Listening to the Spider: reading Hesiod’s Works and Days

 

CHAPTER 1.  A HYMN TO ZEUS?                  

vv. 1-10                  

 

      The Iliad and Odyssey state their subjects as the very first word, “the wrath” of Achilles and “the man” Odysseus, respectively, and then ask a (singular) Muse to tell about it.  But the Works and Days first addresses the (plural) Muses, deferring the subject:[1]

 

Muses of Pieria, celebrators in song.

(v. 1)                                                                

Presumably the Muses are to be asked to say something, but first two phrases describe them (in spite of a vocative declension).  As such, the line appears to condense the Theogony proemium, an essay of over a hundred lines devoted to the Muses themselves which, to be sure, treats them in the third person.  Our poet at least gives their origin in space, “Pieria,” and their role, “celebrators in song (aoidē).”  He does not invent the line freely:  As to the role in particular, there are some evocative second-hemistich expressions about singing, and in accordance with the dis­cussion in the Introduction, at least their close precursors will have been available to him.  The closest parallel (stressed by West) is with the Theogony proemium:  At one point (not its begin­ning) it has the Muses “first celebrate (the gods) in song (aoidē).”  But also, early in the Odyssey Penelope speaks of her sadness over deeds of men and gods, “the ones that singers (aoidoi) celebrate.”  One might think as well of the later passage in that poem where Hermes brings Zeus’s call to release Odysseus to another of the epic female deities or spirits who sing, Calypso, and finds her “singing (aoidousai ) with a beautiful voice,” or of Helen in the Iliad telling Hector she feared they would all become “song material (aoidimoi ) for the future.”  The experience of the ori­ginal listener upon whom our hermeneutics focuses might have been enhanced by recalling any or all of these descriptions, not to say others now lost to us.[2]

            Having established that context, the poet proceeds to what at first seems to be the sub­ject the Muses are to expound, in an impressive composition:

 

Come on (or: come here?), speak of Zeus, exalt your own father,

the one who (makes) mortal men equally not prominent and prominent,

famous and not famous, by mighty Zeus’s grace.

For easily strengthens, but easily brings down the strong,

and easily the illustrious diminishes and the obscure increases,

and yes easily straightens the crooked and the haughty withers

 (does) Zeus the high-thunderer, who dwells in the highest of houses.[3]

(vv. 2-8)

This is certainly effective verse.  After Zeus is invoked, a statement on his activities is framed by two sentiments put into chiastic order (also in the Greek): “not prominent” ... “not famous” and “straightens ... withers.”  The final verse then stresses Zeus by giving one of his more striking standard epithets, “high-thundering,” and by combining the epic phrase “dwells in a house” with “highest,” to give a concluding thought which is surely pithier than the common sentiment that the gods “have homes on Olympus.”  And since “Zeus” from 2 and 4 could have been under­stood as the elided subject at 5 to begin the “easily” epanaphora, the enjambement into 8 is inessential; thus the relative pronoun which begins the second hemistich produces the smooth effect character­ist­ic of epic noted in the Introduction:  High-thundering Zeus effectively “is” the highest dweller, in an integral thought coming after a virtually unnoticed verse boundary.  Meanwhile, in predicat­ing Zeus’s ability to reverse fortunes with opposing qualities, the poet enhances the point in each case by denoting one of the two poles either by an alpha-privative: aphatoi, “not prominent;” arrhētoi, “not famous;” adēlon, “obscure,” or by an intensive which sounds like one: arizēlon, “illustrious;” agēnora, “haughty.”[4]

            To be sure, the effectiveness is achieved within the epic language.  Aside from the point about Zeus’s “house” just noted, “come on” or “come here” (deute in either case) always begins a line also in Homer, either the first line or (as here) the second of a speech.  And then, the first three syllables of “speak” (ennepete, an archaic verb of a solemn nature) are in the same position as the singular (ennepe) in the first line of the Odyssey : “of the man speak, Muse, ... .”  Also, “by mighty Zeus’s grace” (Dios megaloio hekēti ) in 4 is a combination of a standard noun-epithet phrase for the genitive case, “mighty Zeus’s” (D. m.), with an also verse-ending analogi­cal system whose surviving examples are “by grace of he who is Apollo” (Apollōnos ge h.) and “by grace of Zeus and you (meaning Athena)” (Dios te sethen te h.).[5]

            However, after all that Zeus is not the poem’s subject!  The combination of impressive composition with conservative use of language would be to particularly good effect if it prefaced a work about his life and times, but already it is possible that v. 4 connotes divinity in a more gener­al sense than what accrues to him as personality, since the phrases resembling “by mighty Zeus’s grace” include other gods.  In any case, the piece concludes with:

 

Hearken, look and listen: straighten decisions according to justice

you!  I would tell the truth to Perses (or: Perses, addressed in vocative case).[6]

(9-10)

Although this couplet begins by addressing Zeus directly (the Greek imperatives are in the singular), it and the proemium itself end with something of an entirely different nature:  Evidently telling the truth to “Per­ses” (whoever that is) is what the poem to follow is to be about.  It is important to note that this “truth,” etētuma, is relatively narrow.  The truth which the Theogony’s Muses tell the author they can give whenever they wish is the rather metaphysical alētheia.  Thus when, e.g., Priam asks Her­mes (i.e., the god of interpretation) for “the whole truth” (pasan alētheia) about his son, he is aware that Hector is dead, but wants to know if his body is intact or has been mutilated.  But etētuma is simply factual.  E.g., Penelope says (in much the same language as ours) that Eurycleia’s claim that Odysseus has returned is not etētuma.  To be sure, at a certain level these are the same; thus in her important book on our poem Luciana Bona Quaglia goes so far as to entitle the chap­ter which concerns the proemium “Zeus and the ‘Truth,’” and to say that truth will thereby be the “theme” of the poem to follow.  Still, our poet really only says that he wants to tell Perses a true story, not a false one.  Philippe Rousseau argues that the contrast of the Theo­gony’s truth to that here reflects the contrast of the earlier work’s exalted subject matter to our poet’s.  But before actually hearing the latter subject matter, what was the original audience to make of so mundane a conclusion after such lofty rhetoric describing the chief god?[7]

            Of course, one can easily overstate the extent to which a proemium’s contents are deter­mined by the content of the poem to follow:  Other short epic openings tend to be of limited scope in comparison with what then ensues.  This is especially so for the formal Odyssey pro­em­i­um, the work’s first ten lines which tell us that it will be about a man of many devices who wan­t­ed to return home, but then touch on only one adventure (that his companions unwisely ate the cattle of Helios).  The Iliad might be thought better, in that the first several lines on the “wrath” of Achilles certainly speak to much of the poem, but even they do not let one predict that the Tro­jans will be defeated when Achilles transfers his anger to them in the later books.  Certainly, while Zeus and the truth would be important to any archaic Greek text, we cannot expect our poem to concern only law courts, and perhaps not only “Perses,” from the facts that the opening cites these entities.  In short, it is probably a mistake to think of anything like a precis of the actual poem:  It may only be a formal device to get the work started.[8]

            But the poet has given his proemium, and must live with what it does.  In particular, com­ment­at­ors have often felt that its significance turns on the “you::I” juxtaposition which begins its last line.  This pairing is certainly striking in immediate impact.  (West notes the contrast is enhanced by the combination of the first term of such a pair ending a clause with the pair itself beginning a verse.)  Why does the poet use it?  The pronoun beginning v. 10 seems unneces­sary, since 9 is addressed to a single entity whereas only Zeus has been mentioned as such.[9]

            Hesiod scholars have taken two basic approaches to solving this problem.  One is to note that for the overall form of vv. 9-10 the poet has used a traditional hymnic model which, after describing a god, closes by addressing the deity directly with the formula “hail to you, ... (name of god) ... ;/ moreover, I will remember you and another song as well,” whereupon the poet gives the latter, i.e., the next hymn to another god (as in the attested hymns to Hermes, Aphrodite, and some others).   Hesiod retains “you” (if replacing the normal su with the emphatic tunē) and “I,” and also changes the subject.  However, to note use of this model only dis­places the question to one of why it is used.  (Certainly, as is well noted, the result departs from the model, e.g., by placing the formula near the beginning of the actual poem rather than the end.)[10]

            The other approach is to assume that the juxtaposition is more than an accident of versi­fication, and that, rather, it reflects the poet’s actual desire to highlight the relation of the two clauses of which the pronouns are the subjects: Zeus straightening decisions and the narrator telling truth to Perses, respectively.  One can go on to give an exegesis of this relation itself.  As reviewed by Bona Quaglia, most such commentaries think of some pair of mildly differing roles for Zeus and the poet, respectively, in the poem to follow.  To be sure, she herself is scandalized by the least suggestion of opposition between the two, and insists that the latter is the instrument of the former in all respects, with not so much as division of labor between the two.[11]

            Nonetheless, no theory of a complementary relation between Zeus and the poet captures the sense of disjunction experienced by the original listener who has not yet heard the rest of the poem, but who has heard other epic poetry, upon encountering vv. 9-10.  There are many cases of at least the normal second person pronoun falling less than a verse away from that of the first person, where precisely opposition is the point.  E.g., early in the Iliad Achilles complains to Agamemnon that “you” always get the big prize, while “I” get little, whereupon the latter responds: “you” defect if you want, “I” will not beg.  Then, apart from West’s argument for the contrast just noted, every­where else the emphatic second person pronoun begins a verse it is connected to a markedly contrast­ing thought.  Especially, the Theogony poet in his own proemium addresses himself (or, as gen­er­ally interpreted, his heart), to ask for a change from the subject of his earlier encounter with the Muses on Mt. Helicon:[12]

 

But why for me this (matter) about trees and rocks?

You (my heart)! Let us begin with the Muses, who their father Zeus

exalt; ....

(Th. 35-7)

whence he goes on to continue the general hymn to these deities apart from his relation to them.  One might suppose that our poet has this segment in the back of his mind, since his second line speaks of the Muses “exalting” (same Greek verb) their father, and that some of the original audience will have recalled it as well.

            In fact, resolution of the question is achieved by recognizing that “hearken: look and listen: you straighten decisions” refers to vv. 2-8, that is, to the paean to Zeus which the poet has inserted between the initial call to the Muses and the actual poem he wants them to help him recite, and “I would tell the truth to Perses” refers to that poem itself.  While Bona Quaglia and those she cites assume that both poles of the juxtaposition point forward to what follows, any role of Zeus with justice in what is to come is not the reference here.  (Granted that this upcoming role will be large, the original audience has not yet heard it.)  Rather, I believe, the references to “justice” and “decisions” again have the Theogony in mind:  At the one place where the earlier poem speaks of Zeus vis a vis human affairs, in the proemium which we have already seen is on our poet’s mind, the text tells of the Muses making the speech of a king pleas­ant, and adds:

 

              ...........            and now the people

all honor him as he gives judicial decisions

with straight justice; ....  .

(Th. 84-6)                                                                             

Certainly, as observes most recently Wilhelm Blümer, the stress on Zeus’s role with humans in 3-9 differs from his role with gods in most of the Theogony; however, it is to human decisions from that poem (themistes, by a king but one specified as Zeus-nurtured) that our poem’s “straighten decisions according to justice” seems to allude.[13]

            If that matter can be considered resolved, the real issue is why a discussion of Zeus is put into the proemium in the first place.  Why not simply ask the Muses to help give Perses “the facts,” and then get on with the poem?  An epic proemium necessarily involves a transfer from the divine presence which must be invoked if there is to be poetry, to the human poet who neces­sarily communicates it.  Thus Victoria Pedrick has argued that the deficiencies of the Odys­sey proemium are to some extent corrected in the next eleven lines, which combine with it to constitute the poem’s true introduction, and which constitute a transition from the Muse’s regime to the poet’s.  But for this purpose it is hardly necessary to insert a hymn to Zeus bet­ween the normal proemium’s initial call on the Muses and its end.  Why does our poet do so?[14]

            The answer must be that he makes the insertion in order to transfer, not only from the Muses to himself, but also from the subject of the Theogony, namely Zeus, to the human con­cerns which will follow in our poem proper.  In short, the first pole of our you::I juxtaposition refers to the past:  With its reference to v. 9 together with the conservative 2-8, our poet anchor­s his poetry in tradition, especially as given in the Theogony, even as he strikes out on a new path.  The sphere of Zeus is important, even insofar as it overlaps the human sphere, but the poet wants to give the mundane reality about something else:  By all means, Zeus, straighten things out (7, 9); I for my part will push on (10).  At least such is how the audience’s hears it.

            And there is no getting around the fact that opposition between Zeus and the poet has thereby crept into the rhetoric of the text (Bona Quaglia and others notwithstanding).  The critics who insist on their collaboration are at least right in that the poem proper will have the sanction of Zeus in its author’s view, but to an audience remembering both the Theogony and epic proper his actual text here suggests no matter how faintly that Zeus belongs to the past.  We will have to see how the poem manages this contradiction.  (to Chap. 2)

 

NOTES: