Eric A. Havelock:
 

Thoughtful Hesiod

 
From: Havelock The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton University Press, 1982, pp.208-219). Reprinted from Yale Classical Studies, vol.20 (1966), pp.61-72.
This web-text does not contain the notes of Havelock's essay. Greek quotes from Hesiod and Homer have been substituted by English translations by Hugh G. Evelyn-White and A.T. Murray.

So, after all, there was not one kind of strife
alone, but all over the earth there are two. As for
the one, a man would praise her when he came to
understand her; but the other is blameworthy: and
they are wholly different in nature. For one fosters                15
evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves;
but perforce, through the will of the deathless gods,
men pay harsh Strife her honour due. But the other
is the elder daughter of dark Night, and the son of
Cronos who sits above and dwells in the aether, set
her in the roots of the earth: and she is far kinder to
men. She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a                     20
man grows eager to work when he considers his
neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and
plant and put his house in good order; and neighbour
vies with his neighbour as he hurries after wealth.
This strife is wholesome for men. And potter is angry
with potter, and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar          25
is jealous of beggar, and minstrel of minsterel.
   Perses, lay up these things in your heart, and do
not let that Strife who delights in mischief hold your
heart back from work, while you peep and peer and
listen to the wrangles of the court-house. Little con-
cern has he with quarrels and courts who has not a              30
year's victuals laid up betimes, even that which the
earth bears, Demeter's grain. When you have got
plenty of that, you can raise disputes and strive to
get another's goods. But you shall have no second
chance to deal so again: nay, let us settle our dis-
pute here with true judgement which is of Zeus and             35
is perfect. For we have already divided our inherit-
ance, but you seized the greater share and carried
it off, greatly swelling the glory of our bribe-swallow-
ing lords who love to judge such a cause as this.
Fools! They know not how much more the half is               40
than the whole, nor what great advantage there is
in mallow and asphodel.

                                                       Works and Days, 11-41
 


If Hesiod is to be considered an oral poet in the same sense, and to the same degree, as Homer, the metrics and vocabulary of these hexameters would be expected to obey Homeric rules of formulaic composition. In fact, they may contain hints to the contrary, which might raise interesting questions concerning the technical conditions of composition. Rather than pursue these, I propose to focus on the character and content of the argumentative structure, always bearing in mind that if this on examination shows a degree of novelty, in comparison with the habits of narrative epic, then parallel divergences in metrics and vocabulary would not be unexpected. Argumentation of course abounds in Homer, primarily in the speeches. The present passage, however, reads like an attempt to expound a formal thesis with a certain degree of logical rigor which measured by epic standards is unusual; it is to this attempt that present attention will be turned.
 
On the face of it, and making some concessions to the "roughness" of Hesiod's style, the content of these lines can be interpreted with reasonable coherence in the following paraphrase:
 
The are two varieties of contention among men; one of them is negative, provoking war, the other positive, rousing men to work through competition. Emulation of rich neighbors illustrates this kind of competition, (so does) quarreling between craftsmen and resentment between beggars or bards. You, Perses, must learn this lesson and so avoid wasting your time in (the wrong sort of) contention, which means listening in on the wrangles in the agora. Sustenance is seasonal and must be adequately accumulated as a prerequisite for indulgence in disputes (of which, of course, I disapprove) aimed at the property of others (that is, of me). You (Perses) will not have a second chance to act in this way (that is, at my expense). We (Perses and I) should settle our wrangle (that is, lawsuit) justly. The allotment (I mean our patrimony) we (you and I) divided up (between us), but you (Perses) made off with much more (than your share), after honoring (that is, bribing) judges who like giving this kind of (that is, unjust) justice. Fools are they (the judges, the litigants, or Perses?), ignorant of the advantages of moderation (that is, legal compromise between Perses and me) and of a frugal diet (in preference to Perses' acquired wealth).
 
