Listening
to the Spider: reading Hesiod’s Works and Days
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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
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:
[1] Someone in the ancient world
appended a catalogue of bird omens after v. 828. It was rejected by later ancient critics, and
does not survive in what is transmitted to us.
West feels that, lacking the grounds for the ancient rejection, we have
no reason not to attribute it to Hesiod himself. But it seems to me that, lacking a text to
judge such things as style, we have no reason to do so. That the segment summarizes more than the
Days portion is argued in the next note.
[2] “Wherefore” in v. 826 is formally
a genitive demonstrative pronoun (taōn), and the standard
interpretation which takes the segment to conclude Days (cf. above, Chap. 10,
n. 40) proceeds from taking it literally, “of these,” referring to either the
“days” of 765-825 as a whole, or only those of the previous line which are like
either a stepmother or a mother.
However, reading it adverbially is perfectly natural (occurring often
with declensions of ho in epic).
Renehan decisively refutes a construal that the term is enjambed from
824 and does not begin a sentence. (He
himself, retaining the pronominal construal, connects the term with “blessed,”
and Arrighetti with “all this,” in the same line, but either reading of the
syntax seems strained.) Also, one would
expect a connective particle such as de if the segment were part of the
last section, but there is none. Most
construe “bird-omens” in 828 (as did whoever added the catalogue cited in the
last note), but the text in fact uses the term for “bird” proper (ornis)
whereas “bird-omen” is properly oiōnos (as at 801). At times Homer’s ornis is a bird of
omen but, except at Il. 24.219 (cf. above, Chap. 9, n. 33), its
character as such is supplied by the context.
[3] Halitharses: Od. 2.159;
transgressions: 3.206. Also,
verse-ending “without fault to the immortals” (anaitios athanatoisin)
may simply modify the second word of a standard expression, “blame the
blameless” (anaitios aitiaasthai/aitioōito/aitioōio),
ending Il. 11.654 (Patroclus says Achilles might do so), 13.775 (
[4] LaPenna: in the discussion of
Verdenius (1962, 170).
[5] A recent discussion of “Hesiodic
thought” is C. J. Rowe, JHS, 103 (1983), 124-35. The history of Greek philosophy per se most
sympathetic to including “Hesiod,” Olof Gigon, Der Ursprung der griechischen
Philosophie2 (Basel and Stuttgart, 1968), begins with a chapter
on “him” which largely amounts to treating the conceptual framework of the Theogony. Cerri’s article on the “four elements” in
early Greek thought (above, Chap. 9, n. 31) discusses (18-25) the relevant Theogony
passages, but does not consider the implicit symbolism of air, water and earth
at various places in our poem noted earlier.
I believe Leclerc (1984) falls into error in going beyond noting the
poet’s expertise with time (cf. above, Chap. 5, n. 4), to say that time
concepts are part of his actual agenda, e.g., that he wishes to conceptualize a
“calendar” as such in vv. 383-617. As
noted earlier (Chap. 2, n. 11), Will (cf. Cozzo) is concerned to refute an
older view that the poem is a response to an “agrarian crisis.” (David Tandy’s recent review of “who ‘Hesiod’
was,” Warriors and Traders, Berkeley, 1997, 205-8, concludes that the
poem reflects a “peasant” rather than “aristocratic” milieu, but I remain
persuaded that Will’s economic point is valid, irrespective of “Hesiod’s”
cultural or political outlook.)
[6] Plato: above, Chap. 3, ns. 4,
33. Aristotle: above, Chap. 4, n.
14. Plutarch on gods and action: above,
Chap. 5, n. 27. Athenaeus 63a. Plutarch on fig and crow: