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

 

INTRODUCTION.  PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION

 

Hermeneutics: the twentieth century heritage and Hesiod’s audience.

Perhaps it was to be expected that the twentieth century, one of the bloodiest peri­ods in human history, featured relatively heated academic disputes along with its social cataclysms; in any case, an important discussion which grew polemical at times played out in circles concerned with literature.  Beginning in the 1940s, the so-called New Criticism labeled the study of texts from the standpoint of what their authors intended a “fallacy,” say­ing that one’s experience of a poem was disassociated from whatever may have produc­ed it.  Traditionalists responded that authorial intent was the only objective criterion to decide what a text means, and that the critics threatened to mire literary study in subject­i­vism.  As the New Criticism gave way to more avant garde conceptual schemes, culminat­ing in the deconstructive criticism of Derrida and the Yale critics, the charge of subjecti­vism remained the principal response on the part of traditional interpreters.  The matter seems to remain unresolved as a new century begins, with the typical student of a given literature taking an eclectic position to guide his or her work.[1]

            The hermetically inclined classics profession took little notice of this debate at first, simply continuing to assume that what a given ancient author meant was basic, and, after determining this meaning, going on to place the author’s product in whatever histor­i­cal, social, psychological, or other context was of interest to the particular scholar.  As to Hesiod, this approach remained the basis of the principal line-by-line commentary on the Works and Days by Martin West, as well as that on the first half of the poem by West’s principal critic Willem Verdenius, and in most other studies.  Classicists began to take account of the avant garde after the New Criticism itself had become passé, for Hesiod in particular in articles by Jean-Pierre Vernant based on Structuralist premises in the 1960s, and in Pietro Pucci’s 1977 deconstructive study.  Focus on the text to the exclusion of its author was also suggested by a certain denial that a single such person existed in a case like Homer’s Iliad during the period of its principal composition from traditional elements:  The texts (including, by extension, the Hesiodic poems) developed over an extended peri­od of time according to Gregory Nagy and others.  While mainstream Hesiod authorities tended to disparage or ignore these developments (and others such as feminist interpreta­tions), they had an effect:  Such relatively recent studies as Mark Griffith’s of the literary functions of the personalities cited in the Works and Days, or Richard Hamilton’s of the structures of that poem and the Theogony have been less concerned with “Hesiod” than with the texts “he” composed.

            As far as the general question is concerned, one can agree with Donald Keefer’s Mark Twain allusion: “reports of the death of the author have been greatly exaggerated.”  Some person of persons assembled a given text, and the effect of his, her or their consciousness on its content can be of interest.  As for the Works and Days, it is difficult to conceive of its unusual collection of components related to distinct genres growing over an extended period of time qua works and days, even if some of the components themselves might have existed prior to their assembly into a text.  In principle that text (the one we have apart from a few later interpolations) might have been composed by a collective over a period of years, but not over decades or centuries.

            However, the avant garde has created space for recognition that there are factors in liter­a­ture besides the author.  In particular, the audience’s view of a text can be important.  By way of illustration, consider one of the numerous syntactical disputes which have characterized Hesiodic scholarship:  At verse 85 of the Works and Days, after the gods have created the first woman Pan­dora (Pandōrē, “All-gift,” i.e., a gift from all the gods) and she is to be given to men, the text says Zeus sent Hermes to them, “leading the gift of the gods the swift messenger.”  That is, is it “gift of the gods” or is Hermes a “swift messenger of the gods?”  Both possibilities have had their defenders (as has the solution that the text is inherently ambiguous), in the implicit or explicit sense that the question means “what did the author intend?”  Verdenius, for one, says that “messenger of the gods” is meant, because although “gift of the gods” is a standard epic phrase, this gift’s divine character has already been sufficiently specified in naming the woman a few lines earlier, and it is unnecessary to make the point again.  This opinion implicitly assumes an author with a sense of style which involves eschewing undue repetition, whose intent gives the text’s meaning.  But a dif­ferent question is:  What does the audience (meaning an early audience accustomed to hearing epic poetry of the sort found in the Homeric poems) hear?  If “gift of the gods” is what has been specified, not “messenger of the gods,” then what the audience hears is precisely the former whether or not the author intends the latter.

            There is every reason to believe the original set of audiences was historically decisive.  To be sure, most classics scholars over the years have earned their living by lecturing to students, often in a situation requiring little attention to any response from the latter, and it has been natural for them to assume that Homer and Hesiod functioned similarly.  But what if those who recited the poems (and recitation was indeed the mode of delivery for centuries after any reasonable date for their composition, whether from memory or from a written text) were what we now call “perfor­mers?”  It is known that the reciters accompanied themselves with a lute-like instrument (called the phorminx), and there are allegations of parallels with modern illiterate epic bards in places like the former Yugoslavia, where performance was the norm.  And today any actor who has performed both on stage and in films will say that there is a distinct difference, in that in the former case one interacts with an audience.  One can well imagine that at minimum epic reciters stressed particular words or phrases in accordance with the given audience’s circumstances.

