the other poet

373 Pages·2010·2.34 MB·English

T O P
HE THER OET
THE ANCIENT RECEPTION OF HESIOD

PROEFSCHRIFT

TER VERKRIJGING VAN
DE GRAAD VAN DOCTOR AAN DE UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN,
OP GEZAG VAN RECTOR MAGNIFICUS PROF.MR. P.F. VAN DER HEIJDEN,
VOLGENS BESLUIT VAN HET COLLEGE VOOR PROMOTIES
TE VERDEDIGEN OP DONDERDAG 11 FEBRUARI 2010
KLOKKE 15.00 UUR

DOOR

HUGO KONING

GEBOREN TE HOOFDDORP
IN 1978
Promotiecommissie:

Promotor: Prof. dr. I. Sluiter

Leden: Prof. dr. J.A.E. Bons (Universiteit Utrecht en Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Prof. dr. I.J.F. de Jong (Universiteit van Amsterdam)
Prof. dr. A.P.M.H. Lardinois (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen)
Prof. dr. G.W. Most (Scuole Superiore Normale di Pisa en University of
Chicago)
Dr. C.C. de Jonge
Dr. M. van Raalte

De totstandkoming van dit proefschrift werd financieel begunstigd door een NWO
Vervangingssubsidie.

Cover illustration: Detail from Edmond François Aman-Jean’s Hesiod Listening to the
Inspiration of the Muse (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), adapted by T. Dijkstra,
Uitgeverij Koning BV.
Contents

Preface vii

Introduction 1
1 - Memory Studies 1
2 - Hesiod and Collective Memory 6
3 - This Book 10
4 - Getting Started: the Commemograms 16

Part 1 Hesiod and Homer

Chapter 1 Introduction: Equating Hesiod and Homer 23
0 - Introduction 23
1 - Lumping and Splitting 24
2 - Modern Scholarship 26
3 - Lumping in Antiquity 35
3.1 - Hesiod and Homer in Time 35
3.2 - Hesiod and Homer in Greek Society: Performance,
Symposia, Schools 40
Appendix: the Hesiod-Homer Sequence 45

Chapter 2 The Boundless Authority of Hesiod and Homer 49
0 - Introduction 49
1 - The Authority of Homer 50
2 - Herodotus on Greek Theology 54
3 - Hesiod and Homer as Lawgivers 62
4 - Dealing with Poetic Authority: Reactions and
Counter-Reactions 70
4.1 - A Frontal Attack on Fellows 70
4.2 - Strategies of Defence 74
4.2.1 - Selection 74
4.2.2 - Altering the Surface 76
4.2.3 - Allegorical Reading 78
4.2.4 - The Freedom of Poets 80
4.2.5 - Harmonization 84
5 - Conclusion 87

Chapter 3 Hesiod and Homer: The Storekeepers of Knowledge 89
0 - Introduction 89
1 - Hesiod and Homer as Philosophers 90
2 - Old Knowers: an Exclusive Category 92
2.1 - Making Groups: the Sophists 94
2.2 - Hesiod and Homer versus the Tragedians 98
2.3 - Hesiod and Homer as Historians 101
3 - Conclusion 107

iii
CONTENTS

Part 2 The ‘Real’ Hesiod

Chapter 4 Introduction: Searching for Hesiod 111
0 - Introduction 111
1 - The Biographical Tradition 112
2 - The Mechanisms of Memory 119
2.1 - The Practice of Assimilation 119
2.2 - The Catchword-Factor 123
2.3 - The Principle of Snowballing 127
2.4 - The Principle of Clustering 129
2.5 - The Homeric Factor 131
2.6 - The Persona’s Paradox 133
3 - Conclusion 135

Chapter 5 Ethics and Politics: the Common and the Arcane 139
0 - Introduction: Hesiod the Wise 139
1 - Hesiod’s Demons 142
2 - Justice and the City 149
3 - People and their Dealings 153
4 - Moderation and Simplicity 158
5 - Conclusion 160

Chapter 6 Philosophy: Great and Small 163
0 - Introduction 163
1 - Natural Philosophy 164
2 - The Problem of Revelation 172
2.1 - The Attack on Revelation (Xenophanes and
Heraclitus) 174
2.2 - Revelation Modified (Parmenides and Empedocles) 181
2.3 - The Use of Good Old-Fashioned Revelation (Protagoras
and Prodicus) 188
3 - Language and Truth 193
4 - Conclusion 202

Part 3 Hesiod versus Homer

Chapter 7 Introduction: the Contest of Hesiod and Homer 207
0 - Introduction 207
1 - Lumping and Splitting Again: Polar Opposition 208
2 - The Tradition of the Contest 212
2.1 - The Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi 214
2.2 - Other Contests 223
3 - Hesiod versus Homer: Points of Divergence 231

iv
CONTENTS
Chapter 8 Swords and Ploughshares 233
0 - Introduction 233
1 - Modern Scholarship 234
2 - Fighting and Farming 238
3 - The King and the People 245
4 - Hesiod’s Crossing and Homer’s Expansion 251
5 - Conclusion 254

Chapter 9 The Other Poetics 257
0 - Introduction 257
1 - Truth and Fiction 259
1.1 - Lying Muses 259
1.2 - Homer as a Philosopher of Language 263
1.3 - Believing the Poet 268
2 - The Poet’s Craft: Inspiration and Perspiration 276
2.1 - Modern Scholarship 276
2.2 - The Impact of Plato: the Manic Poet 281
2.3 - The Hellenistic Hesiod: on Wine and Water 288
3 - The Hesiodic Genre: the Rise of a Didactic Poet 295
3.1 - The interpretatio latina 297
3.2 - Hesiod in the Handbooks 300
4 - Beauty and Style 303
5 - Boundary Crossing 310
5.1 - Crossing 310
5.2 - Homeric expansion 314
6 - Conclusion 317

Chapter 10 Conclusion 319

Bibliography 331

Samenvatting 355

Curriculum Vitae 365

v

Preface

In the summer of 2009 some friends and I climbed Mount Olympus. I had often seen the
mountain from one of the villages on the Thessalian plain, a friendly-looking giant with its
peak usually hidden in a couple of clouds. When actually on one of its many folds, things are
different. The road was long and steep, there was a fierce and cold wind, and the thick mist
seriously impeded our sight. Every time we thought the top was near, we saw a more elevated
piece of rock protruding from the mist still further away. Nonetheless, after a few hours we
reached the Mytikas. When we were about to start our descent, something marvellous
happened: the clouds disappeared, the sun broke through and suddenly we could see the entire
mountainslope, and the path we had taken.
It appears to me now that writing this dissertation was an experience very much like
climbing Olympus. The collection, analysis and especially the presentation of the material
turned out to be a challenge of mountain-like proportions. I admit that sometimes I could
barely see where I was going, and simply put one feet in front of the other. It has been
particularly difficult for me (especially as a self-funded PhD candidate or ‘buiten-
promovendus’) to keep a constant pace and still find the time to re-think, re-consider, or even
to relax. Fortunately, the right path had been clearly marked, and there were many friends
along the way cheering me on, and sharing in my experience. It is only now, when I have
reached my goal, that I can clearly see how much I have learned.
Naturally, the journey in itself has been rewarding as well. Hesiod is an immensely
interesting author, and we have the privilege of living in an age that is more and more coming
round to appreciate him as such. His scope and influence are awesome, and his relationship
with Homeric epic is far more dynamic than has often been assumed; I am certain that there is
still much to gain from future research in this field. It has been a great pleasure for me to
approach ancient epic within the framework of the main tenets of cultural memory studies.
Memory wars over culturally important figures from the past are fought out every day, and to
attempt to analyse this thoroughly human process in the ancient world has never ceased to
intrigue me. Moreover, the occasional inclusion of modern views of Hesiod has shown how
truly never-ending the pendulum of imagination and mental construction swings to and fro,
from one end to the other.

vii
PREFACE
Climbing Olympus takes two days. This dissertation took slightly less than ten years. I take
comfort in the fact that in ancient epic too, difficult things usually take ten years to complete.
During this long period, I have been happy to be part of the research school OIKOS. Apart
from their support, many friends have helped me: some by letting me work and putting up
with my continuous bustling; others by forcing me to relax and leave the book alone for a
while. They are very dear to me, and without them I would certainly have lost my sanity
somewhere along the way. So thank you Andrea, Daniël, Frans, Hanna, Marja, Marten,
Michel, Robbert, Sebastiaan, Susannah, and many others. I feel the deepest gratitude towards
my parents, to whom I owe everything, and towards my sister Naomi and brother Edward,
who have always loved and supported me. A special thanks goes to the monkeyheads,
particularly Mark, for countless reasons. Lastly, I thank Joëlle, for always being there for me,
even on the very slopes of Olympus.
viii
Introduction

This is not a book about Hesiod. Instead of offering a historical appraisal of the poet or a
literary analysis of his principal works, the present study examines the role of Hesiod in the
ancient imagination. The central question is concerned with the way that Hesiod was given
shape in the collective memory of the Greeks. Hence, this study deals with the processes of
remembering and forgetting that created his image, with its meaning and relevance to Greek
identity, and more particularly with the different manifestations of his image in Greek
literature. This book, then, is about ‘Hesiod’;1 it conceives of and investigates the poet as a
concept in later literary-critical discourse, as a locus that was informed with values and
qualities, and more generally as a cultural icon constructed and reconstructed by later Greek
authors who employed him in their own texts.2
The present study is thus concerned with the ancient reception of Hesiod, but its theoretical
framework is mostly derived from collective or cultural memory studies. In the first section of
this introduction, therefore, I will discuss some of the most important approaches and findings
of this particular discipline. Section 2 will then demonstrate how helpful the main notions of
memory theory can be in understanding and explaining the ancient imagination of Hesiod. In
section 3, I will briefly describe how this book is organized, while section 4 presents some
preliminary findings of interest, and looks ahead to the rest of the book.

1 - Memory Studies
Collective or cultural memory studies constitute a notoriously broad field, incorporating
various disciplines with their own methods and approaches. Nevertheless, they are all based
on the primary observation that remembering is a social act. As was argued by sociologist
Maurice Halbwachs (1877 - 1945), universally regarded as the founding father of collective
memory studies, individuals create and recollect their private memories within a social or

1 Throughout this study I will speak of Hesiod even when strictly speaking I mean ‘Hesiod’, i.e. the Hesiod as
imagined by the Greeks; maintaining the inverted commas throughout the book would become too tedious. In
what follows, the context should always immediately make clear which Hesiod I am referring to: the actual poet
or his ancient image.
2 In this book I will not not draw a sharp distinction between ‘the man’ and ‘the works’, both for the sake of
convenience and for the obvious reason that such a distinction hardly existed in ancient views anyway, the
reconstruction of which is my main interest. As Lefkowitz (1981) and others have amply shown, the ancients
believed that the work of an author reflected his person: this means that biographical data were both deduced
from the work itself and put to use in interpreting it. Obviously, such circular reasoning was especially well-
practiced when relatively little was known of the author through other sources (as in the case of Hesiod).
1
INTRODUCTION
cultural framework; from this observation, it was only a small step to demonstrate the great
importance of this social or cultural framework for memories shared by groups.3 Because of
this common point of departure, collective memory studies are based on a large consensus
about their main focus and ‘objective’: they are concerned with investigating the way groups
of people construct a shared past. As is suggested by this formulation, two notions are of
central concern to this type of study.
The first is the observation that the past, as remembered at any given moment, is a
construction of those alive in the present: some events are forgotten, others are highlighted;
some related events are separated, and unrelated ones are connected.4 This process is partly
unconscious, but also partly conscious and intentional. The second notion of crucial
importance relates to group identity: a common past (or a past, at least, constructed as
common) and the recollections shared by a group provide its members with a sense of
belonging. Such memory goes beyond the experience of a person’s own lifetime: a modern
Greek can ‘remember’ the battle at Thermopylae as easily as the Olympiakos championship
of 2009. In all such cases, recollection makes a person part of a community.
Evidently, these two notions of construction and identity are interconnected since, as is
often observed, the past (i.e. the content of collective memory) is virtually always shaped so
as to benefit the group in one way or another. Just as a resumé for a job interview is
constructed to make the candidate appear eminently suitable for the new position, a collective
past is often formed with a view to the present needs of the group. In other words: the past is
created in the present, and those who do so usually have a certain goal; in this context, the
term ‘intentional history’ is sometimes used.5

Collective memory studies constitute a relatively new branch of modern research, 6 especially
since Halbwachs’ theories laid dormant for a while. His findings, however, were injected with
new life by theorists like Pierre Nora, who put collective memory back on the scholarly
agenda even though they developed Halbwachs’ ideas in a wholly new direction, very
influential though not directly relevant to the present study.7 Despite the relative youth of

3 For a fine summary of the essentials of Halbwachs’ theory see Coser (1992) 21-28.
4 We ‘transform essentially unstructured series of events into seemingly coherent historical narratives’, says
Zerubavel (2003) 13, leaning on an influential essay of Hayden White (1978), who claimed that historians turn
historical events into a narrative by techniques also used for the emplotment of a novel or a play. The past that is
in our heads and in our history books is no ‘truth’, but a construct, and therefore liable to change.
5 Cf. Gehrke (2001) 285.
6 See for a brief history and an excellent summary of collective memory theory also Kirk (2005) 1-24.
7 The new theorists (mostly sociologists and anthropologists) defined memory, as a human modus of
experiencing the past, by opposing it to history, the other modus. While memory re-enacts, relives, and continues
2