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

CONCLUSION

            The poet’s own conclusion summarizes his work:[1]

                                    Wherefore fortunate and prosperous is he who, all this

                                    knowing, acts (or: works) without fault to the immortals,

                                    judging the birds and avoiding transgressions.[2]

(vv. 826-8)

Certainly the work has asked us to act or work (ergazō) with an eye to the gods and to avoid transgression, and it has mentioned several birds that offer lessons (whether simply as seasonal signals as the almanac construal holds, or more subtly as I have proposed above in discussing the cases). In the Greek the three lines turn out to be rhythmically identical in the sense that the sequence of dactyls and spondees is the same, so that they give the segment a sostenuto quality which befits a conclusion. Of course the implicit reference to epic we have sensed throughout continues: The elder Halitharses was best able to “know the birds and” expound their omens (verse-beginning ornithas gnōmai kai compared with our o. krinōn kai ), and Telemachus thought the suitors should pay for their “grievous transgressions” (verse-ending huperbasiēs alegenēs com­­pared with our huperbasias aleeinōn). Still, the segment clearly bears our poet’s stamp in say­­ing that the point is to be fortunate (eudaimōn, a neologism) and prosperous.[3]

            What is most noteworthy about this summary is that is indeed such. “Acts/works” tells us neither to farm nor to sail (much less to observe days of the month) in avoiding fault to the gods, etc., but to act/work in general while doing so. That is to say, this is not the end of a collection of seasonally-based advice to a farmer who must also sail part-time and observe given societal tabus; rather, an aware early audience will have perceived such activities as simply scaffolding upon which an allegory about human life is built. Its detailed features are as argued during the course of the treatment above in Chapters 4 through 10; however, as to its generality, the poet says here that we are to act with an eye to the fundamental principles governing the world; “judge” (meaning interpret) the lessons of our counterparts in nature (who are closer to it than we, and so can help us in transforming it); and do so without going out of bounds.

            The life thus invoked is implicitly compared with the life of the epic character, right up to its summary as just noted. It is true that all languages have standard expressions which function as shorthand for given concepts, images, or expectations on the part of the addressee, and on which ironic play is always possible through variation of a key word or unconventional juxtaposi­tion of expressions. But no modern language is so imbued with inherent cross-refer­ences as was the so-called epic dialect of archaic Greece. Any type of sustained employment of it in a context significantly different from its normal use, such as the Works and Days certainly presented when it was first heard, must have produced a feeling of profound novelty on the part of the audience, a sense which the present work has attempted to approach, but which (it can here be admitted) surely has not actually reached. The novelty includes such subtle points as a shift in time frame from the day to the year, introduced by a use of the cyclic adverb ēmos at the begin­ning of the con­­crete “agricultural” (poetry) to introduce it, and maintained by subsequent uses when the cuc­koo cuckoos, when the cicada drones, and when the crow walks.  (Thus is often enough to cement the time frame, but not so often as to support the contention that the poem gives an almanac of sea­son­al tasks.) To be sure, the poet goes back to the day at the end, giving an entire piece devoted to it. Indeed, his immersion in epic is so thorough that, as has been noted on the occasions where they occur, in several places transitions from one nominal subject to another are modelled on epic passages which are in fact continuous; this could only enhance the audi­ence’s sense that the message is a unity, not the mere collection of unrelated items traditional inter­pretation holds. At minimum, the audience will have grasped the point that the epic hero model could not help any­one achieve the qualities demanded by the allegory our poem connotes, whatever the virtues of the Homeric example in his own sphere.

            This allegory was preceded by a prolegomena much more appropriate to it than to a sim­ple collection of lore, namely the poet’s treatment of “justice.” (Thus the traditional construal of the poem and the numerous compromises therewith which see the second half of the poem as such lore have trouble seeing a connection, and tend to understand the two portions as parallel dis­cussions of the distinct subjects of justice and work.) As the poet sees it, the human of the here and now who is worthy to be the subject of his poem is a person who lives a “just” life in the first place. Accordingly, before that poem he spells out what this means at some length, in verse which is itself memorable and has been influential over the years in its own right. To be sure, the individual human responsibility which this “justice” necessarily entails is sufficiently revolutionary that it cannot begin a work which hopes to reach audiences of the times. Thus it is preceded by some verses composed in an idiom resembling a traditional mythical mode, including especially the Prometheus-Pandora narrative, that have inspired a voluminous secondary literature of their own which, frankly, has been largely irrelevant to understanding the Works and Days itself.

