistry. Instead
of the so-called proemium prefacing a poem about the god it treats, in this
case Zeus, the poet completely changes the subject in the last line, to say
that the poem wants to be about concrete reality. The Strifes narrative is logical enough, but
the transition occurring next, from a genre of narrative to one of admonition,
is strange to say the least. The
citation of half and whole and cheap vegetables is opaque. Most of all, although the so-called
Prometheus-Pandora myth is thought to explain the need for labor, considered an
evil, if so it only does this by contradicting the positive valuation of labor in the Strifes segment.
Indeed, this opening seems to me to be
thematically disconnected from the rest of the poem. One can certainly speak of its poetic motifs appearing later; for example, our
colleague Maria Marsilio has pointed out that there are strong verbal
affinities between Pandora and a maiden cited later in the poem who sits at
home during winter. I take it that,
having articulated these striking 105 lines, it would be difficult for the poet
not to remember them at some level. But
that is not the level of connection via subject matter. To consider that possibility carefully, just
after v. 105 the poet announces with some fanfare that he will give another logos (handout #11) To be sure, the leading commentator Martin
West, among others, thinks that the term logos
has the Homeric meaning of “story” here, not yet the Heraclitean meaning of
“type of discourse,” and that the “other story” in question is the so-called
myth of five races that Hesiod gives next.
From there it is often asserted that the first story forms the
background of the need for work, and the other that of the need for
justice. However, as is noted in handout #12, if the
opening of the poem explains the need for work it does so poorly given that the
narrative’s outcome is, rather, diseases.
Also, as my 2005-6 article discusses with references, some of us think
that the later so-called myth is too abstract to be called such. Finally, why would the poet go out of his way
to say he will speak well and skillfully in v. 107, merely for another
myth? It seems just as likely that heteros logos in 106 refers to the
entire remainder of the poem, conceived as a different type of discourse than
what has just been heard.
Of course our poem was originally an
epic recitation and as such would probably have had some proemium. According to
a recent book by Timothy Power, both the rhapsodes who recited Homer and Hesiod
and the citharodes of classical Greece and Rome typically began with a purely instrumental
prelude to let the audience know a performance was to begin, then sang a
proemium that served to capture its attention, among other things, and then the
piece itself. Here Power considers most
relevant the segment of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes where Hermes sings to
Apollo, which I reproduce in handout #13 without
going over it. Typically the proemium
was only a few lines, but we know of one with 115 lines, namely the Hesiodic Theogony. Why not 105 then?
Thus at this point in my study of
our poem, I am inclined to think that its first 105 lines were composed as a
means of capturing the attention of some audience, through continuous reference
to traditional material and through virtuosity in composition of verses,
without worrying too much about subtlety in the overall composition, prior to
proceeding to the poet’s true interests in the poem proper. Of course, this means the latter material was
what was really important to Hesiod, notwithstanding all the earnest commentary
on the former over the years. And as a
corollary, perhaps we could break the logjam of the past two hundred years or
so of bewilderment over the structure of Works
and Days, by removing these 105 proemial lines from the discussion.
Thank
you.
{In the question/discussion period that followed the
presentation, Marsilio suggested that the persona of Perses is indeed more
coherent in his citations after v. 105 than if vv. 27-41 or -46 are also
included. That seems a cogent point:
Although Perses is certainly portrayed as someone in need of advice later in
the poem (and is called nępios,
“childish,” on three occasions), nowhere after v. 38 is he accused of actually
cheating anyone.}
