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‘Archaic thought’ in Hesiod

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2013

C. J. Rowe
C. J. Rowe
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
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Extract

It is ‘commonly asserted’, says G. S. Kirk, and ‘almost universally assumed’, that Hesiod came ‘at the point of transition from mythopoeic to rational modes of thought’. H. Diller gives this ‘common assertion’ a more precise meaning: Hesiod represents ‘a bridge from mythical to philosophical thought (my emphasis). This view of Hesiod is justified in various different ways. Diller himself stresses the contrast Hesiod makes in the prooemion to the Theogony between what is true and what is false but resembles the true; this he interprets as the type of self-conscious rejection of rival accounts which is echoed in the work of the earlier Presocratics like Heraclitus. For O. Gigon this passage in the Theogony has a specific reference to Homer: Hesiodic ‘truth’ is there opposed to Homeric myth, Logos to Mythos. The Theogony is also philosophical both in so far as it is concerned with a search for beginnings, and because of the universality of its scope. In addition to these formal features, both Diller and Gigon find philosophical elements in the content of the poem, though on this point their conclusions differ sharply. Diller attributes to Hesiod himself that discovery which is often regarded as one of the main contributions of the Presocratics: the discovery that the world operates in accordance with impersonal laws. Gigon, by contrast, suggests that things in the Hesiodic world are seen as products of will, analogous to the products of human activity.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 103 , November 1983 , pp. 124 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1983

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References

1 Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Cambridge/Berkeley/L.A. 1970) 238Google Scholar.

2 Earlier versions of this paper were read to audiences at University College London, The Hellenic Center, Washington, D.C., Boston University, and Vanderbilt University. I am grateful for criticisms and comments made on these occasions, and for helpful points made by Dr G. E. R. Lloyd.

3 ‘Hesiod und die Anfänge der griechischen Philosophie’, A&A ii (1946)Google Scholar (repr. in Hesiod, Wege der Forschung xliv, ed. Heitsch, E. [Darmstadt 1966]) 151Google Scholar: ‘eine Brücke vom mythischen zum philosophischen Denken’.

4 Der Urspring der griechischen Philosophie (Basel 1945) 14Google Scholar.

5 Gigon (n. 4) 22 ff.

6 Gigon (n. 4) 40.

7 Gigon (n. 4) 13.

8 Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy (Oxford 1975)Google Scholar (trans, of Dichtung und Philosophie des frühen Griechenturns2 [München 1962])Google Scholar Index A, 515.

9 Fränkel (n. 8) 105 ff.

10 The Nature of Greek Myths (Harmondsworth 1974) 276 ff.Google Scholar

11 I.e. of ‘Presocratic’ thought, which may be classified as either—or as both: so Lloyd, G. E. R., for example, in Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle (London 1970)Google Scholar labels the Presocratics generally as ‘philosopher-scientists’. The interest of many Presocratics in cosmogony and cosmology, and in the idea of natural law, may in fact appear to link them more closely with the development of science; on the other hand, on any account they stand at (or near) the beginnings of Greek ‘philosophy’, which typically includes both types of activity in some sense.

12 ‘Hesiod and historiography’, Hermes lxxxv (1975) 257–85Google Scholar.

13 Such labels are now perhaps more freely used by classicists than by anthropologists, many of whom reject the idea of a ‘primitive mentality’, although according to Hallpike, C. R., Foundations of Primitive Thought (Oxford 1979)Google Scholar, their grounds for doing so are questionable (I owe this reference to Dr Lloyd). We need not, fortunately, venture further into these murky waters here. However much we may be impressed by the new beginnings made by Greek thought in the sixth century and after, it is ultimately unhelpful to interpret these in terms of simple oppositions, which tend to obscure the fundamental similarities which on any analysis still remain between the worlds of Homer and Hesiod and of later generations of Greeks. Neither is in any case ‘primitive’ in any clear sense: if the differences between them tempt us into saying that the Homeric and Hesiodic world is ‘more primitive’, that will already tie us to a particular hypothesis about the general development of human thought which may or may not be fruitful in other contexts, but which is of doubtful usefulness for the analysis of changes in a single culture over the space of two or three centuries.

14 Because of his date, and because the first ‘philosophers’ in a number of ways clearly look back to him (not least in their interest in origins), it is natural to regard Hesiod as their precursor. But we need to be sure in making this inference that his concerns are really comparable with theirs. I shall provide reasons for thinking that they are not. On the general relation between science and other types of activity after the sixth century, see now Lloyd, G. E. R., Magic, Reason and Experience (Cambridge 1979)Google Scholar.

15 I say ‘crudely’, because I shall want to distinguish between different varieties of the feature in question: see below, esp. pp. 130–3.

16 Fränkel (n. 8) 105.

17 That it may be, but it is not restricted to the archaic period. With the example which prefaces the passage cited from Fränkel (Th. 758 ff., where ‘the same things appear in several distinct pictures: death as death, as the realm of Hades, and as a dog’), we may directly compare e.g. Eur. Ba. 274 ff., in which Teiresias identifies Dionysus simultaneously as the discoverer of wine, and as wine itself. Guthrie, W. K. C., History of Greek Philosophy iii (Cambridge 1969) 241Google Scholar, uses this passage to illustrate ‘how easily the Greek mind could slip from the idea of a substance as embodying a living god to that of the god as its inventor or discoverer’ (my emphasis). This is precisely the same type of ‘inconsistency’ as Fränkel finds in the context in the Theogony.

18 Polarity and Analogy (Cambridge 1966) 202Google Scholar: references to Il. xxiv 4 f., xvi 672, xiv 164 f.; Od. xxiii 16 f.

19 His favourite example, used also in Early Greek Science (n. 11) 11–12, is the Egyptian view of the sky either as supported on posts, or as held up by a god, or as resting on walls, or as a cow, or as a goddess, with her arms and feet on the earth. These ideas were evidently not alternative, since ‘in a single picture [the Egyptian] might show two different supports for the sky: the goddess whose arms and feet reach the earth, and the god who holds up the sky–goddess’ (quoted from Wilson, J. A., in Frankfort, H. and Frankfort, H. A., Wilson, J. A., Jakobsen, T., Before Philosophy2 [Harmondsworth 1949] 53 f.Google Scholar).

20 Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago 1948) 42Google Scholar.

21 Frankfort (n. 20) 61.

22 This is a necessary rider, since it will clearly sometimes be appropriate for the historian (say) to admit that he is unable to decide between available alternatives (cf. n. 70, on just such a feature in Herodotus).

23 That is to say, I take it that an interest in choosing between accounts is a necessary, even if not a sufficient, condition of the doing of philosophy, science and history. Thus the Egyptian view of the sky is unphilosophical and unscientific at least because it fails to make such a choice.

24 In other words, we need not interpret the distinction between truth and falsity, as Gigon does, as that between ‘philosophical’ truth and ‘mythical’ falsehood. Compare Finley, M. I., ‘Myth, memory and history’, The Use and Abuse of History (London 1975) 14Google Scholar: ‘there must be no misunderstanding about one thing: everyone accepted the epic tradition as grounded in hard fact. Even Thucydides.’

25 Loc. cit. (n. 19).

26 As it might, e.g., his handling of the image of death in the passage on Tartarus.

27 Partly this may be a question of a difference of subject-matter; but it is also, and more importantly, a question of a difference of aims, and of the methods appropriate to those aims. In particular, we will tend to require different standards of consistency of the theologian than we do, say, of the scientist. The ultimate question will be how Hesiod works in contexts which appear to raise issues likely to interest the scientist or the historian; in particular, contexts which are apparently concerned with explanation.

28 TAPA lxviii (1937) 403–27Google Scholar. Perry, incidentally, is one of those who think of the Greek mind as following a simple linear development: the early Greek mind, he suggests, ‘has much of the childlike in it’ (407).

29 Perry (n. 28) 425: ‘1. Two or more things (or ideas) that might be logically connected with each other are each viewed separately, and the beholder and narrator is aware of only one at a time—parataxis in various forms. 2. Two things are viewed in juxtaposition or contrast, each of which in some ways denies the other, while the onlooker, though intellectually pleased or even deeply moved by the spectacle, nevertheless remains aloof and impartial in his attitude, being affected for the time being far more by the objective reality of things (theoria) than by any sympathy, however natural, for one of the two things in conflict—irony, the antithetic style, the intellectual detachment of Thucydides.’

30 Perry perhaps overstates the degree of Thucydides' detachment from the issues, but that is another matter.

31 Note Perry's suggestive remark (408–9) that ‘such authors as Homer and Herodotus… concentrate their artistic efforts more upon the episode per se than upon the connection between one episode and another, or upon the effect of the sum total of episodes’. Whether or not this is true of Herodotus, or of Homer, it is certainly and clearly true of Hesiod, as I shall shortly illustrate. Cf. also Nicolai, W., Hesiod's Erga: Beobachtungen zum Aufbau (Heidelberg 1964)Google Scholar, and West, M. L., Hesiod, Works and Days (Oxford 1978) 46 ff.Google Scholar

32 More central examples in Willcock, M. M., ‘Some aspects of the gods in the Iliad’, BICS xvii (1970) 1–10Google Scholar.

33 W&D 488; cf. 415–16.

34 Cf. West's n. ad 416.

35 Th. 117–18, 128.

36 Th. 120–2; Il. viii 244, etc.

37 See n. 19.

38 Th. 217.

39 Th. 904.

40 Solmsen, F., Hesiod and Aeschylus (New York 1949) 36 ff.Google Scholar

41 W&D 11 ff. (It is this passage more than any that seems to guarantee the common authorship of the two poems, in so far as it is plausibly interpreted as containing a reference back to the Theogony: cf. West ad loc. But in any case Hesiodic scholarship, culminating in West, has probably done enough to silence doubts on this general issue—though of course individual sections of both poems may still remain suspect.)

42 West, , Hesiod, Theogony (Oxford 1966)Google Scholar, regards the whole of 901–1020 as un-Hesiodic. For other views, see e.g. Solmsen (n. 40) 36 n. 112.

43 Th. 224.

44 Th. 205–6.

45 Il. i 394 ff, 503 ff.

46 See West ad 70–80. Solmsen, in the Oxford text, brackets 70–6, declaring them ‘partim e Theog. 571 sqq. sumpti, partim recentiores genuinis substituti’.

47 Loc. cit.

48 One may add that there is special point in the emphasis which Hesiod gives to this aspect: Pandora's attractions, he suggests, are not even skin–deep.

49 We may compare here what Lloyd has to say about Homer's various descriptions of Sleep (loc. cit. n. 18): ‘None of these can be considered the definitive description of sleep. Each image illustrates the phenomenon under a different aspect, though each, if pressed, would seem to imply a slightly different conception of the nature of sleep. But the fact that no difficulty was experienced in reconciling these different images is shown by the way in which they may be combined in a single passage [as e.g. in Iliad xxiii 62 f.Google Scholar, xiv 252 f.]. They should, then, be treated as complementary, rather than as alternative, conceptions of the same phenomenon.’

50 Th. 225; W&D 185.

51 Th. 49, etc.; Th. 386–7.

52 W&D 91–2.

53 Th. 594 ff.

54 Th. 585 ff.

55 Cf. Vernant, J.-P., ‘The myth of Prometheus in Hesiod’, in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (Brighton 1980)Google Scholar (trans, of Mythe et societé en Grèce ancienne [Paris 1974]) 168–85Google Scholar.

56 Fränkel (n. 8) 98.

57 See above at n. 16.

58 See n. 27.

59 We must admit, of course, that Hesiod's readiness to live with a paradoxical conception of the gods is likely to prove him innocent of philosophical theology; but if so, even after the rise of ‘rationalism’ many share his innocence.

60 Yet another example, in the description of the geography of Tartarus in Th. 720 ff., can perhaps be quickly dismissed. Certainly not all the variant descriptions here can be simultaneously true, in a literal sense; yet since by the nature of the subject there could be no grounds for a decision between them, we might even applaud Hesiod for leaving them side by side (if it was he who was responsible for them: see West [n. 42] 356 ff.). Or, more simply, we might compare this case too with that of Homer's descriptions of sleep: each is again in some sense complementary to the others, adding to a whole which, if it were the result of calculated artistry, as well it might be, could be interpreted in terms of a kind of impressionism.

61 Fränkel (n. 8) 98 ff.

62 Th. 139–46, 501–6, 689 ff.

63 Th. 147–53, 617–63, 713 ff., 734–5.

64 Th. 383–403.

65 Fränkel (n. 8) 100–1.

66 Two pages earlier Fränkel interprets the story of the hundred–handers along the same lines as he does that of the children of Styx (‘If we follow the line of this myth with the help of our more abstract conceptions, we observe that the brute power by which the god rules cannot be a quality proper to the god himself, but only an instrument which he uses. The forces at his disposal are, so to speak, his obedient servants, and they are themselves divine only because they impose the god's will upon the world.’) In fact, there is a ‘kinship’ between all three stories, only in the third the thought has grown ‘more mature and more general’ (100).

67 Certainly Zeus is the guardian of ‘justice’ between men in W&D, and it is consistent with this that Th. 902 makes him the father of Δίκη. But it is an entirely different question whether any sort of justice or rightness is thought of as characterising his own relationships either with men or with other gods, except perhaps in the unexciting sense that whatever the ‘father of gods and men’ does is by definition right. If Hesiod regards Zeus' defeat of Kronos, or his treatment of men in the Prometheus episode, as especially ‘just’, he does not say so; and the Titanomachy is a simple struggle for power.

68 See my note ad 687 ff. in Essential Hesiod (Bristol 1978)Google Scholar.

69 Cf. West (n. 31) ad 106–201.

70 Op. cit. (n. 12). Rosenmeyer also uses the contexts on Tartarus and on Zeus' rise to support his argument, ‘Hesiod is not a dogmatist. The doublets at Theog. 720–819 are symptomatic; Hesiod gives us several versions of the domicile of the defeated Titans. … Again, first Hesiod tells us that Zeus wins his victory over the Titans because of the help of the Hundred-Arms, and then he states that the victory was secured through the thunderbolt of the Cyclopes. … Hesiod features [both of these doublets], just as Herodotus will produce two or more tales handed down to him in connexion with one and the same event. Only, where Herodotus gives us a marginal comment to the effect that these are equivalent explanation, Hesiod merely tells them without the theoretical annotation’ (268). But this difference is—in my view—a crucial one: it is an essential part of what makes the one a historian, the other a poet. History involves the self–conscious application of a particular kind of method, with which poetry, with its rather different aims, can dispense.

71 Rosenmeyer (n. 12) 269.

72 See West (ad loc.), whose list of parallels (which includes only one other case of ἐκκορυφοῦν itself suggests as an alternative meaning ‘to bring to a head’, i.e. ‘to bring to a conclusion’, (?) ‘round off’ (cf. Wilamowitz' ‘bis zum Gipfel herausarbeiten’, mentioned but rejected by Rosenmeyer, 269 n. 2), though he finally decides in favour of ‘to state summarily’.

73 How a user of myth introduces his material surely depends on how he intends to use it; and it is hard to see why it is less appropriate for a didactic, moralising poet to announce that he will ‘state summarily’ his λόγος than it is for a historian. (Both ‘to state summarily’ and—particularly—Rosenmeyer's ‘to state briefly the main points’ also of course lack the metaphorical colouring of Hesiod's ἐκκορυφοῦν.)

74 W&D 10.

75 The basic meaning of λόγος here is presumably ‘something that is said’; not something that is merely said (and not necessarily true), but, neutrally, something I and/or others say, an account.

76 Lloyd (n. 11) 12. Lloyd regards this as one of the two ‘distinguishing marks’ of the first ‘philosopher-scientists’, the other being ‘the discovery of nature’, what Vlastos calls ‘the discovery of the cosmos’ (Vlastos, G., Plato's Universe [Oxford 1975])Google Scholar. See also Lloyd MRE (n. 14), which attributes the rise of Greek science especially to ‘the experience of radical political debate and confrontation in small-scale, face-to-face societies’ (266).

77 Cf. West ad loc.

78 See my opening paragraph.

79 Cf. West ad loc.: ‘contradiction between different legends made it clear that poets did not invariably tell the truth. … The Muses seem to be saying, “You have lived your life in ignorance of the truth. But now you shall tell it to men. Admittedly, we sometimes deceive; but when we choose, we can reveal the truth, and we are going to reveal it to you.”’ In this case, the lines would constitute a simple assertion that what Hesiod is going to say is true (without any necessary comparison of it with what others say). I am uneasy, however, for reasons which by now should be clear, about relying on any awareness on Hesiod's part of ‘contradictions’ between stories. Another alternative is to interpret the contrast as being between divine and mortal capacities: ‘we Muses can either tell lies or truth; you mortals, without our help, can make no such distinction’.

80 See esp. Vernant, , ‘Le mythe hésiodique des races: essai d'analyse structurale’, and ‘Le mythe hésiodique des races: sur un essai de mise au point’, in Mythe et pensée chez les grecs, i (Paris 1971) 13–79Google Scholar.

81 Up to e.g. 341, the poem presents a unified and clear (if sometimes repetitive) argument; the contents of the rest are rather more diverse and less well connected.

82 But again, is their thought always less ‘precise’ than that of later poets? See (e.g.) n. 17 above.

83 See especially Th. 94 ff., where Hesiod explicitly singles out this function of the singer.

84 See my opening paragraph and n. 76 above.

85 As Gigon's view perhaps implies (see my first paragraph).

86 See pp. 127–9 above.

87 Including human actions, in view of the super-natural status accorded to Eros, Eris and the rest. If the ‘double causation’ which is so regular a feature of the Iliad hardly appears as such in Hesiod (his relationship with the Muses is perhaps a special case), this is presumably because he has relatively little occasion to give direct descriptions of human actions.

88 See n. 14.

89 By then, for example (despite Pherecydes and the ‘Orphic’ cosmogonies), the sphere of cosmogony had in effect been claimed by philosophy; and (non-philosophical) poetry had developed different means of expression.

90 As e.g. Herodotus recognises (ii 53).