The First Poets Read online

  When the poem acquired its title—which describes only two parts of it and therefore mis-describes the “whole”—is uncertain. The first written attestation appears in the second century AD. The text of the poem was unstable even then. The methodical traveller Pausanias not only passed by Askre: he was shown by the Boeotians further along, near Helicon, the text of the poem inscribed on a sheet of lead and even then clearly of considerable antiquity, damaged by time and weather. All this occurred not far from the reedy pool where Narcissus reflected on himself.

  Nietzsche was much taken by one particular observation of Pausanias. Not for nothing was Pausanias a recorder of every fact, for among the crowd of little irrelevant ones there is always the promise of a big one that makes a difference. “The Boeotians living around Helicon,” he reports, “hand down a tradition that Hesiod wrote nothing but the Works and Days; and even from that they take away the ‘Prelude to the Muses.’”13 Works and Days would start at what we now consider the eleventh line; the invocation to the Muses and the evocation of Zeus would vanish. This alternative poem plunges straight in to the matter of Eris, the last-born and most ambiguous of the children of Night.

  It looks like there’s not just one kind of Strife—

  That’s Eris—after all, but two on earth.

  You’d praise one of them once you got to know her,

  But the other’s plain blameworthy.14

  We begin, not with the formal throat-clearing of invocation, Nietzsche says, but with an assertion, “There are two Eris-goddesses on earth.” And from here begins the train of thought which shapes Nietzsche’s radical reading of Greek poetry. “This is one of the most remarkable of Hellenic ideas,” he says, “and deserves to be impressed upon newcomers right at the gate of entry to Hellenic ethics. ‘One should praise the one Eris as much as blame the other, if one has any sense; because the two goddesses have quite separate dispositions.’” He continues with his prose translation: “‘One promotes war and feuding, a cruel one, she is. No man likes her, but the yoke of necessity forces man to honour the heavy burden of this Eris according to the decrees of the gods. Black Night gave birth to this one as the older of the two; but Cronus’ son [Zeus], who reigns above us, placed the other on the roots of the earth and amongst men as a much better one. She drives even the unskilled man to work; and if someone who lacks property sees someone else who is rich, he likewise hurries off to sow and plant and set his house in order; neighbour competes with neighbour for prosperity. This Eris is good for men. Even potters harbour grudges against potters, carpenters against carpenters, beggars envy beggars and poets envy poets.’”15

  The duality of the figure of envious Eris, resolved into twins, the evil elder and the paradoxically benign younger, the spirit of rivalry and the spirit of competition: this is Hesiod’s way of defining and distinguishing human motives and, as it were, laying the thematic groundwork for the human plot. His brother Perses serves the first Eris: vindictive, covetous, and destructive, whereas Hesiod serves the second in his zeal, grudging generosity of spirit, and good husbandry.

  Homer is the father of the epic tradition. To Hesiod is attributed the paternity of another tradition. It is hard to define precisely what it is. As with Homer, there are two poems quite different in tone, matter, and manner. The modern poet-translator C. A. Trypannis uses the term “didactic epic.” Is this conflation of two terms that are tangential to one another of any real use? Is there anything epic about Works and Days? In ancient times didactic verse was sometimes regarded as epic of a kind, but a kind which excluded narratives of conflict. There is a sort of heroism in the everyday, humble man’s endurance of poverty and hardship, labour, and the absence of any durable rewards beyond survival. Such “heroism,” not of the classical hero but of the common man, is hardly “epic,” however, and there is no narrative or progression beyond the seasons. What is more, in Works and Days it is not unreasonable to see the conflation of three poems rather than a single poem, and in Theogony a mass of disparate material gathered and organised into a kind of theological anthology.

  The word “didactic,” on the other hand, gets us somewhere. The poems undeniably give practical advice and philosophical instruction. The Theogony tries to systematise legends of the gods, goddesses and their offspring and is an account of origins, the recurrent aetiologies that become the obsessive theme of the Alexandrian poets but are a continual concern in Greek verse from the beginning. Works and Days touches upon labour, the farmer’s calendar, and justice, with an uneasy appendix on seafaring and housekeeping. It includes myth, too, and fable. Beside the relative elevation of language in the Theogony, Works and Days stays close to the ground and gives us serious advice.

  Don’t piss standing up while facing the sun.

  Between sunset and sunrise, remember,

  Don’t piss on the road or on the roadside,

  Or naked. The blessed gods own the night.

  A religious man squats down, if he’s got any sense,

  Or he goes by the wall of an enclosed courtyard.16

  It is the kind of practical-spiritual counselling that proves how inseparable the physical is from the metaphysical world. We are always watched, we are always “performing,” and our performance—even the most fundamental—is judged:

  Don’t let your privates be seen smeared with semen

  Near the hearth at home. Be careful to avoid this.17

  The lines instruct us, and “we” are always men. In order to teach a wide band of men, the language chosen is less heightened, less deliberately rhetorical, than the language Homer uses in recounting heroic deeds or Hesiod in providing the gods with pedigrees. It may be remote from the language that a simple farmer working on the slopes of Mount Helicon might speak, but such a farmer, familiar with Homer’s verse, and with the local poet’s themes, would have no trouble in understanding it. This more relaxed, less decorous language allows a greater variety of specifically human, rather than Muse-dictated, tones. Rancour, pettiness, individual melancholy, Polonius-like pomposity, humour: all can be accommodated in the narrator’s voice, rather than being confined to the dramatis personae of the narrative. Tonal variations occur close together—he condescends to give advice, then suddenly he loses his temper—since consistency is not a rule Hesiod has to obey.

  … But if you bear false witness

  Or lie under oath, and by damaging Justice

  Ruin yourself beyond hope of cure, your bloodline

  Will weaken and your descendants die out. But a man

  Who stands by his word leaves a long line of kinfolk.

  Now I’m speaking sense to you, Perses you fool.

  It’s easy to get all of Wickedness you want.

  She lives just down the road a piece, and it’s a smooth road too.

  But the gods put Goodness where we have to sweat

  To climb to her. It’s a long, uphill pull

  And tough going at first. But once you reach the top

  She’s as easy to have as she was hard at first.18

  The ingredients of a speaking, satirical, iambic and finally comic verse (and comedy itself) are in the kernel of Hesiod’s generically indeterminate poems. It is odd that Aristotle in the Poetics makes no mention of Hesiod or his achievement.

  And the genre that Hesiod invents is the first to come, not from Ionia, but from the mainland of Greece itself. He does employ hexameters, like Homer, only they are (to use M. L. West’s candid phrase) “hobnailed.” Like Homer’s, his diction mixes various dialect elements, though—unsurprisingly—Boeotian elements are in the ascendant. Athenians of the fifth century BC saw the language as bucolic and comic. The style is that of the oral tradition, and no doubt the poem survived in an oral tradition, too, even though it may have been written down or (though this is mere conjecture) composed in written form. When an oral tradition makes the momentous transition to the leaden sheet or the page of parchment or papyrus, the poet or scribe is writing from the ear, as it were, rather than from th
e silence of earlier pages. The writing exists to score what is conceived as an adjunct to musically accompanied, and dance-accompanied, recitation.

  They say that at Delphi, at a poetic competition, Hesiod was disqualified because he could not play the harp. What does this tell us (assuming it is true)? That Hesiod practised a different kind of recitation, appropriate to a different genre of verse? This may be another of his virtues, and why his poetry is closer to speech than Homer’s: a lack of skill in one component area of the art led to the development of greater skill in another. Or he composed in writing and found the task of lifting the poem off the page with music too difficult, or at odds with the content of the poem. Or he played another instrument.

  Pausanias describes the statues of the poets at Thespiae, and he knows things about Hesiod which critics overlook.19 Here is Hesiod as a statue in a context of poets, and the statue, Pausanias is in no doubt, misrepresents him: “There are portraits dedicated of poets and other distinguished musicians,” he writes (and note how for him, in the second century AD, poets are musicians); “Thamyris is blind, touching at a broken harp, and Arion of Methymne is riding on a dolphin. The sculptor of the statue of Skadas of Argos, not knowing Pindar’s prelude about him, has made a wind-player with a body no bigger than his instrument. Hesiod sits holding a harp on his knees, not at all a proper adjunct for Hesiod: it is perfectly clear from his verses that he sang holding a wand of laurel.” Then he makes a comment with which every lover of poetry who has set critical or historical pen to paper will feel some sympathy: “I have made a deep study of the dates of Hesiod and Homer but I take no pleasure in writing about them, being familiar with the extraordinary censoriousness of pundits nowadays in the field of poetry.” And after that deeply felt aside, he continues with his catalogue: “Mystery is carved standing beside Orpheus the Thracian; all around him beasts in stone and bronze are listening to his song …”

  In the British Museum there are two heads thought to represent Hesiod, one in bronze—the younger man, lively and focussed—and one in marble, older, with a look of wise resignation, set on a pillar at eye-level so that he looks hauntingly into his interlocutor. Homer is to his right, with abundant and coiffed hair, a more elaborate wreath, sightless and listening.

  The texts of Hesiod, like those of Homer, were assembled between 800 and 600 BC. Robert Lamberton suggests that both Works and Days and the Theogony may have been “appropriated” and doctored for use in the festivals.20 It is possible, too, that the poems were composed for the festivals; Hesiod tells us he travelled to recite, and tradition insists that he performed, even in competition with blind Homer. In Works and Days the presence of Perses gives a dramatic frame to the didactic content. The poem is eminently suitable for a rural festival. The institution of the festival and of competition may have generated some of the formal elements and even imposed a Hesiodic identity on the reciter. Whether he was reciting his own poem or adapting a work of earlier composition we will know only if a variety of drafts can be found. The Egyptian desert is generous, but it is unlikely to yield Hesiod papyruses in quantity or in chronological order.

  “Homer and Hesiod were the first to compose Theogonies,” Herodotus says, “and give the gods their epithets, to allot them their several offices and occupations, and describe their forms; and they lived but four hundred years before my time, as I believe.” Four centuries seemed short to Herodotus because memory was strict and relatively stable. This had something to do with the Muses, for memory herself is their mother.

  Hesiod’s Theogony, an early formulation of Greek religion and the evolution of the gods, is particularly important in what it preserves. It is also in parts obscure and confusing. In the beginning was Chaos, a yawning chasm, a darkness or an absence of light, morally neutral and less sinister than Milton’s Chaos (Milton owes debts to Hesiod’s account). The earliest figures in the Theogony are not anthropomorphic deities like Zeus, who wins and becomes king of the gods in a third-generation struggle against his father. They are forces, rather: Chaos, then Earth, Tartarus (in the guts of Earth) and eventually, Eros, who emerges as a power of nature which begins to sort the chaotic, scattered elements into wholes and beings. The power of Eros keeps the new forms and beings together; gradually Cosmos becomes a possibility.

  Though Hesiod composed in the eighth century BC, the traditions he brings together in his poem have much earlier origins. His myth of creation and the succession of the gods has much in common with Hittite and earlier accounts, some dating back to Sumerian times. His chronological catalogues may be based in the succession myths of Mesopotamia: king lists, god lists, with origins and the occasional identifying epithet. His cosmic vision is a synthesis of received elements, though we have no way of knowing how these stories reached the farmer in Askre. He composed the poem, but his function, as he himself might have seen it, was more that of an editor than a maker, harmonising received material within a metrical construction. His function, if this was the case, would be analogous to that of Eros working on and through Chaos, making sense and shape of it. It is an apt analogy for what a poet with Hesiod’s ambitions was setting out to do.

  Chaos, Earth, Tartarus and Eros are entities, self-created and not in necessary relation to one another. From Chaos emerged Erebus and Night, from Night emerged Aether and Day. We are into material genealogies of the most cosmic sort in the Theogony. Earth first begets Uranus (Heaven), then Mountains and Pontus. After lying with her son Uranus, she brings forth six sons—Oceanus, Coeus, Hyperion, Crius, Iapetus, Cronus—and for the sake of symmetry, six daughters—Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys. These are the Titans and Titanesses.

  Endlessly fecund, Earth is delivered then of the Cyclops and the Hundred-handed. Uranus conceals them in the bowels of the Earth. Annoyed at their exclusion, she stirs them up against their father. Of all the Titans, Cronus loathes Uranus most intensely and sets out to punish him. He puts his father down with cruel violence, hacking off his testicles. From the mess emerges none other than Aphrodite:

  The genitalia themselves, fresh cut with flint, were thrown

  Clear of the mainland into the restless, white-capped sea,

  Where they floated a long time. A white foam from the god-flesh

  Collected around them, and in that foam a maiden developed

  And grew. Her first approach to land was near holy Kythera,

  And from there she floated on to the island of Cyprus.

  There she came ashore, an awesome, beautiful divinity.

  Tender grass sprouted up under her slender feet.21

  Cronus, learning that he himself is destined to die at the hands of his offspring, decides to devour them as they are born. His wife flees to Crete when the youngest, Zeus, is to be born, and Zeus survives, finally overthrowing Cronus and the Titans, liberating his swallowed siblings and himself becoming supreme.

  Hesiod is not Homer, and the strange creatures and gods that fight across the heavens are not as human as heroes, but the verse dealing with the conflicts is vigorous and in a different key, as it were, from the reflective and the aphoristic passages that surround it. The destruction feels quite close and real, and despite the absence of human scale and human interest, we experience something of the horror of this not unfamiliar kind of war. Modern technology has made Hesiod’s hyperboles comprehensible. And we have read of such things in Dante, Milton and Blake. And in the Apocalypse.

  Zeus rules wisely and is just. He is also irrepressibly fertile, fathering gods and heroes by different mothers and means. Athena was born out of his head after he had consumed her mother, Metis; Themis bore him Eunomia (Order), Dike (Justice) and Eirene (Peace), the three Fates. Another mother bore him the Graces; Demeter gave him ill-fated, almost-mortal Persephone. Part of Hesiod’s radicalism is in his insistence that dike is more important than time (honour) in the ordering of affairs in the age of Iron. His emphasis was to become that of the emerging civic units of Greece at large.

  Zeus slept with Mne
mosyne (Memory) for nine nights—he must have been in love to have stayed with her for such a long time—and set her apart from the other Immortals. She provided him with nine daughters, bearing them close to the summit of Olympus, near the houses of Grace and Desire. From our point of view, they are crucial children, the Muses: Cleio, Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polyhymnia, Urania and Calliope. The Muses inspire poets (Hesiod asks them to dictate to him: his modest ambition is to be their stenographer) but they also, Calliope in particular, legitimise the eloquence of kings.

  For she keeps the company of reverend kings

  When the daughters of great Zeus will honour a lord

  Whose lineage is divine, and look upon his birth,

  They distil a sweet dew upon his tongue,

  And from his mouth words flow like honey.22

  Hesiod’s ostensibly historical narration takes us from the beginning of creation to the very fringes of Homer’s Odyssey and the heroic world Hesiod never quite shares with his fellow-founder of Greek poetry, a world he describes but cannot enter. In the Theogony Hesiod is a seeming historian, but the real model for the divergent traditions of Greek historical writing is Homer.

  It is hard to see how a religious practice could be based on the Theogony, yet it is a kind of permanent point of religious reference and a text susceptible to multiple readings and perspectives. Because of its ambiguities and irresolutions, it gave rise, among its audiences and readers, to that busy and vexed form of humanity, the critic. One kind of critic is the king. In his Life of Theseus Plutarch quotes Hesiod’s lines about Theseus deserting Ariadne—“A passionate love for Aigle burned in his breast, / Panopeus’ daughter”—and reports that these lines were removed from Hesiod’s poem by no less a figure than Pisistratus, to “protect his ancestor.” The same tyrant inserted into Homer’s description of the underworld the verse “Theseus and Peri-thous, illustrious children of the gods,” in order to please the Athenians.23