The First Poets

by Schmidt, Michael;

  A tyrant could change a text; and a text—Hesiod or Homer—was regarded as important enough, politically, to merit tampering with, to censor information or flatter sentiment. Who were the audiences for Hesiod’s poems? We know they were largely male, given the nature of the poems and of the world into which they came. As with Homer’s two poems, we can imagine different audiences for each. The Theogony has the feel of a piece composed for recitation at a festival, conveying information in a beautiful and more or less structured form, with points in the poem at which an audience or chorus might interject. We are tempted to reverse the generally accepted chronology of composition and to infer from this that it was composed when Hesiod was already known. The way in which he depicts himself in the poem as the shepherd surprised by the Muses is a kind of packaging, building on the known fact of his rustic origins.

  Works and Days would appear, in its cruder shape and more direct approach, to have come first. It addresses (albeit intermittently) Perses, a single silent interlocutor. The reader can imagine this poem performed in a smaller circle, as evening entertainment; certainly the subject-matter, the coarseness of address, and the basic quality of some of the counsel given suggest a humbler audience. The sense of a local audience is also conveyed in the concern with specific-seeming issues: Perses’ unjust claims are part and parcel of the wider corruption the poem brings to light, the local lords who behave unfairly. The physical world is alive in the lines, and the voice of a man who has lived a hard life.

  Poetry is a form of oral memory, kleos; in the Theogony24 its function is described as conveying klea proteron anthropon (“the glorious achievements of the people of old”). Works and Days is different, conveying the lived experience of a present time in which the poet himself is living.

  Whether the audience was local or festive, it understood the nature and language of Hesiod’s verse. It was trained, to use Taplin’s over-deliberate expression. It was second nature to a Greek man to understand, through the curious amalgam of dialects, geographic and temporal variegations, what the poetry was doing. “Yet this special poetic language will not have struck its hearers as artificial or outlandish, precisely because they knew it and expected it as the language of hexameter poetry. It is the language proper to the occasion that they will have assimilated from childhood.”25

  In all likelihood, the myths and legends the poet told were almost as familiar as the language he used: his audience was entertained and instructed by how he sounded and by the ordering of the stories, what the poet added to the familiar, what originality of detail or structure he brought to bear. In the case of Hesiod, the first person singular may have been the key. When he writes of Pandora, for example, the first written account of the myth that we possess, his audience could have known a version of the story already; in his Pandora they would have found new connections to other myths, and a striking vehemence in his conclusions. She makes her poetic début in Theogony as the first woman, a “lovely evil”:

  And they were stunned,

  Immortal gods and mortal men, when they saw

  The sheer deception, irresistible to men.

  From her is the race of female women,

  The deadly race and population of women,

  A great infestation among mortal men.26

  She makes a vivid appearance in Works and Days, coming among men with her jar (pithos), not box, of evils. Zeus was not wilful in having her sent, with a curse donated by each of the gods: Pan-dora, “all gift.” Prometheus had stolen fire from heaven for men, and Pandora was sent to Epimetheus, Prometheus’ brother, as divine punishment. Epimetheus, despite his fated brother’s warning not to accept gifts from the gods, could not resist and took Pandora in. She is one of the earliest examples of the vilification of the female. Misogyny is a crucial ingredient in both Hesiod’s poems. There are goddesses on the one hand, and there are women on the other, drones in the hive, layabouts of leisure, gluttons to boot. Woman is a curse; with her, unhappiness is inevitable; without her, there is no heir.

  The religion Hesiod presents is human in terms of the ways the gods vie with one another and the ways they relate to the world. We also get a sense of natural balances, symmetries, dualities, complementarities. We considered the double nature of Eris, with whom Works and Days opens. In the Prometheus-versus-Pandora story, we have theft and retribution. Prometheus himself has a contrasting brother, Epimetheus. Their names relate them and at the same time place them at opposite ends of time’s see-saw: forethought and afterthought, foresight and hindsight. For most evils there is a balancing good; the just act and the unjust act are rewarded appropriately, symmetrically if you like. The absence of a balancing element can lead, as in the history of the early gods, to violence, “war in heaven”; it is no wonder that imbalances on earth have similar consequences. In the little anecdote of the hawk with the nightingale clutched in its talons (the first fable of its kind in Greek literature) the nightingale may have a sweet voice and beauty on its side, but the hoarse-voiced hawk has power, and he is hungry. He declares,

  Only a fool struggles against his superiors.