            Moreover, presumably we have the texts of these poems in the first place because original audiences responded to them.  Some have held that the Athenian leader Pisistratus had them fixed in writing in the sixth century, B.C.E. (perhaps a century and a half after their primary composi­tion), feeling that they were important to the culture of at least Athens.  If so, granted that our hard knowledge of the times is sketchy, it can hardly be true that his opinion was only recent, and that he rescu­ed Homer from supposed obscurity out of his personal interests.  Archaic Greece was not a time like ours when an author’s immortality is ensured by the technology of movable type (or its extension to electronic communication) once his or her work is published.  The immediate audi­ence was the agency to turn thumbs up or down, as the case may be.

            For such reasons as these, my effort herein is to recover the experience of the most aware members of the earliest audiences of the Works and Days to the extent possible.  As a cor­ol­lary, I take their consciousness insofar as it can be estimated to constitute the primary arbiter of disputes over what its words and phrases mean.  Naturally, this is an open-ended (some will say “subjective”) criterion, since different members of an audience then, as now, presumably had different prior conditioning, attentiveness, and native intelligence.  Still, one can believe that the general level of receptivity to oral poetry was higher than in our “inoralate” (or “inauralate”) age, when invention of writing has led to the atrophy of listening skills.  In any case, it is the experience of those audience members who were well attuned that I am interested in understanding.[2]

 

Genre: didacticism versus epic in language.

            It is generally thought that the Iliad and the Odyssey coalesced in essentially the form in which we have them in the mid to late eighth century, B.C.E., as the endpoint of a long oral tradition about the Trojan and other wars.   Perhaps as late as the mid seventh the Hesiodic works arose, one suspects after a shorter gestation period as noted above.  (We can be fairly sure that at least close precursors of our Iliad, Odyssey, and Theogony -- whether the latter was by the same “Hesiod” at a younger age, or another person or collective -- came before our Works and Days.  This is especially because Richard Janko’s 1982 study shows that the statistical incidence of ten different slowly decaying linguistic archaisms in the texts as we have them is what one would expect of their composition in that temporal order.)  The times were marked by expansion of the Greek world geographically and economically, producing opportunities for contact with other cul­tures as well as the interest and wherewithal to absorb what they had to offer.[3]

            These opportunities bore fruit in the area of literature:  It has long been known that con­tacts with the Near East influenced the Homeric poems.  For example, Achilles and his comrade Patroclus are arguably indebted to Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu in Sumero-Babylonian epic.  As to Hesiod, in the twentieth century scholars such as Peter Walcot showed that the Theogony betrays the influence of Akkadian creation myth; the Works and Days, Near Eastern wisdom literature.  Near the end of the century West brought the question up to date.  The discovery of such borrowings has undoubtedly reinforced the general feeling that the Works and Days itself constitutes wisdom literature, often with the further assumption that it is a more or less literal record of advice to its nominal addressee, the author’s brother (with asides to certain “kings”).  At first sight it appears to be very different from the poems of epic proper, so that one might believe it is only epic in that it used the metrical form popular at the time of composition.[4]

            The upshot is that most today think of the work in terms of its superficial appearance as what West calls “a poem of exhortation and instruction, moral, ethical, and practical.”  As a corol­lary, since didactic literature is not generally held to be aesthetically interesting, classicists are more apt to use the poem’s citations as evidence for given aspects of material culture in the early archaic period than to study it for its contribution to culture.[5]

            But in the first place, as Verdenius in particular has suggested against West, this is to belit­tle the poem’s long known indebtedness to Greek epic not only in meter, but in language.  It has been understood since the nineteenth century (since expanded upon by several authors including West himself) that there is a good deal of language in Hesiod which appears also in Homer, both insofar as the poems are in a common dialect and, at the next simplest level, in the matter of repe­t­i­tive word formations.  These so-called “formulae” include the well known phrase consisting of a noun and an epithet (“fleet-footed Achilles,” “rosy-fingered Dawn,” “winged words,” etc.) as well as other types:  The leading authority Bryan Hainsworth lists examples from a typical Iliad passage including, among others, the prepositional phrase such as “in (one’s) heart”; the half-verse expression such as “since anger fell onto his spirit”; double epithet like “elder horsedriving,” applied to any one of several heroes; more complex patterns such as the word nēpios (“fool” in the sense of being childish) beginning a verse, followed by a clause detailing in what way the given person is foolish; and even a series of particles like ei men dē (“if,” followed by two entities with context-dependent significations).  And in fact, not only epic proper but every part of the Works and Days contains such expressions.  As an example involving Pandora again, after Zeus’s speech promising to create the evil which will prove to be her, the audience hears:[6]

 

                        So he said, and the father of men and gods laughed out (loud).

(v. 59)

This striking verse may draw on as many as three attested epic formations: (1) The (ubiquitous) opening phrase and “father of men and gods” also occur together in “so she said, and the father of men and gods did not disregard her” after a speech by Hera (where “did not disregard” is also a standard phrase).  (2) After Odysseus spoke on one occasion, “so he said, and (his maids) laughed.”  (3) Hector’s baby cried, “and his father laughed out (loud).”[7]

            Moreover, as Joseph Russo’s review points out, epic has yet other relevant phenomena which such a discussion tends to neglect, especially, the similarly sounding, metrically compatible word groups sometimes called “analogical formulae.”  Already in 1928 Milman Parry’s pioneering study of “formulaic” phenomena gave examples of such phrases, e.g.,”the sweet smell envelop­ed” Odysseus (amphēluthen hēdus aütmē) versus “a feminine cry envelops” him (amphēluthe thēlus aütē), both expressions verse-ending with metrical value __ __ vv __ vv __ x (see the Appendix for definitions).  As for Hesiod, Pandora again provides a good example:  She opened the famous jar (it only became a “box” in modern times) at v. 94 by “taking away the jar’s great lid” (pithou mega pōm’ aphelousa).  This phrasing is clearly related to the statement that, to get a cup to make a libation on behalf of Patroclus before his final battle, Achilles “removed the lid from his chest” (chēlou d’ apo pōm’ aneōiga), both verse-ending with meter __ __ vv __ vv __ x .  Indeed, our poem is full of phrases related to epic in like manner.[8]

            In fact, Hesiod’s language is thoroughly epic, as G. P. Edwards especially argued in 1971 with respect to such phenomena and others (as against earlier opinions such as that there was a “mainland” tradition distinct from the Ionian-composed Homeric poems).  To be sure, from time to time before and since then commentators have argued from internal evidence that there was a specifically didactic tradition prior to Hesiod, which was not epic in thrust even if it was in meter.  However, their examples can invariably be explained without such an assumption.[9]

            That is to say, the vocabulary of Homer and Hesiod alike in effect consisted, not only of words, but of all manner of metrically conditioned word patterns.  In fact these are not simply a matter of a style which supposedly characterized oral performance, whatever may be their roots in that mode of discourse, but are basic to the language.  And just as an individual word evokes an image in a language construed as a prose sequence of words, so does a metrically-defined phrase in Homeric/Hesiodic poetry evoke an image.  That being the case, two further points are to be made.

            First, the phrase’s image need not necessarily reduce to the sum of the images its indivi­dual words would evoke separately.  This point was well made in 1982 for the particular case of the noun-epithet phrase by Paolo Vivante, arguing in a literary-critical mode, and has since been stated more generally by others with a more conventional philological orientation.  That is to say, e.g., “fleet-footed horses” evokes an image with components broader than speed.  (Indeed, a superficially incongruent event like this image losing a race is not necessarily a problem.)  And while it is sometimes suggested that there are fewer “irrational” epithets in the Works and Days, neither in its case should we look primarily to superficially descriptive value to determine the poetic function of a phrase, e.g., as when the poet speaks of when to yoke the “fleet-footed horses” along with other animals (v. 816), given that horses play no role in the rest of the poem.[10]

            Second, there is the question of allusion.  When can we say that the presence of two sim­i­lar phrases in separate texts constitutes a deliberate allusion by one to another (or both to a third case in a text now lost), and when is it merely a matter of poets employing the same language whose components consist of such phrases, so that they are used with no more thought than are individual words in a prose language?  Pucci has discussed this problem for relations within the Homeric corpus, and says that allusion exists when certain criteria are met: rarity of the word formation; that it be “marked;” that there be “specificity of context, exclusivity of theme;” and that an actual textual reason exists for the allusion.  Here one can quibble that the inclusion of “rarity” seems to assume that earlier peoples found repetition as tedious as do we, a doubtful proposition, and also that often one can be pretty certain from, say, the “marked” character of the repetition that it constitutes an allu­sion even if the “textual reason” cannot be discovered.  But with these reservations his approach seems sensible.  As one example among many between Hesiod and Homer, before Zeus details the evil he will have the gods create, he tells Prometheus:[11]

 

                                                   “you rejoice at stealing fire and at beguiling my mind

                                                   -- and at great pain for yourself and for men to come,”

(vv. 55-6)

and goes on to say that he will make men an evil they will nonetheless love (57-8), i.e., what will prove to be woman, and then to give his “last laugh” noted above (59). That is, Zeus says, your joke is on you. Compare this with Hector chastising his brother Paris for bringing Helen to Troy:

 

                                                   “ ... you brought (home) a beautiful woman

                                                   from a far land, the daughter-in-law of warrior men

                                                   -- and great pain for your father, your city, and all your people.”

(Il. 3.48-50)

The common occurrence of the standard expression “great pain” (mega pēma, in the same verse position) would not be particularly noteworthy of itself, but what is “marked” is that fact combined with the bitterly humorous tag line, that the addressee’s activity in doing A will also do B to his cost. “Exclusivity of theme” pertains in that both segments deal with the matter of woman. The common generalizing sentiment, that a selfish individual act will affect all, also seems relevant. Thus, what­ever the “textual reason,” a specific relation is difficult to deny. If, further, we accept the relative dating of the Works and Days as the later of the two, this means that Hesiod here alludes directly to (at least a close precursor of) Homer.

 

            Of course, from the standpoint of audience-oriented hermeneutics the question is not whether the author alludes to another author, or the text to another text, but whether the aware mem­bers of the audience specifically recalled earlier uses of a given phrase, or at least exper­i­enced an image which earlier uses evoked without particularly thinking about it.  In the example just cited, probably everyone who remembered the Iliad was highly conscious of the allusion.  Dif­fer­ent­ly, a phrase occurring often in epic proper, say, “far-shooting Apollo,” will have been heard on a particular occasion where the phrase was used more as a general presence deriving from the more striking of other uses in the tradition, perhaps without specifically recalling a given instance (such as, in this example, the destruction of the Achaeans’ camp now cited near the beginning of the Iliad).  Still, the perception will have been of more than an anthropomorphic figure with bow and arrows.  A similar example between Hesiod and Homer is a set of phrases including “baneful war and dire battle,” which v. 14 says is stirred up by the baneful one of two Strife sisters; and 161, that it destroyed the hero race.  In fact “war and ... “ is invariably used in Homer as something to be disparaged, so that it will not have been necessary to recall a specific example for a member of Hesiod’s audience hearing the phrase to feel an aura of negativity.[12]

            Indeed, if a modern “inoralate” scholar can discover a given parallel through research, there were probably people in archaic Greece who noticed it instantly.  And the breadth of such par­allels leads one to suppose that the audience’s sensation in a given case was richly felt, not­with­standing the modern idea (implicit in the term “formula”) that repetition is simply tedious.

 

Genre: didacticism versus epic in composition.

            It might be thought that the collection of adages the traditional construal says our poem constitutes can use epic language as well as meter because it is available, without the fact meaning anything in itself.  But another issue is how the adages are assembled.  Proverbs 25-27 (a section sometimes asserted to be of early date) is a series of short aphorisms, perhaps with a tendency to be grouped by theme, but not partaking of anything one would call an intricate composition.  But can one say that of our poem?

            Consider composition within a single verse.  Richard Martin notes that the structure of a Hesiodic single-verse aphorism often has contrasting hemistiches.  For example:[13]

 

                        And give to one who gives,         and don’t give to one who doesn’t give.

(v. 354)

However, this division is not particularly opposed to epic:  The epic line is divided metrically by a caesura 99% of the time (see the Appendix), which indeed corresponds to Martin’s division in this case (kai domen hos ken dōi // kai mē domen hos ken mē dōi ), and the hemistiches are often at least of different content:  E.g., Agamemnon says of Achilles that the latter wants

 

                        to command all        but I think none of them will obey

(Il. 1.289)

(pasi de sēmainein,// ha tin’ ou peisesthai oïō).[14]

            Moreover, the Hesiodic line is much like the Homeric in the small fraction of cases where the main caesura itself is lacking (some 1% in Homer, but still important).  In fact most of these (85% in Homer) fall into a pat­tern whereby two caesurae occur at definite places, i.e., in the second and fourth feet of the line, respectively, to give three cola which turn out to have increa­sing lengths in the Greek.  Geof­frey Kirk in particular treats this verse type which he calls the “rising threefolder,” saying that it has a “more urgent, progressive or flowing effect” than does the stand­ard verse with caesura in the third foot, and is often “deliberately placed for climax or con­trast.”  E.g., in the first example of the caesura-less line in Homer, Agamemnon tells Achilles:[15]

 

                        either Ajax      or Idomeneus      or illustrious Odysseus

(Il. 1.145)

or you can return the captured girl (ē Aias    ē Idomeneus    ē dios Odusseus, __ __ __       __ __ vv __        __ __ vv __ x ).  And it has long been noticed that there are eighteen lines without the main cae­sura in our poem, of which most (twelve, or 67%) turn out to have the structure of three increasing cola.  For example, at harvest time you should no longer hoe your vines,

 

                        but your sickles    sharpen and    also your servants rouse

(v. 573)

for the harvest (all’ harpas    te charassemenai    kai dmōas egeirein, __ __ __         vv __ vv __         __ __ vv __ x).  In this particular example the verse in fact could have been reordered so as not to bridge the caesura, but as it is, the rhythm gets our attention after we have learned in a normal verse that we should desist from the vines, and before we are told over the next several normal verses to be up by dawn and work.[16]

            So our poet’s composition within a verse is about as epic as Homer’s.  What about larger structures?  Consider the type of enjambement which is not required by the syntax.  In an article first published in 1929 Parry noted that the Homeric poems have much more of this “unperiodic” enjambement than does later hexameter poetry, about a quarter of all lines as compared with an eighth in, e.g., Vergil’s Aeneid.  Again taking the beginning of the epic corpus as an example:[17]

 

                        The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleiades Achilles

                        baneful, which gave countless woes to the Achaeans.[18]

(Il. 1.1-2)

(I.e., sing, goddess, the baneful wrath of Peleiades Achilles, which ... ).  Since “baneful” is a descriptive adjective, the first verse could stand alone, but the poet instead opts to build a couplet.

            Here it is important to see that, although one can attempt to explain this phenomenon negatively, as in Parry’s own conclusion that it follows from the supposed oral character of Homeric verse, in fact it plays a positive aesthetic role.  This type of enjambement allows the poet to achieve what Kirk calls “cumulation” of further thoughts.  Or as Vivante puts it, “there is an inti­macy of connection” when successive thoughts are mediated by a runover word.  In the cited example, we feel that banefulness is what gave the woes, even though the formal subject of the clause is “wrath” in the previous line.  Notice that the effect pertains because the runover is not syntactically necessary:  The sequel verse has an integrity it would lack if some actually essential element were held over.  Moreover, the effect is enhanced when, as often, the runover word or phrase is followed by a relative pronoun introducing a new clause, e.g., “which” in the above exam­ple of Il. 1.2.  Vivante explains this as a matter of the poet wanting the runover to be the effective subject of the next clause:  The banefulness is to give woes to the Achaeans.  It cannot do so formally since it is syntactically tied to the previous line, but “which” achieves the same effect since that is “intimately connected” to the adjective.  In short, the effective subject of the second line of such a pair is smuggled in via a combination of devices, allowing two separate thoughts to flow smoothly from one to the other.  One hardly notices the verse boundary.[19]

            As for Hesiod, our poem and the Theogony have statistically the same frequencies of the various types of enjambement as does Homer overall (if there are differences in some of its individual sections).  This was originally shown by Edwards in terms of Parry’s three categories: no enjambement, essential enjambement, and the “unperiodic” enjambement under discussion, and is essentially borne out when improved categorizations are used.  Moreover, our poem has cases where a runover word or short phrase is followed by a relative pronoun, and the effect is similar to Il. 1.1-2.  E.g., under the influence of the good Strife goddess,[20]

 

                        anyone yes wants to work, watching another

                        (who is) wealthy, who is eager to plow and plant

(vv. 21-2)

and order his estate (23).  Just as Homer surreptitiously has us sense that banefulness caused the woes, here we feel that the person who is wealthy is one who is eager to plow, etc.

            Thus Hesiod’s small scale composition is comparable to Homer’s.  Moreover, the situation is similar when we consider actual sections.  In particular, just as with the ABBA form of classical music, the archaic Greek poets were fond of “ring composition,” i.e., structures where the end in some sense recalls the beginning.  The point has been extensively discussed for Homer, and to some extent with Hesiod.  For example, both the agricultural portion as a whole of the Works and Days, vv. 383-617 and the section running from 564 approximately to its end have convincingly been argued to constitute rings. For example, the latter section consists of five seg­ments: 564-70, about vine-pruning; 571-81, harvesting; 582-96, summer; 597-608, threshing; and 609-14a (I take 614b-17 to constitute a coda to the entire agricultural portion), viticulture.  As Jean-Claude Riedinger observes, there is an “exterior circle” comprising the first and fifth seg­ments, concerned with vines; an “interior circle” for the second and fourth, with grain; and a “moment of rest” in the third.[21]

            Or, there are narrative passages whose structures resemble some in Homer.  For example, the beginning of the concrete treatment of agriculture runs:

 

                        Just at the point that the force of the piercing sun ceases

                        its sweltering heat, with the autumn rain

                        of mighty Zeus, and afterwards a mortal’s body turns

                        much lighter, for right then the star Sirius

                        only little over the head of nurtured-for-doom humans

                        goes by day -- though yes he partakes more of night;

                        at that point (or: at the point that?) most worm-free is by-iron cut

                        wood, and it pours leaves to earth and stops making shoots;

                        well then cut wood, bearing in mind your task(s?) for the time.

(vv. 414-22)

A full commentary on this passage (including discussion of the noted uncertainties) will be given in Chapter 5 below, but for the moment one may note that it contains eight lines (albeit divided into two segments of six and two, respectively) which concern a situation in nature confronting a per­son at a certain time of year, followed by a single verse concerning the person’s suggested response (which to be sure, will be expanded upon by way of specification in the sequel).  That form itself is reminiscent of the extended simile featured in the Iliad, where several lines on something transpiring in nature (e.g., a lion killing a farm animal), are followed by a line or two on human activities (e.g., Achilles kills a Trojan, also often expanded upon in the sequel).[22]

            As a different type of example, we will see in Chapter 6 that the powerful description of the North Wind’s effects on various creatures in winter, given in sequence, sounds rather like Diomed­es or Achilles laying waste to the Trojan army.

 

Genre: discrete lessons versus continuous narrative.