Suppose this is the sense and connection intended by the poet. An initial difficulty then arises concerning the portrait of Perses who, on the one hand, it would appear, is exhorted to avoid the dangers of poverty, and on the other is accused of excessive acquisition. This inconsistency tends to support those who have argued that Perses, though he may have been a real brother, is used as a lay figure in this poem. This, though probable, is not the issue with which I wish directly to deal.
 
Behind the problem of personal identity in this passage lies another which cuts deeper. The air of logical connection which appears in our translation depends for its effect upon the bracketed portions added as supplements to the Greek text. Read without them, the argument tends to loosen up and even disintegrate. This is not true of the first fourteen lines(11-24), ending in examples of rivalry for wealth. But to these are then subjoined two aphorisms occupying a line each, the intent of which, taken by themselves, can be viewed as satirical: (a) the first object of a craftsman's criticism is always his fellow craftsman; (b) beggars resent each other, as do bards (hence, either: resentment is universal or: bards are like beggars). These rather cynical sentiments are linked to the previous gospel of work, but the logic of the connection is not very tight. Such activities would rather be proof of time-wasting than of hard work, that is, of the negative strife rather than the positive, especially in view of the implicit distinction previously drawn between deris and zelos.
 
At line 28, to maintain continuity with the previous passage, we have to interpret eris kakochartos as equivalent to the negative strife described in 13 ff., and as excluding the good strife of 24. But without this interpretation, the Greek more naturally reads as initiating a fresh argument, to the effect that strife of any kind can menace hours of labor; this happens if its attraction can lure one into joining the audience at disputes in the marketplace. On this showing, the poet at this point has abandoned the formal division with which he had begun.
 
Lines 33 and 34a, again, can be connected logically to the preceding by assuming that they are ironical, expressing a policy which from Hesiod's standpoint is immoral. But taken by themselves, without benefit of such moralizing interpretation, they could be read as another piece of proverbial cynicism advising the would-be aggressor in acquisition to be sure to have a secure financial basis from which to proceed.
 
From 34b onward, the continuity suggested depends on identifying the second person singular in the Greek as addressed to Perses, and the first person plural as including Hesiod and Perses. The kleros (37) then becomes their common patrimony, and the neikos of 35 becomes a lawsuit between Hesiod and his brother in which Hesiod had been worsted. The text supplies none of these clues. If they are withdrawn, the connection between 34a on the one hand, and 34b plus 35a on the other, falls apart, as is also true of the connection between 35a and 35b ff. and between 36 and 37, and between 39 and 40, and between 40 and 41.
 
It is not our intention to reduce the whole passage to a meaningless series of phrases, but rather to indicate that the poet is in fact aiming at an argumentative unity but that his unity is very difficult for him to achieve; the reason being that he is working with disjunct bits and pieces of verse drawn from his oral reservoir which he is trying to put together in a new way. However, before suggesting his method, it is fair to ask: How far, supposing the original material does consist of disjunct pieces of verse, can the process of disintegration of context be pushed?
 
A good many units making up this composition consist of self-contained proverbs. This is true of 23b plus 24a, of 25 plus 26 - a pair linked by parallel syntax and assonance - of 28 (plus 29 if desired), of 30 plus 31, and of 40 plus 41. If syntax were manipulated, one or two others could emerge from the text. This is true of 22 (plus 23a if desired) if plousion were changed to the nominative, and of 32 if the first two words were changed to the feminine and the last to the nominative, perhaps of 33 plus 34a if for the first three words some substitute were proposed: plouton ktesamenos, though unlikely, would do. Further manipulation might produce similar effects on lines 20, 36 and 39. Not the actual existence, but the latent possibility of such proverbs is the point to be stressed.
 
Let us now return to what one feels to be the poet's sustained intention. Though the passage can be analyzed and broken down into these bits and pieces, when read as a whole it conveys the impression of a single thread of sustained meaning, but the thread, so to speak, is in spots very frayed, and almost broken. The original impression is fixed for us by the first fourteen lines, after which logical coherence begins to give way at 25 and disintegrates faster as the poet proceeds. In these opening lines he establishes quite firmly the antithetic concepts of a praiseworthy and good eris and a blameable and bad eris (lines 12-13). To each is attached a series of appropriate descriptive formulae. The bad eris is a rouser of war, intractable, unloved, a burden prized perforce (14-16). The good eris enjoys cosmic parentage and divine status, is far better for men, and is a rouser of men to work through emulation (17-24). So far, so good. But this paragraph of fourteen lines in fact exhausts the capacity of the poet (a) to maintain his antithesis with clarity and logic, (b) to define adequately its second half, that is, the functions and effects of good strife. The reasons for this double limitation will be suggested in a moment.
 
Thereafter, two things happen to the exposition. At first, Hesiod attempts to embark further on the attributes of the good strife, but the attempt breaks down into partial irrelevance (lines 25-27). Then he abandons the antithesis altogether and his verse is allowed to flow into a description of the evils of strife in general (28). But this strife is now viewed as centering not on war, but on litigation in the market-place (29); and it is to this topic that those formulas which fill up lines 30-2 attach themselves. Less clearly, tha same topic seems to control lines 33-9, with 40 and 41 added as an appendix.
 
What is the reason for the initial failure of connection - the failure, that is, to sustain argument coherently beyond fourteen lines? I suggest the following: The oral reservoir, so to speak, as we can determine from Homer and from the Theogony, supplied our poet with familiar images of strife as the spirit of combat and of contention between individuals, as the child of Night, and as a dangerous element in human life. He applies his own creative genius to these formulas in order to split the single conception into two types, which he calls gene, and this constitutes a mental leap forward. The effect is to call into being a new topic of discourse, namely a good strife, a novel conception and one which he wishes to develop as a moral principle necessary to the economy of an agricultural society. But his formulas do not readily support either the antithesis or the existence of this new concept and he has to fight, as it were, mentally against the tradition, and his effort finally collapses. He becomes the prisoner of familiar formulas which have taken shape in an epoch of minstrelsy which was innocent of such a distinction, or at least had never formally recognized it; but he never entirely loses the thread of his new conception.
 
The first fourteen lines, then, give expression to a thesis which can be accepted as an act of new creation and a successful one. They would nevertheless be expected to obey that familiar law of oral composition whereby any act of poetic originality is carried out by remodeling or reorganizing previously used formulas. The antecedents of these lines lie initially in those contexts of the Iliad where eris is portrayed as arousing the combative instincts of men in battle. Her Homeric image is a little complex. She is an affliction (argalee) and also is beneficial (amoton memauia), yet also is beneficial (laosoos). She casts neikos into the midst and arouses ponos and increases stonos, but she also puts sthenos into men's hearts. In particular, she encourages and enjoys an equal contest. Zeus and the gods generally let her loose on men. She can grow till she treads earth and strikes heaven. Nor should we forget her role as that initial contention aroused by Apollo which sets the machinery of the Iliad in motion, particularly as Homer later makes a point of this when he represents his hero as condemning and discarding this eris.
 
Echoes, as it were, of these attributes penetrate into Hesiod's divided account. As she who treads over the earth, the original eris turns into twin figures who do this (11-12). As the spirit of combat, afflictive (schetlie) and also god-directed (athanatoon boulesin) , she becomes the bad strife. But equally as the source of energy in the fighter and as the participant in equal contest and the source of ponos she helps to suggest the attributes of the Hesiodic good strife (20-4). Finally, as the source of neikos, she supplies a prototype for the lines following the antithesis which discuss or portray litigation in the agora.
 
Between the Homeric description of eris and the dichotomy achieved by Hesiod there intervenes the genealogy of eris supplied in the Theogony (225-32). The truth seems to be that the Iliad, the Theogony, and the Works and Days deal successively with eris as a topic of some significance and each enlarges on the preceding. Homer had described her as the spirit of war. In almost cosmic terms, she grows to such stature that she strides on earth while her head is against heaven. Her companions are deimos, phobos, kudoimos, and ker oloe. She is also the sister of Ares androphonos. She presides over or brings about polemos, mache, neikos, and ponos. The Theogony, rationalizing, we suggest, these images of eris, works her into the genealogical scheme by assigning her parentage to Night, thus giving her cosmic extension, and gives her a list of brothers and sisters which includes Ker (211), and a list of children which includesAndroktasiai, Ponos, Machai, Phonoi, and Neikea (226-9). She herfels is karterothumos (225) , consistent with her Homeric portrait as the source of combative energy in men: altogether, a formidable and oppressive figure in the genealogical gallery of the Theogony.
 
Our present passage, then, begins by correcting this genealogy. There are two gene of strifes, not one. But in using genos in this way, the bard has insensibly shifted its meaning. Two gene of eris (in the singular), if he had so phrased it, would mean two different generations or sets of children derived from eris. A man can have only one ancestral genos but conceivably his descendants could number several gene. This would have been a genealogical correction, and in part Hesiod may mean this, since he is probably thinking of a strife who had good children as against the list of bad children in the Theogony. However, he does not say this. He speaks of "two gene of strifes" (in the plural) which can mean only two different strife-families, that is, two different people born (with the name) strife. The implication is that they are children of a common parent - either twins or at least sisters. Now this is not strictly a genealogical correction, but a typological one. Genos is being transmuted from its previous familial meaning into that of class or kind, and this is achieved by a change in the context in which an existing word is used, not by using a new word. Once he has managed to double the name eris in this way, Hesiod splits one from the other conceptually by praising one and blaming the other. Epimomete as an epithet is suggestive. An act of genuine mental creation has occurred and he is somehow aware of it. Is this why he insists on the participle noesas to indicate the effort of (mental) attention required? After that it becomes easy to muster some Homeric formulae, previously used to describe the combative eris, and here attach them to the blameworthy type, and to recall in the same context the Homeric designation of the gods, Zeus (XI.3) and Apollo (I.8-9) in particular, as the originators of eris. The divine boulai (W.D. 16) may even be another reminiscence of the preface to the Iliad (I.5).
 
But the sister eris, whose separate existence he so far tenaciously retains in his mind, requires a separate definition, and a more sophisticated one. This is his own mental creation, and it is important, so he grounds the definition in that genealogy supplied in the Theogony, and then, remembering that Night is extended triple round Tartarus, above which grow roots of earth (Theogony 726-8), he exalts the importance of his new eris by giving it cosmic extension, thus preparing for the parallel assertion of the importance of its role in human life ("for men it is far better"). To define this role, he then successively attaches to the cosmic figure the formulas of three proverbs applicable to agriculture but recalling the Homeric spirit of emulation in combat which still lurks in the back of his mind as a contextual reference. Then, as if to reaffirm his mental grip on this dawning conception, he reasserts in a formulaic variant the importance of the role for men of this particular (hede) eris.
 
If at this point his connection begins to give out and his coherence to fade, we can measure his partial failure against the initial success achieved by remustering traditional formulas in order to construct a new pattern, something we can properly style a new idea. A concept has been born, or rather given linguistic expression, which is the main battle. The effort is not sustained for very long. The tight logic gives out because, we suggest, he is compelled to draw upon a vocabulary which is intractable for the purpose.
 
Lines 33-9, on any interpretation, offer conundrums. 34b plus 35a are suspended in a vacuum. Do 35-6 appeal for a settlement out of court, as opposed to one adjudicated by a prince (39)? Would any such alternative be likely in Hesiod's society? The formulas of 36 surely refer to the normal administration of justice. And how could successful and greedy acquisition confer great prestige on princes, unless they were the beneficiaries?
 
A clue to these obscurities may lie once more in the eris theme of the Iliad. Hesiod has moved from the good eris to eris-in-general by way of the agora. As eris is transplanted from the fields to the speaking place, she becomes the principle and process of litigation. The eris of the Iliad erupts and then subsides in two scenes laid in the agora. Hesiod's participant in the agora, after gaining his fill, proceeds to provoke neikos and deris by going after other people's property. But he will not be able to do so twice. A distribution has been made, but he has made off with more. Honor is due to princes who are gift-gobblers.
 
With these sentiments compare some of the statements made by Achilles to Agamemnon:
 
Most glorious son of Atreus, thou most covetous of all men, how shall the great-souled Achaeans give thee a prize? Naught do we know of wealth laid up in common store, but whatsoe'er we took by pillage from the cities hath been apportioned... (I.122-5)

and forsooth thou threatenest that thou wilt thyself take from me the prize wherefor I toiled much... (I.161f.)

but if ever an apportionment cometh, thy prize is greater far... (I.167)

In sooth it is better far throughout the wide camp of the Achaeans to take for thyself the prize of him whosoever speaketh contrary to thee. Folk-devouring king, seeing thou rulest over men of naught; else, son of Atreus, wouldest thou now work insolence for the last time. (I.229-32)

But of all else that is mine by my swift black ship shalt thou take or bear away naught in my despite. Nay come, make trial, that these too may know... (I.300-302)
 
As for the proposal in Hesiod's lines that litigation between two parties (diakrinoometha) be settled, and the reference to the legal functions of princes, one may again compare, from the same scene in the Iliad, Nestor's unavailing attempt at mediation, including his remarks to Achilles:
 
nor do thou, son of Peleus, be minded to strive with a king, might againt might, for it is no common honour that is the portion of a sceptred king to whom Zeus giveth glory. (I..277-9)
 
as well as the formal reconciliation offered by Achilles at Iliad XIX, where the eris now to be concluded is given thematic significance:
 
Son of Atreus, was this then the better for us twain, for thee and for me, what time with grief at heart we raged in soul-devouring strife for the sake of a girl? (XIX.56-8)

but long shall the Achaeans, methinks, remember the strife betwixt me and thee. (XIX.63-4)
 
Acceptance of this offer is accompanied by the transfer of compensation previously promised (lines 140ff., 238 ff.).
 
Are these echoes so slight as to be fortuitous? Or do they add up to a pattern of reminiscence? We recall the suggestion earlier made that, as Hesiod proposes the notion of a fruitful competitive strife, he may have the preface to the Iliad in his memory, among other contexts. Then he lets go of the antithesis and treats eris under another guise, as a single principle. But in doing so, he does not simply repaint the epic portrait of her. Instead, she is translated into a legal context. The neikos which she arouses becomes akin to the principle of litigation, a topic complementing the notion of competition. Both are so to speak additions to the conceptual apparatus. But litigation has its epic prototype conspicuously in the engagement between Achilles and Agamemnon, a neikos to be settled not by war but by negotiation; it had launched the plot of the Iliad. Hesiod is using the same theme to launch his own poem. And so, as Hesiod proceeds to portray litigation, his phraseology evokes the scenes, of quarrel and reconciliation, between the two heroes.
 
If this be acceptable as an explanation of these puzzling lines, we see revealed another facet of the poetic process by which Hesiod, working within a fairly tight oral tradition, achieved his own creative ends. Besides the manipulation of epic vocabulary to yield fresh dichotomies, besides the loose grouping of aphorisms to furnish continuous discourse, we perceive also the evocation and exploitation of whole situations or scenes in the epic prototype, and ones which are familiar.
 
Ultimately, the method of Hesiod can be viewed as one of topicalization carried on within the existing matrix of narrative oral poetry. This is still some distance away from logically organized discourse, let alone abstract definition and analysis. The linguistic materials are still oral. They can be rearranged and regrouped and as it were "translated" to produce the semblance of discourse. Within these limits, the achievement of thoughtful Hesiod is surely not inconsiderable.