  He not only gets beaten, but humiliated as well.27

  Part of Hesiod’s subject-matter is, inevitably, the generations of man, where he comes from, how he has developed. The poet speaks of five ages: Golden, Silver, Bronze, the age of the heroes, Iron. By adding the age of the heroes he disrupts a traditional eastern symmetry, for the progression does have its origins in eastern thought. He gives it a specifically Greek inflection. But the thrust of his genealogy is conventional: it is an old story of decline and corruption. The age of Iron is our own. What can we do about it? Work hard, respect the gods and respect justice. The advice is not unlike that of Samuel Smiles, though without Smiles’s optimism.

  The Theogony is a useful place for readers to familiarise themselves with the Olympians. All the gods are there: Zeus first, then mighty, neglected and treacherous Hera, Aphrodite, Ares, Artemis with her bow and arrows, wise Athene, Demeter who brings the fields alive, unbridled Dionysus, Hephaistus the smith, Hermes the inventor of the lyre, and so on. Hesiod’s catalogues are rather bare and peremptory compared with Homer’s, but then they are very different. That difference was recognised and dramatised in a festival confrontation.

  It was at Chalcis in Euboea, the funeral occasion already mentioned, and a sufficiently neutral ground for both Boeotian Hesiod and for floating Homer, that the legendary match between them took place. Here Hesiod won the coveted tripod. Homer, representing in his voice the heroic and aristocratic values, the pan-Greek spirit, confronts the everyman from Askre with his dirty fingernails, his daily concerns, his rancours and timidity, his peasant values,28 which are in some respects bourgeois avant-la-lettre in their concern with legacies and lucre.

  Homer, we remember, travelled around Greece as a celebrated performer. He learned that Ganyctor was organising funeral games for his father, Amphidamas, the Euboean king, and invited not only athletes but poets too, with the promise of a generous purse. Homer decided to attend; Hesiod attended, too, and there a head-to-head contest was arranged. Before their hosts, the chief Chalcidians and the brother of the dead king, Paneides, now king himself, Hesiod subjected Homer to a series of questions. Here is a flavour of their exchanges. To begin with, Hesiod asks,

  “Homer, son of Meles, inspired with wisdom from

  heaven, come, tell me first what is best for mortal man?”

  “For men on earth ’tis best never to be born at all; or being

  born, to pass through the gates of Hades with all speed.”

  Homer’s is a famous response. Hesiod has found a formidable rival. He decides to lighten the tone of the proceedings.

  “Come, tell me now this also, godlike Homer: what think

  you in your heart is most delightsome to men?”

  “When mirth reigns throughout the town, and feasters

  about the house, sitting in order, listening to a minstrel; when the

  tables
beside them are laden with bread and meat, and a wine-

  bearer draws sweet drink from the mixing-bowl and fills the

  cups: this I think in my heart to be most delightsome.”

  The judges are ready to give Homer the prize, he has replied with such clarity and assurance, and in verse of course. Hesiod, irritated by his facility, rummages in his mind for a real poser: “Come, Muse; sing not to me of things that are, or that shall be, or that were of old; but think of another song.” Homer, nonplussed and unable to think of an apt answer, replies, “Never shall horses with clattering hoofs break chariots, striving for victory about the tomb of Zeus.”

  There is a touch of surrealism about it, and certainly it follows Hesiod’s injunction. Now Hesiod begins the game of consequences, reciting a line or more and requiring Homer to finish the sense and form of each passage, some being quotations from the work of one or the other poet. We can set out Hesiod’s lines in roman type and Homer’s in italic, to see how the consequences unfolded:

  Then they dined on the flesh of oxen and their horses’ necks—

  They unyoked dripping with sweat, when they had had enough of war.