            But, it might be said, the description of the North Wind is only one passage, and a “digression” from primarily prescriptive content at that.  Is not the Works and Days a collection of statements on different subjects (Prometheus and Pandora, justice, agriculture, sailing, and so on)?  Even if it uses epic conventions in its composition of verses and individual sections, if we look at the forest rather than the trees how can such a piece be compared with a continuous narrative of events such as the Iliad constitutes?  In the nineteenth century this disconnectedness was elevated to a principle, culminating in Adolph Kirchhoff’s view that the poem constituted eight originally independent “admonish-songs” which were only assembled by some redactor after the fact.  This approach retained influence throughout the twentieth century, in that the “sections” were considered entities unto themselves, suitable for individual exegesis in isolation from the rest of the poem.  Thus literally volumes have been written interpreting the Prometheus-Pandora myth, not to mention comparisons of the “justice” discussion with the Old Testament prophets, and (to be sure, fewer) interpretations of the agricultural and/or sea-faring portions, almost always without regard to how the section under discussion might play a role in the overall poem.  The trend reached its cul­mination with Walter Nicolai’s 1964 breakdown of the work into successively finer sub-divisions, each given a high degree of presumed reality.[23]

            However, one reviewer at the time felt that Nicolai’s schema had about as much in common with Hesiod’s poem as did “a lecture hall with a cowshed.”  Perhaps at minimum the sections are not as sharply divided as it seems.  More generally, we have to ask if it is possible that the appar­ent­ly discrete nature of Hesiod’s poem is underlain by something coherent in nature.  To this end, considering the question first in literary-theoretical terms, the epic form can be defined in such a way as not to preclude a set of nominally distinct pieces.  This point has been made particularly with regard to Walt Whitman (whose contemporary Edmund Stedman in fact called him “our old American Hesiod, teaching us works and days”) and to the debt of American poets to him.  James Miller holds that Leaves of Grass is a “lyric epic,” i.e., a “long poem (formed) out of a sequence of subtly related lyric moments.”  For example, after beginning (apart from some preliminaries) the work with “Song of Myself,” the poet proceeds to “Children of Adam,” a process of first defining his voice and then placing it in a context.  A relation is clear in spite of the distinct nature of the two indi­vidual poems.  Such a pattern, Miller says, is later followed in extended opera including Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, and others.  In treating the Whitman heritage with many of the same poets, Jeffrey Walker adds that each has an underlying agenda of moral education, which certainly sounds like Hesiod.[24]

            A different model:  If anyone today is an American Hesiod it is Jared Carter, an important poet of rural subjects whose work even includes an essay on Hesiod.  He has one 520-line poem of rustic orientation (Hesiod’s being perhaps 825 after some interpolations are subtracted) for which the designation “small scale epic” might not be out of place.  Namely, it relates the speaker’s tra­vails wherein he was disabled by an accident resulting from an attempt to scavenge wood at an abandoned farm, was denied help by a woman he had mistreated upon his return from war several years previously, and was eventually rescued after being discovered in aerial photographs taken by authorities searching for a serial killer.  Here a variety of subjects of contemporary relevance are integrated into a single narrative, with ethical overtones.[25]

            As for our poem, in the first place its disjointedness is at least ameliorated by the principle Verdenius’s watershed 1962 article calls “association of ideas.”  Namely, the end of each nominally separate section is joined to the beginning of the next by means of a common motif or concept.  For example, a segment on the proper means of sacrificing to the gods (vv. 335-41), entailing the idea of a meal, leads to a mini-essay on the treatment of neighbors (342-52) where the first verse is on who to invite to dinner.

            Moreover, although it is not commonly recognized as such, Verdenius’s point is actually one aspect of the more general principle that the sections usually lack precise beginnings and endings.  For example, much ink has been spilt over the boundary between the first and second parts of the poem: whether 381-2 (“do thus” and work if you want riches) belong with their ante­cedent or their sequel; however, in that case even Nicolai is forced to admit that the couplet’s role is ambiguous in this respect.  In fact, in demanding that a boundary verse belong to either its antecedent or its sequel, scholars have been unconsciously applying a model of a professor’s outline for a lecture to a class (or of a Renaissance portrait or classical musical composition).  The real world which our poem and other works of art endeavor to reflect, however, lacks sharp edges.  (Therefore, so do French Impressionist paintings and most twentieth century tone poems.)  The boundary between earth and sea, for example, shifts with the tides.  The point need not be taken to the length of denying the poem’s sectionization itself (the earth and sea are definite entities after all), but we should only speak of a boundary verse’s location in a section heuristically.  Thus Donald Sheehan, criticizing “Cartesian” construals of our poem’s structure, offers the interesting interpretation that it is composed of “lexical webs.”[26]

            But the poem’s coherence goes beyond smoothing transitions.  A point not taken into account in proposals such as Sheehan’s is that, as has increasingly been noticed, numerous motifs or concepts in the first part of the work at least have affinities with corresponding forms in the later portions.  For example, Maria Marsilio points to a parallel between the Pandora passage and some details in the description of the maiden who stays inside her mother’s house and is protected from the North Wind which devastates everything else (vv. 519-24).  For his part, aside from noting such motifs as the jar Pandora opens recurring toward the end of the “Days” section, Hamilton even finds a good deal of the structure of sections of the poem up to 382 reiterated (sometimes in reverse order) in sections thereafter.[27]

            Such points give impetus to a set of proposals of long standing, whereby one or another of the narratives of the first part of the poem are thought to determine it as a whole:  The second half is held to constitute a working out of the consequences of the narrative in question.  For example, it has often been thought that the Pandora narrative explains the need to work, an activity with which the second half is concerned.  Of course these proposals are frequently subject to criticism (e.g., the Pandora narrative itself stresses disease, not labor), but the general idea has emerged that the first half of the poem, all or in part, is in some way introductory to the second.  We recall that, while the Iliad as a whole is a ring structure, it certainly involves linear development as well, what would call the “plot” if it were a novel, or at the level of subtext, a drive toward the death of Achilles (not realized in the poem itself, but cited, e.g., in the Odyssey).[28]

            To be sure, apart from the details of just what leads to what (to be discussed in the reading below), there is a certain tendency here to see the direction of the poem’s overall linear develop­ment as negative, as if the later part of the poem merely listed examples to illustrate the fundamental principles thought to populate the earlier part; however, I believe that this assignment of priority is incorrect.  It is in accord with the trend that until quite recently far more scholarly attention has been devoted to narratives such as the Pandora story than to those such as the devastation wrought by the North Wind.  But it seems to me that the point of the poem is its second half.  Of course, in the final analysis it is the reading itself which will show this, as well as the assertion that the poem does not merely constitute disconnected didactic material.

 

Poetics: tradition and individuality; nature as object or medium of participation?

            Enough has been said here to claim that the formally injunctive character of much of the Works and Days cannot be its raison d’être.  Surely that is no more its defining characteristic than is the Iliad simply a war story, or the Odyssey a tale of a hero’s adventures on his way home.  We readily understand that the formally temporal-narrative character of the latter two works is but a scaffolding supporting structures which proposed timeless verities to the Greeks.  The really inter­est­ing questions are not who won the war or how Odysseus defeated the Cyclops, but issues like whether the anticipated death of Achilles makes men more noble than gods or simply pitiable fig­ures, or whether disguise or revelation of identity is a fundamental principle of the world.  In that context, when as noted above Hesiod adds the previously unmentioned horses to oxen and mules, to be yoked on a certain day of the month as a matter of “advice,” are we to say that he is simply correcting an earlier omission?  Surely, rather, at that point in the poem he needs to make a general implication -- perhaps that all domestic animals are meant to serve humans in the nat­ure of things.  After all, no one seriously believes Vergil’s Georgics reduces to a farmer’s alma­nac, and it draws on our poem, so why should we automatically construe the latter in such a way?  (Thus to her credit, Stephanie Nelson treats the texts of Hesiod and Vergil in comparable terms, refu­sing to consider either as any kind of handbook in exploring their underlying “metaphysics.”)[29]

            Of course, if one is to go beyond scaffolding with Hesiod’s poetry (whether or not his metaphysics) there needs to be some sort of guiding poetics.  While the poem has affinities with epic proper, and while one assumes it has some overall “vision,” that cannot be the latter’s.  It is different not in that the formal injunctive mode makes up much of it (Homer’s characters after all issue orders to one another), but in that, particularly in its later sections, it is directly engaged with the here and now, as opposed to the deeds of past individuals.  How are we to approach the poem with this in mind?

            John Miles Foley has written at some length on the difference between the poetics required for “oral-derived” poetry such as Homer’s and the poetics with which one is accustomed to treat modern poetry.  In the latter, he says, one focusses on the text under study in itself, but in the for­mer so much weight accrues to past meanings of traditional phrases that it is impossible to isolate the text from that tradition to any degree (compare the discussion of “far-shooting” Apollo above).  It is possible to think that he overstates the contrast:  Modern poets are certainly con­s­cious of the tradition in which they stand, and in an example like Hart Crane’s relation to Whit­man one can make a case that a discussion of The Bridge which ignores Leaves of Grass is incom­pe­tent.  Nor is the point absent from theoretical discussions of poetics, as critics from T. S. Eliot to Har­old Bloom bear out.  Still, one can see what Foley is talking about.  In William Carlos Wil­liams’s for­mulation, the importance of a poem is “in the minute organization of the words and their relation­ships in a composition ... -- not in the sentiments, ideas, schemes portrayed.”  Evi­dently, if one puts past tradition in the category of the mental abstracted from the verse itself, as a subtext (the “ideas”), then according to WCW it is not the important point.  In contrast, with the Iliad’s rel­ation to the epic tradition we deal with its position in a “supertext,” not its relation to a “subtext.”[30]

            However, surely the relation of the Works and Days to the epic tradition will turn out to be different simply because of the difference between their respective concrete concerns.  Foley acknowledges that what he calls “traditional” poetics works best when one speaks of a common “generic fit.”  When that is present one can even relate the poem in question to those in other cul­tures, e.g., the Odyssey as an example of “The Return Song,” found also in Serbo-Croatian epic.  He says that it is thereby a “metonymy” of the tradition generally.  But in Hesiod’s case, if we are to the use the name of a standard figure to describe the relationship to the tradition, “irony” is more apt.  This is perhaps not so much so with an example like Zeus’s speech to Prometheus cited above (where the general tone and use of standard expressions are hardly different from many of the addresses of Homer’s characters to one another), but it is another matter when we come to something the north wind Boreas’s rampage:[31]

 

                        He through horse-breeding Thrace, the broad sea

                        blowing on, stirs it up; and earth and forest groan (or: huddle together?):

