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The interpretation of Hesiod, ‘Theogony’ 736ff
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2013
Extract
Gregory Vlastos, in his interesting review of Cornford's Principium Sapientiae, in Gnomon, XXVII (1955), pp. 65ff., gives a particularly bald statement (p. 74 and n. 2) of a theory advanced in an article by Friedrich Solmsen, ‘Chaos and Apeiron’, Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica, n.s. XXIV (1950), pp. 235ff., and by Hermann Fränkel in his Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechentums (New York, 1951), pp. 148–9. The theory is that Theogony 736–45 has a profound cosmogonical significance, and that it was probably from there that Anaximander derived and developed his idea of an originative ἄπειρον. Now the Hesiodic passage is one of a group of variant descriptions of Tartaros that extend, as an appendix to the Titanomachy, from 726 to 819. Many of these descriptions are mutually inconsistent, and, although I would not go quite so far as Jacoby (Hesiodi Carmina: pars I, Theogonia (Berlin, 1930), pp. 22 ff.) in asserting that they are certainly all later additions, most of them by different authors, it seems manifest that they cannot all be by the author of the Theogony as a whole—even accepting that this poem is to some extent a synthesis, not always elegant or consistent, of previous accounts. At all events no other part of the poem, including the cosmogony and theogony of 116 ff., manifests the piecemeal, repetitive and contradictory qualities of this series of descriptions of Tartaros. For example, 726–45 describes the underworld, and it is there that the halls of Night are located; but at 746 ff. there is a sudden transition to the far west, the region where Atlas stands and where Night exchanges with Day. Solmsen (op. cit. p. 243, n. 2) tries to defend this unaccountable and irrelevant switch by showing that Night, earlier in the poem, is associated with the western parts of the earth, but is also a product of Chaos in the cosmogony of 116 ff. Yet this consideration, although it provides a sufficient motive for an irrelevant rhapsodic elaboration of the kind that Jacoby posited, really does nothing to support unity of authorship for the two adjacent passages. I agree with Jacoby, then, that what we are presented with in this part of the Theogony is a farrago of rhapsodic variants, juxtaposed inconsistently (for the most part) by the most mechanical principles, on the central theme of Tartaros.
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- Research Article
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- Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 4 , January 1957 , pp. 10 - 12
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- Copyright © The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press 1957
References
page 11 note 1 In spite of Solmsen's observation that the bowl of the sky seems to meet the edge of the earth-disc at the horizon.
page 11 note 2 Cf. e.g. Solmsen, op. cit. p. 238: ‘If verses 116ff. do not teach that the world arises out of the original Chaos, our passage [sc. 736–45] does assert this…’; Vlastos, op. cit. p. 74: ‘…the notion that the great masses of the physical universe—Earth, Sea, Sky, Air—arose from an undifferentiated primal state…this can be found in Hesiod's “Theogony”…at v. 736ff.….’
page 12 note 1 The only earlier instance cited in L.S.J, s.v. πηγή II, 2 is Aesch, . Pers. 743 Google Scholar. A glance at this line, νῦν κακῶν ἔοικε πηγὴ πᾶσιν ηὑρῆσθαι φίλοις, shows that the meaning is not, as L.S.J. thinks, an ‘origin’ of evils, but a continuing fountain or stream of evils that does not dry up. The metaphorical sense of ‘origin’, which is common in Plato, is better illustrated in the next citation in L.S.J., though even there the meaning could be similar to that of the Aeschylean passage: Xen, . Cyr. VII, 2, 13 Google Scholar αἱ τέχναι, ἃς πηγάς φασι τῶν καλῶν εἶναι.
page 12 note 2 A study of the lexicography of πηγή shows that in epic it is regularly used in the plural, meaning simply ‘streams’: so, for example, in the other use of the word in the Theogony, 1. 282 Google Scholar Ὠκεανοῦ παρὰ πηγάς. This use is sometimes retained in tragedy; cf. n. on 1. 410 in D. L. Page's Medea. Meaning ‘fountain’, ‘ever-flowing source’, whether concretely or metaphorically, πηγή is common in fifth-century literature, especially in Aeschylus and Pindar, πηγαί at Theogony 738 exemplifies this later use, not the epic use, and thus provides further confirmation of the comparatively late origin of the passage in which it occurs.
page 12 note 3 Even apart from the failure of the main comparison between the ‘great gulf’ and Anaximander's ἄπειρον, Vlastos's parallels between the two ( Gnomon, XXVII (1955), p. 74, n. 2Google Scholar), some of which are also adduced by Solmsen, are not strikingly persuasive. The gulf is said to resemble the Indefinite because it is vast; windy and therefore in perpetual motion; source of earth, sky, sea, air; immortal because these are ‘immortal gods’. Nevertheless, I would not deny that Anaximander's concept may have had something in common with concepts that gave rise to the different descriptions of Tartaros in the Theogony: see now my remarks in Kirk, and Raven, , The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 24–31 Google Scholar. I notice, incidentally, that one of Vlastos's arguments (op. cit. p. 75 n.) against the interpretation of Chaos at Theogony 116 as the gap between earth and sky is based upon an extreme unitarian view of the composition of the Theogony, even though Vlastos himself had admitted on the previous page that 11. 736 ff. might be an addition by a later poet: for he asks how the Chaos of 116 could be between earth and sky, if it is beneath earth, in the form of the χάσμα μέγ', at 740. This seems to reveal some inconsistency of criteria.