  And the Phrygians, who of all men are handiest at ships—

  To filch their dinner from pirates on the beach.

  To shoot forth arrows against the tribes of cursed giants with his hands—

  Herakles unslung his curved bow from his shoulders.

  This man is the son of a brave father and a weakling—

  Mother; for war is too stern for any woman.

  And so the contest continues, with sequiturs and nonsequiturs.

  But for you, your father and lady mother lay in love—

  When they begot you by the aid of golden Aphrodite.

  But when she had been made subject in love, Artemis, who delights in arrows—

  Slew Callisto with a shot of her silver bow.

  When they had feasted, they gathered among the glowing ashes The bones of the dead Zeus—

  Born Sarpedon, that bold and godlike man.

  Now we have lingered thus about the plain of Simois,

  Forth from the ships let us go our way, upon our shoulders—

  Having our hilted swords and long-helved spears.

  Eat, my guests, and drink, and may no one of you

  Return home to his dear country—

  Distressed; but may you all reach home again unscathed.

  Hesiod changes tactics. He asks Homer factual questions: How many people from Achaea went to Ilium? Homer answers with a mathematical exercise: “There were fifty hearths, and at each hearth were fifty spits, and on each spit were fifty carcasses, and there were thrice three hundred Achaeans to each joint.” Hesiod and the audience begin working out this huge hyperbole: fifty hearths, 2500 spits, 125,000 carcasses …

  Hesiod poses him moral questions and Homer replies with subtlety and ambiguity, like a rabbinical teacher who knows there are no right answers but only not wrong ones. “How would men best live in cities, and with what observances?” asks Hesiod. “By refusing to get unclean gain and if the good were honoured, but justice fell upon the unjust,” Homer replies with wise facility.

  “What is the best thing of all for a man to ask of the gods in prayer?”

  “That he may be always at peace with himself continually.”

  “Of what effect are righteousness and courage?”

  “To advance the common good by private pains.”

  “What do men mean by happiness?”

  Again, that appalling reply: “Death after a life of least pain and greatest pleasure.” Homer gets the better of Hesiod at every turn; the people call for him to be declared victor. But King Paneides orders both of them to recite what they regard as the best lines from their own poems. Hesiod begins with a passage from Works and Days about the Pleiades, times for harvest, times to plough, lore lyricised. Homer comes back with a conflation of two passages from Book XIII of the Iliad.29 It has to be said that Homer chooses magnificent fragments; but then he is spoiled for choice. Hesiod’s verse looks functional and pale beside even a prose version such as this: “The ranks stood firm about the two Aiantes, such that not even Ares would have scorned them had he met them, nor yet Athena who saves armies. For there the chosen best awaited the charge of the Trojans and noble Hector, making a fence of spears and serried shields. Shield closed with shield, and helm with helm, and each man with his fellow, and the peaks of their head-pieces with crests of horse-hair touched as they bent their heads: so close they stood together. The murderous battle bristled with the long, flesh-rending spears they held, and the flash of bronze from polished helms and new-burnished breast-plates and gleaming shields blinded the eyes. Very hard of heart would he have been, who could then have seen that strife with joy and felt no pang.”

  Hesiod cannot stand up to such complete visualisation and, we imagine, Homer’s riveting prosodic control and delivery. But the new king has a mind of his own. He overrules the crowd and crowns Hesiod on the grounds that the man who enjoined his fellows to pursue peace and good husbandry should be rewarded, not the man who celebrated war. Hesiod’s was, therefore, not a poetic but a moral crown of laurel. He received also the tripod made of brass, which he immediately dedicated to the Muses, to whom he owed so much, appending this inscription: “Hesiod dedicated this tripod to the Muses of Helicon after he overcame divine Homer at Chalcis in a contest of song.”

  He went from Chalcis to Delphi to dedicate himself to Apollo. The prophetess, excited at his approach, called out a blessing to him in anticipation: “… surely his fame shall be as wide as the spreading light of morning.”30 She had a warning, however: “beware of the pleasant grove of Nemean Zeus; for there death is destined to overtake you.” The poet avoided the Peloponnese, assuming the prophetess had that Nemea in mind. But coming to Oenoë in Locris, he stayed with the sons of Phegeus, unconsciously fulfilling the oracle; that area was sacred to Nemean Zeus.

  He overstayed his welcome at Oenoë, until his young hosts, suspecting him of seducing their sister Ctimene, murdered him.31 They threw his corpse into the sea. On the third day, as legend often has it, his body was rolled ashore by dolphins, during a local feast. The people hurried to the strand, recognised the body, lamented and buried it. They began to seek the assassins, who, in terror, had set to sea in a fishing boat, pointing the prow towards Crete. Halfway across, Zeus sent them to the bottom with a bolt of lightning. That is Alcidamas’ version of events. Eratosthenes has a variant story, more grimly entertaining if less miraculous: Hesiod’s travelling companion Demodes seduced the girl and was murdered along with Hesiod. The girl hanged herself. Hesiod’s dog, Eratosthenes tells us, identified the murderers. The brothers were sacrificed to the gods of hospitality. It is the stuff of Jacobean theatre.

  Hesiod, shepherd and hill farmer, elect of the Muses, first poet of the arts of peace, was murdered, then. Thucydides agrees that he was killed in Locris, by local people and—that prophesy—in a sanctuary of Nemean Zeus. Plutarch’s version implies, says Peter Levi,32 “the cult of Hesiod as a divine hero”—a demigod like Archilochus at Paros was to become? “He had a named companion … he was washed up by dolphins like Palaimon at the isthmus, his grave was a local secret like Dirke’s at Thebes, and his relics were envied by the people of Orchomenos” (IX, 38, 3) in central Boeotia, as far from the sea as Hesiod could have wished.

  Despite the misogyny of the poems, legend unanimously places a woman at the heart of the tragic affair. We turn to trusty Pausanias: “everyone agrees that the sons of Ganyctor”—who organised the games for his father, Amphidamas—“fled from Naupactos to Molykria because of Hesiod’s murder, and there they paid Poseidon the penalty of sacrilege; but one story is that someone else disgraced their sister and Hesiod was wrongly blamed for it; another is that Hesiod was guilty.”33

  On this subject Pausanias allows himself to express no opinion. He does take the story a little further, establishing where the poet was finally interr
ed. At Orchomenos, he declares, is Hesiod’s tomb. This is how the men of Orchomenos got their hands on the coveted bones: “a plague had seized on men and cattle, so they sent off ambassadors to the god, who were told by the Pythian priestess to bring the bones of Hesiod from Naupactos, or otherwise there was no cure.” They inquired how to find them at Naupactos: the priestess said that a crow, one of Apollo’s sacred birds, would tell them. So when they landed on Naupactian ground they saw a rock quite near a road with the bird perching on it, and in a hollow in that rock they found the bones of Hesiod.

  A funeral verse was written on the tomb:

  Askre and the plough land were his country:

  The soil of the horse-whipping Minyai

  Covers his bones: his name rang loudest

  On the stone of Wisdom: Hesiod lies here.

  That is another name critics have given to his kind of writing: not epic, but “wisdom literature.” Given that wisdom advances more slowly than knowledge and outlives the vagaries of taste, the poetry of Hesiod, a constant resource for three millennia despite its archaisms, conventionality and prejudice, can be considered wise.

  VII

  Archilochus of Paros

  The Parian: I was the first

  to bring his iambs into Latium,

  the metres and their matter: Archilochus!

  But not the words he aimed to slay

  Lycambes …

  HORACE, Epistles I, XIX, ll. 23ff.

  We hear snatches of song—a phrase (“tender horn,”1“lances … pierced their spirit”2), a longer run (“Paros, farewell, those figs too, that life by the sea”3), but nothing whole. As though in the old port of Parikia a sailor was singing and, because the winds move ceaselessly over Paros (as modern windsurfers know), we could make out only a teasing play of words and whispers. The voice can be ribald, erotic, cruel, lyrical. Looking west across a sea over which empires battled for millennia, this port gives the poet’s voice political inflections.