            The construal of the poem as an allegory of the organized autonomous person’s life is to be compared principally with two other conceptions of it. The first of these is the idea that the work is determined by the moral considerations featured in the narrative of the races and its immediate sequel, as espoused particularly by Pierre Waltz near the beginning of the last century and Erbse near its end. The second is the concept of the poem portraying humanity as part of Zeus’s order, more or less as a complement to the Theogony portraying the gods as part of it, as espoused especially by Bona Quaglia. (A view falling eclectically between these two is Nelson’s.) Different­ly, the foregoing treatment has brought out justice as a prerequisite of the desired human life (a sort of Kantian a priori, as Mario LaPenna has said of the first half of the poem generally), but not the defining characteristic of the life itself, and the human as needing to function in a world inclu­ding the standard gods but not determined by them. (In particular, the poet does not think of Zeus as govern­ing the occult forces of the “superstitious” part of the work; rather, the human must deal with them just as with everything else.) Apart from contrasting with these conceptions, the idea of the work as an allegory overall evidently generalizes theories that given parts of it are fig­ures specifically for poetry (Rosen, Marsilio). And the allegory which is actually established in the section encompass­sed by vv. 414-503, to be developed thereafter, is in conflict with assigning undue relevance to the proposal of Bader’s book, i.e., that most of the work after that (497-778 to be precise) betrays the author’s heritage in the Indo-European figure of the “Brilliant Seer.” She does thereby treat an important part of the poem (and as it turns out points to interesting parallels to the traditions of other peoples in the process), but at most this concept of it can only supply fur­ther aspects of the non-epic source material (i.e., other than Near Eastern wisdom literature and possible indigenous lyric traditions) which pale in importance compared with epic in developing the allegory. Indeed, while even today any true poet has some features of a tribal mantic, to Hesiod’s times most of the material of the second half of the poem was modern, not archaic.[4]

            Apart from grasping this invocation in itself of an organized autono­mous human to confront such modern conditions, one has a right to ask about its historical role. The foregoing work has been solely for the pur­pose of interpreting the poem as literature, but the following may be remar­k­­ed. It is most common to consider “Hesiod’s” role in ancient Greek culture, i.e., as a matter of the combination of this poem with the Theogony. From such a perspective, particularly in dis­cus­sions of Greek “thought,” i.e., the extent to which “Hesiod” anticipates the Presocratic “philoso­phers,” one usually focuses on the earlier poem, to ask if the primordial entities “Chaos,” Earth and Love are or are not forerunners of the principles espoused by the earlier of the Presocratics. It is true that this focus on pure thought about what is now called the physical world has little to do with our poem: Although on occasion interpreters speak of its “concept” of one or another entity of interest to mod­ern physics (e.g., Leclerc’s study of “time” in the poem), its own interests are not these enti­ties as such. Rather, while the poet of the Theogony may have been interested in how they came to be, ours simply takes the concepts given to him (e.g., the knowledge that there were year­ly and daily time cycles) and composes a work on what one is to do in that context. One can cer­tain­ly make a case that he innovates in social concepts (as the Theogony poet for the most part does not), in particular in the theory and practice of “justice.” (As such, one can agree with Ernest Will and others, at least insofar as that portion of the poem is concerned, that it reflects the out­look of a semi-prosperous small land owner.) However, as has been argued here even such con­cerns amount to prolegomena to the actual interests of the poem proper.[5]

            It follows that treatments of the role of the Works and Days in Greek thought should pay less attention than has been the case to what Plato did with the Prometheus myth or to the metal symbolism of the races narrative, and more to developments like Aristotle’s founding household economics with v. 405 in mind or Plutarch’s ethics of the relation of trust in the gods to practical action as cited in 465-72. There are numerous such ancient references, from the important to the trivial. (And as to the latter, even the fact that one of Athenaeus’s effete dinner companions prides himself on his knowledge of the arcane, and so cites the fact that the snail is called “carry-house” at 571, would be relevant since it shows that the poet’s wit had its effect.) There is also literature which does not cite Hesiod overtly but probably alludes to him. (For example, one would think a folk belief reported by Plutarch, that a fig leaf resembling a crow’s foot portended a bad sum­mer, derives from the ominous segment about spring “sailing” at 678-85 enunciated hundreds of years before.) More importantly, one of the poem’s central concepts, the use of “plowing” in 458-92 as a synecdoche for organized productive activity that I have argued above, must have influenced the wide use of plowing as simple metaphor in later Greece: for ships rowing in Aes­chylus; above all for procreation in Theognis, Sophocles, and elsewhere; and for the composition of poetry itself in Pindar and Callimachus. Finally, the fact that Latin literature has so obvious a debt to our 383-617 as Vergil’s early work, the Georgics, might be taken as occasion to ask just what features of the section rendered it a sufficiently strong component of the Greek culture the Romans admired for it to commend itself to the later writer.[6]

            In such a way the recent trend of which this book has attempted to be a part, to focus on the actual works and days of Hesiod’s Works and Days, might be extended to study of their role in history. But that is another task.

NOTES: