The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  While in the Iliad women serve as motives for action (Helen, Chryseis, Briseis) but apart from Andromache have little presence, in the Odyssey women play important roles. Penelope, Helen, Calypso, Nausicaa, Arete and others of more humble origin can become involved in the central action of the poem, have motives and complex moral natures. We move away from the barbarities of mere heroism and approach the hard-earned zone of peace and stability, achieved in the end by calculation, deception and scrupulous conspiracy. Despite all the action of the Iliad, it is in the Odyssey that we find adventure.

  The basic story is not uncommon: a husband returns after a very long absence to find his son grown up, his wife besieged by suitors. His task is to work his way back into the place he left, so he must test his wife’s fidelity (especially after what happened to his friend Agamemnon upon his return from Troy), get to know his son, and purge his house of the pestilential suitors. To this core are added traveller’s tales, which, Lesky says, “must have been many and varied in the second millennium BC while Crete was a great sea power.” We can see the poem as an early novel of homecoming, a sea adventure, a saga of Troy, and a work which stimulated new Ionian thought and imagination.

  We start in Ithaca, an anarchic island. Young Telemachus, whose name means “decisive battle,” Graves tells us, is bullied and kept down in his own house. His father’s long absence means that he and his mother are effectively held hostage by the suitors exploiting the traditions of hospitality. Penelope’s name is variously etymologised. Graves says it means “with a web over her face” or—“striped duck.” Paul Kretschmer derives it from pene, penion, “bobbin-thread, woof,” and elop “as found in olopto,” “unravel.” Kretschmer’s explanation is the more satisfying since the name would describe (as Telemachus’ ultimately does) the key trick action of the poem. Odysseus, Graves says, means “angry.”

  Telemachus sets off in quest of his father. If he is dead, Penelope will have to remarry and move on, unencumbering the estate. If he is alive, Telemachus needs him. The Telemachiad, the first four books of the poem, deal with the boy’s coming of age and his education in more stable and less rustic societies. He brings back gifts and a kind of hope which within hours produces a flesh-and-blood father and elicits from him some of the heroic skills we would expect of the son of Odysseus. He is also capable of cruelty as coarse and pointless as that practised on the windy plain of Troy: not only the execution of the female servants, but also collusion in the death of the rebarbative goatherd Melanthius, whose nose and ears are removed, his genitals lopped off for the dogs to eat, and his hands and feet severed.

  Wise, wily, scheming, crafty Odysseus: the old fathers of Ithaca, looking at the heap of their dead sons, had a point when they called for revenge. “They took the dead away, buried every man his own, and put the bodies of those who came from elsewhere on board the fishing vessels, for the fishermen to take each of them to his own place.” Then in the meeting place they assembled and Eupeithes, father of the churlish Alcinous, Odysseus’ first victim, recalled how many Ithacans died with Odysseus in the Trojan expedition, and how he had then come home and killed the flower of Ithaca youth all over again. “Let us be up and doing before he can get away to Pylos or to Elis where the Epeans rule, or we shall be ashamed of ourselves for ever afterwards. It will be an everlasting disgrace to us if we do not avenge the murder of our sons and brothers …” The poem tells us that “He wept as he spoke and every one pitied him.” But there was to be no revenge on the returning king; on the contrary, Laertes, Odysseus’ father, would have the pleasure of fighting alongside his son and grandson, backed by Athena in the likeness of Mentor, swooping down and killing more Ithacans, old men for the most part, starting with Eupeithes himself. Odysseus would have slain the lot had Zeus not sent down an insistent thunderbolt and Athena commanded him to desist. Then, “glad at heart,” he obeyed, and the warring factions were compelled by the gods to make peace. Odysseus, one of the worst leaders of all time, having mislaid all his comrades and taken ten years to cover the distance his fellow combatants had covered in a few weeks, settled down to rule Ithaca, though legend has it that he led one further expedition—over the edge of the world.

  VI

  Hesiod

  The Muses bore Hesiod; the Graces bore Homer.

  SIMONIDES1

  Consider the comedown, the loss of scale, of conjuring magic, the decay of dignity: from Orpheus, Arion and Amphion to Homer; and then from Homer to grumbling, litigious, horny-handed-son-of-toil Hesiod. It all started beside divine Olympus, then the windy plain of Troy where legend and history mingle. And now? Askre, in Boeotia, cut off from Thebes (due east) and from Athens (east-south-east) by mountains, from Corinth (due south) by the Gulf.

  Here we seek a poet,2 the very first who speaks—probably before 700 BC—with an individual voice and whose subject is nothing more, and nothing less, than the hard life he leads. If we could smell him, he would certainly reek of the human. He suffers from a need to make sense of his world and to reduce the troubling, floating legends of gods and goddesses, the rituals of religion and the rules of husbandry, to some kind of connected order. He needs a sense of control, or at least a sense of shape, in his physical, social and spiritual environments. And his tool is language.

  Even today it is no easy matter getting to where Hesiod’s farm used to be. Mount Helicon and the so-called Valley of the Muses involve a deal of rather uninteresting (though not difficult) climbing, and if you are looking for traces of Hesiod, you must brace yourself for disappointment. Bear in mind that you are traversing the merest skeleton of Hesiod’s landscape: time and history have been particularly unkind to this part of Greece, removing most of the trees and giving it a parched, forgotten feel, changing its weather from the patterns Hesiod records. Here you do not feel history rising like a fine mist; you feel that it has evaporated quite.

  The modern village of Palaiopanayía is as far as a car will take you on your quest. After that you need a guide, ideally a mule, patience and imagination. In about forty minutes you come upon an ancient tower, medieval in origin, perhaps earlier in the materials from which it is constructed. It is called, unsurprisingly, Palaiopirgos (“old tower”) and is located, perhaps, in the site of Keressos. South of the tower are the shards of an old (Turkish?) village with a little church. Beyond a stream rises a hill crowned by a ruined Hellenic structure. It stood there eighteen hundred years ago when the traveller Pausanias passed that way, and, with his obsessive meticulousness (for modern readers a happy pedantry), he made a note of it.3 It represents the only remains of the hamlet called Askre, which may mean “barren oak.”4 Hesiod called Askre a town “cursed, intolerable in winter, unendurable in summer, pleasing never,” a Boeotian Lake Wobegon. As settings go, Askre’s is neither grand nor amenable. Still, around Easter the traveller is sometimes surprised, when the sun is half way up the sky, by tiny gusts of exquisite scent: they come from the wild, almost leafless cyclamen, pale dots of purple. There are old olive trees clenched among the rock. And the streams where the Muses bathe, which are named in the Theogony as the Permessos and the Olmeios, come together not far from the remains of the village. From their bath, the Muses rose like wraiths to the summit of Helicon, and they danced and chanted the invocation to Zeus that Hesiod heard.

  If you persist and climb on towards midday you reach, in a couple of hours, the Valley of the Muses with its scatter of ruins: an altar, a stoa, the theatre where the contests of the Mouseia were conducted every four years. To the musical and poetic contests in later years were added dramatic competitions as well. The upper valley of the Permessos belonged to the Muses, and therefore to Apollo. The sacred groves, deep shadows and cool springs were the landscape in which Greek builders set fine temples and a famous sanctuary, decorated with statues representing the Muses themselves and their servants, in particular—from our point of view—the epic and lyric poets.

  Constantine the Great made off with the treasures of the sanctuary. Deforest
ation and erosion creased and aged the landscape, leaving bare rock and the exposed ruins. The Muses packed their bags, after coming here originally from the skirts of Mount Olympus, not too far away from where the gods live. Their town of origin was Pieria—watered by the bubbling Pierian spring, a traditional source of poetic inspiration. Thracian peasants paid homage to the feminine spirits of the mountains and the welling water. The Muses wandered south and founded Askre. Mount Helicon and the lyric springs of Hippocrene (a further two and a half hours on foot, on a spur of Mount Helicon) and Aganippe were dedicated to the Muses. Hippocrene, the Spring of the Horse, is so named because Pegasus, landing from the sky, caused it to flow when his hoof-beat struck the ground.

  The Muses came from elsewhere before settling (for a time) into this place. So did Hesiod’s father.

  But already, in a hot, solid landscape, I am talking of Hesiod as a real person. The cautious modern historian warns us to doubt every word of every ancient biography. We can know nothing. I ought properly to write “‘Hesiod’s’ ‘father,’” making it clear, by using the tongs of quotation marks, that I am aware of my subject’s problematic existence. His “mother” was said by later traditions to be the divine, or divinely fathered, Pycimede (“quietly clever”); his partner—perhaps even his wife—was assigned the name Eoie, and like his father he was said to have had two sons, Mnasiepes and Archiepes, “rememberer” and “beginner of epic verse,” respectively.5

  If I forego the tongs, it is in part because I want to spare the reader the irritation of so much evidence of caution, and in part because I believe—up to a point—in the Hesiod who emerges from the two substantial poems firmly attributed to him,6 the grudging laureate of the Arts of Peace: Works and Days and Theogony. He may have been responsible, too, for the mini-epic Shield of Heracles and other fragments. Cycles of poetry grew out of the work of Hesiod, quite as much as out of Homer’s. Of the poems fathered on Hesiod, the most interesting is The Catalogue of Women, evoking the dynasties established by gods mating with human beings. Because of the repeated phrase e hoie (“or like the woman who”), it is known as Ehoiai (plural). Ostensibly it follows the Theogony, but it grew in fits and starts on into the sixth century BC.

  Especially from Works and Days a sense emerges of a man with a past, an immigrant father, a litigious layabout of a brother, a farm, and a farmer’s seasonal woes. He is keen to make understanding out of what he knows. At heart he is a philosopher, the first of the Greek philosophers in fact, looking for stable forms, but without—because he comes so early in the history of his culture—the prose instruments of later thinkers. Historians of philosophy generally locate his contribution to the development of Greek thought in the Theogony, his account of the origins of the gods; deeper and more durable is his account of man and his relations with the physical world. The crucial poem, as a poem, is Works and Days.

  Hesiod as philosopher does not so much think as affirm and assert; he is conservative, obedient to customs and superstitions, which he sets down unquestioningly: they seem to be pragmatically true, judging from his day-to-day experience. Though he might be a tyrant’s ideal intellectual subject, he is not at one with Voltaire’s Pangloss: “Whatever is is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” His is a glummer motto: “Whatever is, is.” And most of what is is not the best. Hesiod expresses a timeless peasant conservatism. Even today it characterises rural communities which have not been transformed by modern technology, which can still accurately be called communities, that is, in eastern Europe for example, and Tras os Montes in Portugal, remote parts of Spain, Asia and Africa and Latin America.

  His father, Hesiod tells us, was from Cyme in Asia Minor. Southern-most of the Aeolic ports, it is a little above Smyrna (Izmir), which claimed Homer for its own. If modern Askre is remote from our expectation, modern Smyrna is worse: an industrial city with a large oil refinery. The ruins of the ancient town are a little to the north, and right on the coast.

  Cyme, like other towns in Asia Minor and the islands, sent its people out to colonise. Cyme’s most famous settlement was Cumae, the western-most Greek colony in Italy, where the eponymous Sibyl lived in her cave, a figure Virgil evokes in the Aeneid. The people of Cyme spoke a mixed dialect of Ionian and Aeolic, widely used in northwest Asia Minor and on some of the islands, Lesbos among them.

  Hesiod’s poem gives us some details. Around the middle of the eighth century BC, the poet’s father became an economic migrant.

  He was fleeing, you can be sure, from something other

  Than wealth and good things: loathsome poverty

  Zeus visits upon men.7

  He sailed a long way, landed and then—as if repelled forever by Poseidon—walked and walked until he was out of sound and sight of the sea. (His poet son inherited his aversion to open water.) He settled and started his farm, and here the poet was born. Hesiod makes no mention of his mother. It is tempting to speculate that she was a Boeotian whom the man from Cyme married, rather than a goddess.8

  At least two sons were born, industrious Hesiod and main-chancer Perses, a thorn in his brother’s side. When their father died, the sons entered into a dispute over their inheritance, the meagre farm. Contention went on and on and we get a sense that Hesiod did not win the argument, though in terms of posterity he has had almost three millennia of last-laughing. His brother, who never replies to his advice or retorts to his taunts in the poem, is a mute villain. Hesiod’s is a formidable voice to speak against. He tells in Works and Days of how he competed in the poetry contest at Chalcis in Euboea,9 at the funeral of Amphidamas.

  The great man’s sons had put up

  Prizes aplenty for the contests, and I’m proud to say

  I won in the songfest and took home an eared tripod.

  Dedicated it to the Heliconian Muses, on the very spot

  Where they first set me on the road to clear song.10

  What is he referring to? We are perilously near to “intertextuality” for the poet draws attention to another of his poems. In Theogony he describes himself as having been unexpectedly inspired by the Muses. He is the first poet to portray himself thus, enabled to sing by some force outside himself. Truth and fiction are the Muses’ initial themes. Some critics suggest mischievously that Hesiod may himself have “made” the Muses on Mount Helicon; indeed, that in the Theogony he first named them.11 This seems unlikely: the poet we encounter in the poems is not inventive or “original” in this way.

  Like his successors in the Muses’ favour, he was out pasturing a flock (of sheep in his case) on the slopes of the sacred mountain. Down came the Olympian Muses, offspring of Zeus “the holder of the goat skin,” an epithet which has troubled scholars. It may mean a rustic Zeus, a god wandering like a shepherd himself on the slopes of Helicon. Indeed this may be a way of alluding to a mighty human master who imparted the divine art of song to the young shepherd, his poetic apprentice, and Hesiod translated the man and the debt into a “higher register.”

  The Muses address the shepherd-about-to-become-a-poet. They warn him that they know how to lie and deceive peasants and low-life such as he is, but they also know how to tell the truth. They give their elected votary a laurel staff, and then quite literally they inspire, that is, breathe into him, a voice that is not his but is divine. The purpose? So that he might celebrate things past and to come.

  … and they breathed in my frame a voice divine,

  and the power to tell of the past or future was mine,

  and they bade me sing of the gods who never may die, and ever, the first

  and the last, on themselves to cry—

  But why this wandering tale of a tree or stone?12

  It is a good story, appropriate for the Mouseia. Enjoined by the Muses to sing, the poet starts by singing about them, and then discloses, with their aid, the structure of the divine world. The inspired poet is a vehicle, of use to the Muses. The “I” of Hesiod survives, as it were, despite their injunctions; their higher rhetoric is hard
ly credible, as coming from so modest a mouth as his. The poet on this inspirational model is like a spiritualist medium or, worse still, a creature whose mind is occupied and used by an alien force, and then released back to itself in a state of confused exhaustion. It doesn’t quite work: Hesiod remains Hesiod. He starts the Theogony in the third person but soon moves to the first; in the midst of narrative he finds it impossible to withhold a comment. His repetitive demand is for justice, fairness, order. There can be a hectoring petulance in his tone.

  Works and Days is inspired differently than the Theogony. We ought perhaps to say it is occasioned, for the tone is dogged and resigned, by the hard-working countryman’s daily life and family gripes. It can be viewed either as the surviving fragments of a larger poem which, due to the uncertainties of transmission, have reached us in a mutilated state, or as a non-systematic anthology of lore, custom and poetry more or less harnessed by the voice of a single speaker. That speaker is not a continuous presence in the poem: he establishes his existence and then rather forgets himself, or we forget him, much of the time. Yet the poem somehow adds up; what we take away from it is a sense of his presence, without which it would fissure and fall apart.

  If we consider the poem an anthology of bits, we can look for natural breaks, changes of tone, idiom and direction; we should not demand of it a coherence and structure which are in effect anachronistic, back-projections from later literature and theory. Not that theorists and critics have not spent two and a half millennia doing just that. If we wish to read Works and Days for pleasure, freed as much as possible from critical patristics, we do best not to make inordinate formal demands of it.