                        many     high-leafed oaks     and thickset firs

                        in mountain glens he brings to much-nourishing earth,

                        falling on them, and then all the numberless forest resounds;

                        and beasts shudder, and put their tails between their legs,

(vv. 507-12)

and so on for several more verses.  It will be noted when we study this passage in Chapter 6 that much of it is epic in language, including “high-leafed oaks” conditioning a three-fold line also in Homer, and a reference of what is literally “put their tails under their genitals” to “put a child under my belt” in the Hymn to Aphrodite.  Indeed, some of the language is featured in Homer’s nature similes.  But one cannot avoid the fact that Homer is not actually confronting nature in the similes and other descriptions, but uses it as a foil to describe his heroes from the distant past while Hesi­od is telling us to deal with it.  It is one thing if high-leafed oaks were once felled to build Patroclus’s funeral pyre; it is another if one falls on you.  The fact that Aphrodite once had sex is different from the possibility that you may never have it if you do not protect your organs.  One can use the Homer­ic similes as James Redfield has done, as evidence for a reading of the Iliad as a relation of culture to nature.  Still, that is at a remove from Homer’s audience, whereas Hesiod’s must them­selves wage the war between the two entities.[32]

            Clearly, some modification of Foley’s poetics is needed to deal with the Works and Days.  On the one hand, one must study the internal connections of the poem in WCW’s sense, but with these extended to include connections to the epic supertext, the collection of hexameter poetry of which our poem is a member in a more integral sense than, say, any “lyric epic” tradition including Whitman, Pound, and Olson.  On the other, while this study will be with a view to uncovering Hesi­od’s particular “epic vision,” the expectation must be that that will turn out to be different from Homer’s.  Of course one must avoid taking the difference to be that between wisdom literature and telling a story, for all the reasons noted above.

            Specifically, since the difference will be in our poem’s relation to quotidian reality, in particular to nature, one must ask how the poetry of nature composed in the cultural and intellectual circumstances likely to have characterized early archaic Greece should be discussed.  As a concrete example, we may ask what poetics will assist us in interpreting Hesiod’s advice to

 

                        take note when you hear the voice of the crane,

                        of the yearly screeching from high in the clouds,

(vv. 448-9)

then to take this revelation to be a sign to plow, and then to do various things (in a mini-essay on the need for organized work, extending to 457).  To traditional interpreters the crane’s cry in this example is a static signal, that it is time to plow (and Leonard Lutwack’s recent work on birds in general literature endorses this view of the philologists in the one place he cites our poem).  But can we really believe Hesiod or his audience thought of the cry as we do of an alarm clock?[33]

            As background to this question, it seems plausible to me that poetry is a category older than prose, if not as old as music.  Studies of the poetry of hunter-gatherer cultures appear to relate what one might call lyric to the essentially religious phenomenon of chant, although tribal “prose” narratives at least in some cases can be broken into strophe- and verse-like structures.  On the other hand, today there are musicians and biologists alike who believe that some animals (parti­cularly songbirds and humpback whales) have what can be meaningfully called music.  Thus one model of how human voice actions evolved would be that, whether in Homo sapiens proper or some precursor, music (probably together with dance) emerged, from which poetry eventually became abstracted by dispensing with variable pitch but not with meter, and then ordinary speech by losing the meter.  From this point of view, the occurrence of metrical features in narrative is a vestigial phenomenon, as is Greek epic bards singing their poetry.[34]

            All this is relevant to Hesiod in that people in tribal cultures believe they are part of nature, and in that the civilizing influence of the Bronze Age in Greece is unlikely to have altered this consciousness in a place like rural Boeotia in the eighth and seventh centuries.  Thus Hesiod and his audience most likely felt that they were having a conversation with the crane of v. 448 to receive its wisdom.  (As is now generally recognized, even Homeric poetry retained something of a belief in the divine nature of birds.)  Put differently, given that the poet has a hawk call a nightingale a “poet” or “singer” (aoidos, in Homer an epic bard) in the first half of the work, he probably feels that he is translating the crane poet with the aid of the Muses.  After all, its message is evocative (“high in the clouds,” along with other points to be covered in Chapter 5).[35]

            Thus it may not be too much to say that Hesiod felt nature to be his partner in giving the poem:  There are several voiced creatures in the second half of the poem, as well as other animals with a degree of evident symbolic import, and as will be seen, in the winter section there is an over­tone of the addressee acting to protect Earth herself from the North Wind.  In any case, the poetry of at least the second half is to be interpreted as if the reciter and his audience were conscious of being part of nature as an alive entity, not just “matter” which must be bent to one’s will.  The pre­sence of the epic tradition is also everywhere marked (as is the ideology of the small land owner’s particular aspirations), but it will not do to reduce the poem to something which simply responds to Homer (nor to an expression of the material needs of a particular social class).

            That said, we are ready to proceed.  For convenience the following reading is divided into chapters, more or less in accord with the conventional sectioning of the poem, although as stres­sed above its divisions are to be considered imprecise.  (to Chap. 1)

 

NOTES: