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confluências e fronteiras
Organizadores
Christian Werner Breno Battistin Sebastiani Antonio Orlando Dourado-Lopes
HUMANITAS
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O presente livro teve como ponto de partida o colóquio “Gêneros poéticos na Grécia antiga: fronteiras e confluências”, realizado em junho de 2013 em São Paulo, na Universidade de São Paulo, e organizado pelo grupo de pesquisa “Gêneros poéticos na Grécia antiga: tradição e contexto” (Universidade de São Paulo/CNPq). Sem o apoio de várias instituições e pessoas o colóquio e o livro não teriam sido possíveis. A publicação do livro foi financiada por um auxílio do CNPq, e o colóquio contou com financiamento da FAPESP, da CAPES e do Departamento de Letras Clássicas e Vernáculas (Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas/ Universidade de São Paulo). Agradece-se a todos os participantes do colóquio pelo envio de seus textos e, quanto à organização do evento, especialmente a Breno Sebastiani, Erika Werner, Antonio Orlando Lopes, André Malta, Adriane Duarte, Lucia Sano, Leonardo Vieira, Camila Zanon, Caroline Evangelista Lopes e Fernando Rodrigues Jr.
9 Abreviações 11 Introdução
Christian Werner Universidade de São Paulo
23 Genre and authority in Hesiod’s Works and Days Lilah Grace Canevaro
University of Edinburgh
49 The animal fable and Greek iambus:
ainoi and half-ainoi in Archilochus Laura Swift
The Open University
79 A digressão como recurso narrativo em Homero e Heródoto
Adriane da Silva Duarte Universidade de São Paulo
99 Epic heroes in tragedy:
genre, ethics, and the fifth-century community
William Allan
Università degli Studi di Milano
149 Aspectos cômicos do diálogo Górgias de Platão
Daniel Rossi Nunes Lopes Universidade de São Paulo
185 O mimo grego literário no períiodo helenííistico
Fernando Rodrigues Jr. Universidade de São Paulo
205 Políibio e a viagem de Odisseu pela Sicíilia: intertextualidade, memória e entendimento
Breno Battistin Sebastiani Universidade de São Paulo
219 At non inglorius umbris mittitur:
Epitáfios e epicédios dedicados a animais no contexto greco-romano
Erika Werner
Aant Acta Antiqua
AevAnt Aevum Antiquum
AJPh American Journal of Philology A&R Atene e Roma
BICS Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London
CB Classical Bulletin
CJ The Classical Journal
ClAnt Classical Antiquity C et M Classica et Mediaevalia
ColbyQ Colby Quarterly
CPh Classical Philology
CQ Classical Quarterly
CR Classical Review
CV Classical Views
Eclás estudios Clásicos
EMC echos du Monde Classique G&R Greece & Rome
HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology ICS Illinois Classical Studies
JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies
MD Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei
Testi Classici
LEC Les Études Classiques
LfgrE Lexikon des Frühgriechischen epos MH Museum Helveticum
PACA The Proceedings of the African Classical Associations
PCairo Zenon Cairo Zenon Papyri
PCPhS Proceedings of the Cambridge
Philological Society
Philol. Philologus
PP La Parola del Passato
QUCC Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica
RE Paulys Real-enzyklopädie der
klassischen Altertumswissenschaft RFIC Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica
RHR Revue de l’histoire des religions
SH Supplementum Hellenisticum (ed. H.
Lloyd-Jones et P. J. Parsons) SIFC Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica TAPA Transactions and Proceedings of the
American Philological Association
ZPE Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und epigraphik
Christian Werner* Universidade de São Paulo
Após a aguda problematização, que às vezes beirou a negação, da utilidade e validade da noção de gênero literário nos séculos XIX e, principalmente, XX entre escritores e teóricos,1 nas últimas décadas a noção retomou a importância que teve, por exemplo, entre os formalistas russos, e a aproximação preconizada por Bakhtin nos anos 1950 entre gêneros do discurso e gêneros literários também se mostrou, por meio de diferentes abordagens
* Agradeço a Lucia Sano pela leitura deste texto e suas sugestões.
1 Para um panorama dessa história, cf. Duff, D. (Org.) Modern genre theory. Essex: Pearson, 2000.
teóricas, bastante produtiva. Simplificadamente, ultrapassou-se o viés essencialista e/ou puramente formal, essencialmente estático, comum em teorias clássicas, românticas e positivistas, por meio de formulações dinâmicas e abertas. Gêneros deixaram de ser vistos como ideias ou entidades puras. As reformulações que produziram o revigoramento dessa antiga concepção literária, como não poderia deixar de ser, também se fizeram notar em estudos sobre a literatura grega.2 Percorreu-se, assim, um 2 Por falta de espaço, destaco publicações mais recentes que se ocuparam, sobretudo, do modo como categorizações da produção poética grega se fazem notar nas próprias obras e não na sua teorização posterior (acerca da importância dessa diferenciação no contexto greco-romano, cf. Farrell, J. Classical genre in theory and practice. In: Cohen, R. e White, H. (Org.) Theorizinggenres II. New Literary History, v. 34, n. 3, 2003, p. 383-408), mencionando apenas uma parcela exemplar dessa bibliografia, que será complementada nas contribuições deste livro: Rossi, L. E. I generi letterari e le loro leggi scritte e non scritte nelle letterature classiche. BICS, v. 18, 1971, p. 69-94 (os 40 anos de publicação deste artigo seminal foram comemorados na revista Seminari Romani, v. I, n. 2, 2012 com uma série de contribuições que discutem diferentes gêneros da literatura grega, especialmente da poesia arcaica); Calame, C. Réflexions sur les genres littéraires en Grèce archaïque. QUCC, v. 17, 1974, p. 113-128; Nagy, G. The best of the Achaeans: concepts of the hero in archaic Greek poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979; Gentili, B. Poetry and its public in ancient Greece: from Homer to the fifth century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988 (a edição italiana é de 1985); Rosen, R. M. Old comedy and the iambographic tradition. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988; Martin, R. P. The language of heroes: speech and performance in the Iliad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989; Winkler, J. J. e Zeitlin, F. I. (Org.) Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian drama in its social context. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990; Nagy, G. Pindar’s Homer: the lyric possession of an epic past. London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990; Käppel, L. Paian: Studienzur Geschichte einer Gattung. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992; Nightingale, A. W. Genres in dialogue: Plato and the construct of philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Silk, M. S. (Org.) Tragedy and the tragic: Greek theatre and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 (especialmente a contribuição de O. Taplin); Ford, A. Epic as genre. In: Morris, I. e Powell, B. (Org.)
longo caminho desde o artigo de A. E. Harvey sobre a herança alexandrina do nosso modo de pensar – basicamente, classificar – a lírica grega arcaica.3
A new companion to Homer. Leiden: Brill, 1997; Loraux, N. La voix endeuillée: essai sur la tragédie grecque. Paris: Gallimard, 1999; Silk, M. S. Aristophanes and the definition of comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; Depew, M. e Obbink, D. (Org.) Matrices of genre: authors, canons, and society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000; Rutherford, I. Pindar’s paeans: a reading of the fragments with a survey of the genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; Dobrov, G. W. Figures of play: Greek drama and metafictional poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; Graziosi, B. Inventing Homer: the early reception of epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; Clay, J. S. Hesiod’s cosmos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Graziosi, B. e Haubold, J. Homer: the resonance of epic. London: Duckworth, 2005; Platter, C. Aristophanes and the carnival of genres. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007; Kurke, L. Archaic Greek poetry. In: Shapiro, H. A. (Org.) The Cambridge companion to archaic Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Rotstein, A. The idea of iambos. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; Swift, L. The hidden chorus: echoes of genre in tragic lyric. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; Faulkner, A. (Org.) The Homeric Hymns: interpretative essays. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011 (especialmente o capítulo de J. S. Clay); Kurke, L. Aesopic conversations: popular tradition, cultural and the invention of Greek prose. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011; Agocs, P. et al. (Org.) Reading the victory ode. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; Bakola, E. et al. (Org.) Greek comedy and the discourse of genres. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 (especialmente o capítulo de M. Silk); Kowalzig, B. e Wilson, P. Dithyramb in context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Para a poesia helenística, a noção de gênero sempre foi fundamental, por exemplo, através da noção de Kreuzung der Gattungen, ela própria constantemente reavaliada, sobretudo nos últimos 20 anos, desde sua formulação por W. Kroll na década de 1920; cf., especialmente, Barchiesi, A. The crossing. In: Harrison, S. J. Texts, ideas, and the classics: scholarship, theory, and classical literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 142-166. Para o universo da poesia latina, cf., mais recentemente, Papanghelis, T. et al. (Org.) Generic interfaces in Latin literature. Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.
3 Harvey, A. E. The classification of Greek lyric poetry. CQ, v. 5, 1955, p. 157-175.
Ao ser teorizado, gênero (poético) foi sempre uma categoria que pressupôs um universo de análise limitado, primeiro, a poesia, depois, a literatura. “Poesia” é uma concepção que remonta aos gregos,4 mas “literatura” é uma ideia cuja história é bem mais recente: “a história da ideia de ‘literatura’, de fato, revela um processo de especialização crescente de sentidos, por meio do qual a ‘literatura’ foi, originalmente, equiparada a todos os tipos de escrita e então, na era pós-Gutemberg de impressão, a obras impressas, e somente muito mais tarde foi restrita à noção de obras da imaginação”.5 Entre os gregos, porém, não há nenhum termo que abarque prosa e verso,6 e mesmo na Roma imperial não há um termo equivalente à “literatura”.
Isso não significa que o terceiro sentido de literatura mencionado – modificado, é verdade – não tenha sido operante entre os gregos, em que pese um termo não ter sido cunhado para ele. Um termo que, nas práticas gregas, se aproximou bastante do sentido em questão foi mousikê,7 termo nuclear para aquilo que 4 Acerca da conceitualização de poesia entre os gregos, cf. Ford, A. The origins of criticism: literary culture and poetic theory in classical Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 91-158. Para a delimitação entre “canto” e “poesia”, sincrônica e diacrônica, cf. Nagy, 1990 (n. 2), p. 17-51.
5 Prendergast, C. The world republic of letters. In: ______. (Org.) Debating world literature. London; New York: Verso, 2004, p. 4. Todas as traduções nesta “Introdução” são de minha autoria.
6 Para o termo mimêsis como candidato parcial, cf. Finkelberg, M. The birth of literary fiction in ancient Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; e Halliwell, S. The aesthetics of mimesis: ancient texts and modern problems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
7 Cf. Ford (n. 4), p. 4 (“cultura literária” como “equivalente mais próximo” de mousikê); para uma discussão da noção, cf. Peponi, A.-E. Frontiers of pleasure: models of aesthetic response in archaic and classical Greek thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 2-14. Acerca do termo, cf., por exemplo, Aristófanes, Rãs 797-802 e, sobre essa passagem, Halliwell, S. Between ecstasy and truth: interpretations of Greek poetics from Homer to Longinus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 109-111.
J. Herington chamou de “cultura da canção” (“song culture”), a forma como a cultura músico-poética grega se desenvolveu antes da crescente penetração da escrita na produção e recepção das obras poéticas.8
Mousikê, que engloba “variados tipos e combinações de ação verbal, instrumental e cinética, não foi apenas a quintessência das instituições culturais na polis grega, mas também um componente decisivo na produção do imaginário coletivo, especialmente na Atenas clássica”.9 É a partir das práticas da mousikê e relacionando-se com elas – mas nunca somente em uma relação de oposição – que outras formas de saber se constituíram e se definiram ao longo dos séculos V e IV a.C., todas elas reivindicando para si o caráter de sophia.10 Assim, quando Platão “cria” a filosofia, ou seja, define-lhe um campo que se torna hegemônico, ele o faz, em diversos de seus diálogos, incorporando e criticando formas e conteúdos da poesia e da retórica.11 Essa estratégia de utilização 8 Herington, J. Poetry into drama: early tragedy and the Greek poetic tradition. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1985. Para uma discussão sobre o impacto da escrita na conceitualização e teorização da poesia nos séculos V e IV a.C., cf. Ford (n. 4) e Ford, A. From letters to literature: reading the ‘song culture’ of Classical Greece. In: Yunis, H. (Org.) Written texts and the rise of literate culture in ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
9 Peponi, A.-E. Introduction. In: ______. (Org.) Performance and culture in Plato’s Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 3.
10 Cf., por exemplo, Tell, H. Plato’s counterfeit sophists. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2011, e Martin, R. P. The seven sages as performers of wisdom. In: Dougherty, C. e Kurke, L. (Org.) Cultural poetics in archaic Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
11 “Platão define explicitamente o modo de discurso usado pelo filósofo (‘dialético’) em oposição à linguagem sedutora da poesia e da retórica; mas seus diálogos nunca se restringem à dialética. De fato, as conversas dialéticas dos interlocutores (…) são apenas um aspecto do diálogo platônico, pois muitos dos textos de Platão também são constituídos pelos diálogos que eles conduzem com outros gêneros do discurso” (Nightingale, n. 2, p. 3).
e exploração de gêneros poéticos para definir novos gêneros em prosa, demarcando diferentes tipos de sophia, é explorado em diversos capítulos deste livro, quais sejam: historiografia (A. Duarte, cap. 3; B. Sebastiani, cap. 8); e diálogo socrático (A. Capra, cap. 5; D. Lopes, cap. 6).
Nesse período, a técnica poética (poiêtikê tekhnê) foi paulatinamente conceitualizada como um saber com objeto e especialistas próprios, de sorte que os produtos dessa técnica passaram a ser examinados a partir de categorias cada vez mais abstratas, ou seja, dissociados de suas condições usuais de (re) performance. Fez parte desse processo a gradual e cada vez mais diferenciada categorização dos produtos disponíveis para exame, que culminou no trabalho dos filólogos alexandrinos a partir do século III a.C. Todavia, esses mesmos eventos ou produtos culturais, antes da percepção e definição da poesia como uma técnica ao modo da medicina ou da retórica, já haviam sido entendidos pelos seus públicos como pertencentes a conjuntos maiores e a seus subconjuntos, ou seja, é possível demonstrar que, na cultura da canção grega, categorizações de ordens diversas sempre fizeram parte do horizonte de expectativa na recepção da poesia.12
Conjuntos e subconjuntos dessa natureza, porém, não podem ser compreendidos como categorias estanques, no que parte da crítica literária do século XX que se dedicou ao tema não cansou de insistir, tanto a partir da análise diacrônica, adotando uma noção de “evolução”,13 por exemplo, quanto, sincronicamente, 12 Cf., abaixo, L. G. Canevaro (cap. 1) e L. Swift (cap. 2).
13 Numa discussão homóloga, cf. o uso ético-político da noção de “evolução”, entendida como “progresso”, para se compreender a relação entre poesia épica e trágica desenvolvido em Allan, W. e Kelly, A. Listening to many voices: Greek tragedy as popular art. In: Marmodoro, A. e Hill, J. (Org.) The author’s voice in classical and late antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
a partir da reconstrução de um sistema de gêneros literários e, eventualmente, extraliterários. Um gênero só coexiste com outros gêneros em um conjunto marcado por relações hierárquicas que implicam juízos culturalmente definidos. Gêneros, assim entendidos, são estabilizações de relações de comunicação e, portanto, podem ser examinados a partir de uma diferenciação defendida por M. Bakhtin e T. Todorov entre gêneros primários ou cotidianos e secundários ou literários.14 A prática de gêneros, tanto por parte de poetas quanto de seu público, portanto, é parte constituinte da comunicação estabelecida entre eles.15 Vejamos como isso funcionaria no caso da poesia épica.
R. P. Martin (n. 2), em um trabalho seminal, defendeu que, na poesia homérica, a tipicidade de certos discursos dos heróis manifesta-se na utilização, pelas personagens dos poemas, de alguns gêneros discursivos cuja performance evidencia o valor do sujeito da performance. Os principais gêneros discursivos (rememoração, jactância-e-insulto – “flyting” –, comando), por sua vez, guardam certas relações com aquele que é o gênero maior, ou seja, o gênero épico-heroico. Ao se examinar como operam certo gênero discursivo e seus conteúdos típicos, circunscreve-se, por oposição ou paralelismo, o próprio gênero épico-heroico.
2013, p. 77-122; alguns pontos desse artigo são retomados por W. Allan em seu texto (cap. 4).
14 Embora sem fazer referência aos autores citados, essa distinção foi conceitualizada, mutatis mutandis, por E. Bakker como, respectivamente, aoidê e epos na poesia épica; cf. Bakker, E. The meaning of meat and the structure of the Odyssey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 15 Cf. Bakhtin, M. M. Speech genres and other late essays. Trad. V. W. McGee.
Ed. C. Emerson e M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986 e, do mesmo autor, ensaios presentes na coletânea Questões de literatura e de estética (a teoria do romance). Trad. A. F. Bernardini et al. 6. ed. São Paulo: Hucitec, 2010, sobretudo, “Epos e romance (sobre a metodologia do estudo do romance)”; e Todorov, T. Os gêneros do discurso. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1980.
Um sistema de gêneros, portanto, não é indissociável de certo contexto. No que diz respeito à poesia grega arcaica, Andrew Ford, entre outros,16 insistiu que toda composição poética poderia ser definida a partir de quatro categorias: contexto (noções sociais e religiosas); linguagem marcada (pela ocasião: canto e dança); tema/conteúdo; relação entre cantor e público. Esta última categoria diz respeito, sobretudo, à autoridade do(s) gênero(s) predominante(s) num determinado momento e o modo como essa autoridade é conceitualizada. No caso da poesia épica, por exemplo, isso ocorre por meio da vinculação entre a Musa e o poeta, vinculação que justamente serve para Hesíodo diferenciar seu poema, Trabalhos e dias, desse gênero maior, como mostra L. Canevaro (cap. 1).
Quando Platão demarca os protocolos de um novo tipo de saber, a filosofia, ele o faz por meio de um intenso uso de diferentes tipos de discursos e tradições, inclusive poéticos, de sorte que “a reformulação da tradição poética é um fenômeno bastante comum nos diálogos platônicos. As versões ‘reformadas’ do canto épico são superiores à épica tradicional segundo os padrões do próprio Platão”.17 Essas estratégias, que reconceitualizam os próprios gêneros e seus protocolos, são o tema de duas contribuições neste livro, a de A. Capra (cap. 5) e D. Lopes (cap. 6): o primeiro investiga de que forma Platão, no Fedro, ao perseguir uma definição do discurso filosófico, se aproxima da demarcação de um grande gênero poético (ou arquitexto, na nomenclatura de G. Genette) que podemos chamar de lírico, dele se apropriando do que lhe interessa, mesmo que por contraste
16 Cf. Ford, 1997 (n. 2), Käppel (n. 2) e Carey, C. Genre, occasion and performance. In: Budelmann, F. (Org.) Cambridge companion to Greek lyric. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
17 Capra, A. Plato’s Hesiod and the will of Zeus: Philosophical rhapsody in the Timaeus and the Critias. In: Boys-stones, G. R. eHaubold, J. H. (Org.) Plato and Hesiod. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 202.
ou oposição; o segundo, a partir do rastreamento de ecos aristofânicos (Os cavaleiros, em particular) no Górgias, mostra de que forma uma conceitualização avant la lettre da retórica em Aristófanes é reaproveitada pelo filósofo.
A interação entre gêneros é intrínseca à recepção dos textos poéticos, e essa interação, com frequência, tem um caráter agônico. Envolvidas nessa discussão não estão apenas questões formais, mas, sobretudo, culturais, pois um gênero procura manter um determinado status simbólico que pode ser disputado ou assimiliado por outros gêneros. W. Allan (cap. 4), por exemplo, mostra como a tragédia retrabalha elementos chave do heroísmo épico para se definir como gênero de arte popular que propunha oferecer algo para cada grupo presente na plateia, ou seja, sem propagar um ideário puramente democrático ou aristocrático, no que se diferenciaria de gêneros ideologicamente mais circunscritos.
Desta forma, o objetivo principal das contribuições deste volume não é indagar por que um determinado texto pertence a um determinado gênero, mas investigar estratégias de conceitualização de gêneros que permeavam a comunicação pressuposta pelos textos poéticos produzidos na Grécia antiga e em sociedades nas quais, em determinadas épocas, a recepção da poesia grega foi culturalmente central, como mostra o texto de E. Werner (cap. 9) para a literatura latina. Assim, investiga-se de que forma determinado texto demarca-se em relação a outros textos em um ambiente cultural no qual espaços de atuação e de autoridade eram reivindicados pelos produtores desses textos. Trata-se de explorar a ideia de que gêneros não só se definiram mutuamente, mas incorporaram, representaram e transmutaram elementos genéricos ou transgenéricos.18
18 Por exemplo, a categoria do “cômico”; para os problemas no uso dessa categoria em uma discussão de gênero, em particular, a comédia, cf. a contribuição de Silk para Bakola et al. (n. 2).
Uma característica transgenérica fundamental na poesia grega é a oposição entre louvor e censura, que não é apenas central na Poética aristotélica, mas foi operante na própria produção poética arcaica e clássica, como explicitado, por exemplo, na Nemeia 7 de Píndaro, e continuou presente no período helenístico, como F. Rodrigues Jr. (cap. 7) demonstra na sua discussão do mimo grego. Para A. Rotstein (n. 2), o epainos (“louvor”) pode ser entendido como um macrogênero, com o que ela desenvolve a discussão da polaridade entre louvor e censura tal como conduzida por análises sociais ou antropológicas dos gêneros poéticos gregos, entre outros, por G. Nagy e B. Gentili (n. 2). Todavia, isso não é suficiente, pois, na recepção da poesia jâmbica, particularmente na crítica moderna, as relações entre o “jambo” e a macrocategoria psogos (“censura”), como mostra a autora, não é clara.
Outro elemento transgenérico bastante comum é a narrativa, que, ao longo dos séculos V e IV a.C., pelo menos em Atenas, passou a ser conceitualizada, sobretudo, a partir dos poemas homéricos que se tornaram canônicos, Ilíada e Odisseia.19 Isso é apenas parte de processos complexos que produziram formas distintas de representar o passado,20 a partir de um certo momento, por meio da prosa e em acentuada diferenciação em relação a formas poéticas tradicionais,21 como mostra B. Sebastiani para 19 Para uma reconstrução possível desse processo, cf. Nagy, G. Homer the preclassic. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2010.
20 Cf. Marincola, J. et al. (Org.) Greek notions of the past in the Archaic and Classical eras: history without historians. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, e Grethlein, J. The Greeks and their past: poetry, oratory and history in the fifth century BCe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
21 Cf. Kurke, 2011 (n. 2) e Baragwanath, E. e de Bakker, M. Myth, truth and narrative in Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, entre outros.
a prosa historiográfica de Políbio em relação à autoridade tradicional da Odisseia (cap. 8). Essas transformações também dizem respeito à utilização, por parte de poetas e prosadores, de um lado, e à conceitualização, por parte de teóricos antigos, da noção de “ficção”, uma noção intrinsecamente elusiva.22
Examinar como determinado texto literário utiliza certos elementos narrativos não serve apenas para discutir de que forma seu gênero se constitui, mas, sobretudo, para relacionar esse texto a gêneros distintos e também para investigar como outros gêneros são implicitamente definidos nesse texto/gênero. É o que faz A. Duarte no seu texto sobre Heródoto (cap. 3).
Outro exemplo de um uso da narrativa condicionado pelo gênero e condicionante dele verifica-se em Trabalhos e dias de Hesíodo: ao mesmo tempo que utiliza uma moldura narrativa mínima (o conflito entre o poeta e seu irmão em uma comunidade cujos reis se deixaram corromper), o poema também se dissocia da poesia hexamétrica narrativa por excelência, a épica heroica, que tem, no seu centro, a narração de conflitos violentos. Essa dissociação acompanhada de associação é acentuada por estratégias diversas, ao longo do poema, para definir o estatuto dos temas e da forma de um gênero cujo autor busca firmar sua autoridade, como mostra L. Canevaro (cap. 1).
Para concluir com o gênero poético por excelência na Atenas do século V a.C., a tragédia, o espetáculo em destaque nas Grandes Dionísias, festival cívico fundamental na cidade, é possível observar que as histórias desenvolvidas nas tramas trágicas tinham vários elementos em comum com as performances homéricas, que fazem parte do núcleo de outro festival central em Atenas, as Grandes Panateneias. Um dos elementos distintivos
22 Cf. Porter, J. Making and unmaking: the Achaean wall and the limits of fictionality in Homeric criticism. TAPA, v. 141, 2011, p. 1-36.
principais dos espetáculos trágicos (e cômicos), porém, foi a incorporação de outros gêneros, em particular o grande gênero da poesia mélica coral, o que tornou a experiência coletiva no teatro de Dioniso algo completamente distinto da performance de um poema épico. Ao passo que a Ilíada e a Odisseia já estão canonizadas no início do século V a.C., os espetáculos dramáticos, sobretudo tragédias e comédias, passaram por diversas mudanças genéricas ao longo do século. Assim, a noção que a maioria dos trabalhos citados nesta introdução tem demonstrado, e que é rediscutida pelas contribuições a este volume, é a de que, sincrônica e diacronicamente, cada performance ou leitura de um poema coloca o espectador em uma linha de força formada pela atuação de elementos que são mais ou menos associados a determinados gêneros e dependentes do contexto cultural.
Lilah Grace Canevaro University of Edinburgh
In his Theogony, Hesiod established a close relationship with the Muses, beginning with an extended Hymn,1 and crediting them with his poetic prowess.2 Such an affiliation was appropriate for that particular poetic project as the focus of the Theogony was on the gods, and Hesiod needed the Muses to support his claim to privileged knowledge of the divine sphere.3 Beginning with the 1 Theog.1 μουσάων Ἑλικωνιάδων ἀρχώμεθ’ ἀείδειν.
2 Theog.22-3 αἵ νύ ποθ’ Ἡσίοδον καλὴν ἐδίδαξαν ἀοιδήν.
3 See J.S. Clay, Hesiod’s Cosmos (Cambridge, 2003), 50-3 (Theogony), 72-8 (Works and Days).
Muses is a convention of epic: the Iliad begins μῆνιν ἄειδε θεά, the Odyssey ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Mοῦσα; the Catalogue of Women has at line 2 Μοῦσαι Ὀλυμπιάδες; according to the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi, the Thebaid began Ἄργος ἄειδε, θεά, πολυδίψιον, and the epigoni Νῦν αὖθ’ ὁπλοτέρων ἀνδρῶν ἀρχώμεθα, Μοῦσαι. In the Works and Days, however, Hesiod employs this epic convention only to break away from it.
Μο ῦ σ α ι Πι ερ ί η θ ε ν ἀ ο ι δ ῇ σ ι κ λ ε ί ο υ σ α ι δεῦτε, Δί᾽ ἐννέπετε σφέτερον πατέρ᾽ ὑμνείουσαι, ὅν τε διὰ βροτοὶ ἄνδρες ὁμῶς ἄφατοί τε φατοί τε ῥητοί τ᾽ ἄρρητοί τε Διὸς μεγάλοιο ἕκητι. ῥέα μὲν γὰρ βριάει, ῥέα δὲ βριάοντα χαλέπτει, ῥεῖα δ᾽ ἀρίζηλον μινύθει καὶ ἄδηλον ἀέξει, ῥεῖα δέ τ᾽ ἰθύνει σκολιὸν καὶ ἀγήνορα κάρφει Ζεὺς ὑψιβρεμέτης ὃς ὑπέρτατα δώματα ναίει. κλῦθι ἰδὼν ἀιών τε, δίκῃ δ᾽ ἴθυνε θέμιστας τύνη· ἐγὼ δέ κε Πέρσῃ ἐτήτυμα μυθησαίμην.
Muses from Pieria who praise with song, come here, tell of Zeus your father as you hymn,
through whom mortal men are unspoken and spoken alike,
known and unknown, by the will of great Zeus.
For he easily strengthens, and easily weakens the strong, easily he diminishes the conspicuous and raises up the inconspicuous,
easily he straightens the crooked and withers the manly, Zeus the high-thunderer who dwells in the highest halls. Listen to me, seeing and hearing, and you: make laws straight with justice.
But I will tell true things to Perses.
Hesiod begins with the Muses, conforming to their demand in the Theogony that he always sing of them first and last: Theog.34 σφᾶς δ’αὐτὰς πρῶτόν τε καὶ ὕστατον αἰὲν ἀείδειν. He asks the Muses to sing of Zeus, 2 Δί’ ἐννέπετε. If we were to be taken in by the parallel with Odyssey 1.1 ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, we would assume that where in the Odyssey the focus is the man, in the Works and Days it will be Zeus.4 However, in the proem Zeus is only celebrated in regards to his relationship with mortals: omitted are the conventional hymnic features such as narratives of the god’s birth and his divine deeds. Hesiod got these details out of the way already in the Theogony. So he begins by extolling Zeus’ powers; then, in a reversal of audience expectation, he departs from the Muses’ song. Although the focus of the proem, Zeus will be replaced by the realities of Iron-Age living as the main theme of the poem proper and as such the Muses are being invited to sing a song parallel to Hesiod’s own.5 Hesiod himself will sing of ἐτήτυμα (line 10), addressed ostensibly in the first instance to Perses; his focus will be not on gods, but on men: 3 βροτοὶ ἄνδρες. Then at lines 11-26 Hesiod makes a new addition to his pantheon: the Good Eris which Hamilton defines as having ‘only internal effect’.6 Hesiod takes this inward-facing Strife to the extreme, entering into the spirit of competition specifically with himself.
4 D. Sider, ‘Didactic poetry: the Hellenistic invention of a pre-existing genre’, in R. Hunter, A. Rengakos and E. Sistakou (edd.), Hellenistic Studies at a Crossroads. exploring Texts, Contexts and Metatexts (Berlin/New York, forthcoming), suggests that a better title for the Works and Days would have been the Zeusiad.
5 On the Muses’ song being tangential to Hesiod’s own, see e.g. A. Ford, ‘Epic as Genre’, in I. Morris and B. Powell (edd.), A New Companion to Homer (Leiden, 1997), 396-414, at 409, Clay (n.3), at 72-8, J.H. Haubold, ‘Shepherd, farmer, poet, sophist: Hesiod on his own reception’, in G. Boys-Stones and J.H. Haubold (edd.), Plato and Hesiod (Oxford, 2010), 11-30, at 21.
In amending the genealogy of Eris, he is competing with his own Theogony, in which there was only Ἔρις στυγερή (hateful Strife). He is also ‘correcting’ the depiction of a single Eris in heroic epic.7 All of this conjures up a picture of a poet who knows about cosmogony, who knows about epic – but who sets out to make a different point entirely.
So having ostensibly dismissed cosmogonic and heroic epic all within the first 20 lines or so, where does Hesiod situate his Works and Days in terms of genre? In this paper I will consider the multiple generic strategies employed by Hesiod in the Works and Days. I will argue that the poem operates primarily in the didactic genre, but that Hesiod both manipulates this genre (or we might call it a sub-genre, or even a mode) and appropriates elements from other genres when it suits his purpose. I hope to show that the result is an authoritative didactic persona, and a multi-faceted poem with elements which can be applied to all sorts of situations.
I
My first contention is that the primary generic impetus of Hesiod’s Works and Days is that of didactic, or wisdom, literature. Although this is the prevailing view in current Hesiodic studies, it is not a given.8 Malcolm Heath, for example, in an influential 7 E.g. Il.4.440-5 Eris sister of Ares, 5.518, 5.740, 11.2-12, 11.73-4, 18.535, 20.48; see further K. Stoddard, The Narrative Voice in the Theogony of Hesiod (Leiden, 2004), 17, H. Koning, Hesiod: the Other Poet (Leiden, 2010), 276-7, and esp. W. Thalmann, ‘‘The most divinely approved and political discord’: thinking about conflict in the developing polis’, CA 23.2 (2004), 359-99, at 376, who points out that whilst this is a correction of the explicit uses of eris, it may also tap into the multiple potentialities implicit elsewhere.
8 It has been argued against by e.g. E.F. Beall, ‘The plow that broke the plain epic tradition: Hesiod Works and Days vv.414-503’, CA 23.1 (2004), 1-32, at 5.
article of 1985 discussed the matter at length, only to come down firmly on the fence.9 Heath had two main qualms in marking out the Works and Days as didactic: first, that we cannot easily say it is formally didactic (that is, that its audience would have understood it as being intended to instruct) because of ‘want of evidence concerning the system of genres in its context of origin’; second, that we cannot say it is finally didactic, that it really teaches us something, because (to put it simply) we can’t come away from it knowing how to make a plough.
The first qualm raises an important point about the very use of generic distinctions in relation to early Greek hexameter. At this time there was no paradigm of genres such as those developed by Cicero or Horace, by Quintilian or Diomedes. Nor was literature yet schematised into ‘high’ and ‘low’ genres. Hesiod does not use self-consciously terms like ‘cosmogony’ or ‘didactic’,10 and the term ‘wisdom literature’ was one originally borrowed from Biblical scholarship. It is sometimes argued, therefore, that in categorising early poetry we run the risk of anachronism, of imposing later thought on a tradition that was not formed under such constraints. Sider (n.4) argues that ‘didactic poetry as a genre was essentially invented in Hellenistic times, and then retrojected backward in time’. However, just because generic distinctions had not yet been articulated does not mean that such distinctions did not exist: it was simply a practical rather than a formal issue. As Rossi so neatly put it, in the Archaic period, generic laws were unwritten but respected; in the Classical period they were both written and respected; and in the Hellenistic period, they were
9 M. Heath, ‘Hesiod’s didactic poetry’, CQ 35.2 (1985), 245-63.
10 Sider (n.4) notes that the Greeks ‘never actually used the adjective διδακτικός to modify ποίημα or ποίησις’.
written but not respected.11 Early poetry may not be governed by written laws, but this does not preclude the possibility of categorisation. Depew and Obbink suggest that in early Greece ‘genres are, as they are in everyday speech, familiar patterns that typically produce certain contexts and effects’.12 After all, a genre is essentially a recognisable pattern, a ‘type’ (or, as Fowler puts it, a ‘mode’13) that unfolds in a certain way through certain distinctive forms. It is on recognisable patterns that the very tradition of oral poetry is based, and through a handing down of these patterns that the poems are transmitted. Hesiod and his audience may not have proclaimed the Works and Days as a wisdom poem, but features such as an immanent narrator and an explicit addressee do mark out a pattern different from that of other ‘types’ of hexameter poetry.
In response to the second qualm, that the Works and Days is not clearly didactic because it does not clearly teach us anything, I would say that Heath was looking for teaching in the wrong place. If we look for purely practical instruction, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment: as Stephanie Nelson in particular has shown, Hesiod’s Calendar is designed more to depict the seasonally-revolving life on a farm than to mould his audience into farmers.14 Heath is bothered by this descriptive element, arguing that it detracts from any didactic thrust and indeed shunts the poem towards another genre entirely. However, it seems to me
11 L.E. Rossi, ‘I generi letterari e le loro leggi scritte e non scritte nelle letterature classiche’, BICS 18.1 (1971), 69-94.
12 M. Depew and D. Obbink (edd.), Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons, and Society (Cambridge Mass., 2000).
13 A. Fowler, ‘The formation of genres in the Renaissance and after’, in New Literary History 34 (2003), 185-200.
14 S. Nelson, ‘The drama of Hesiod’s farm’, CPh 91.1 (1996), 45-53, and God and the Land: the Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil (New York/ Oxford, 1998).
that the description serves a particular didactic purpose. Hesiod is really teaching about how to manage the Iron-Age condition, characterised as it is by the need to work for one’s livelihood. In an Age in which there is no longer a close relationship between gods and men, this work must be done independently of divine or indeed other assistance: and throughout the Works and Days self-sufficiency is especially prized. Hesiod therefore describes the condition, in order that we might face it.
The first clue that the Works and Days is primarily didactic is Hesiod himself: Hesiod the narrator, that is. The narrator of the Works and Days is not hidden behind a shield of tradition and divinity, like Homer; he is conspicuous, putting himself forward and adopting the persona of a teacher. Personal interjections punctuate his teachings: 174-5 ‘Would that I were no longer among the fifth race of men, but either had died earlier or been born later’; 270-1 ‘Now I would not be just among men, nor would I wish my son to be’. He is no stranger to the first person, nor, in fact, to singing his own praises: he will summarise a story ‘well and skilfully’ (εὖ καὶ ἐπισταμένως 107), and boasts that he was ‘victorious in song’ (ὕμνῳ νικήσαντα 657). It is this immanent, tangible, authoritative persona, so different from that of the elusive Homeric narrator, which establishes the generic force of the poem. In breaking away from the Muses, Hesiod makes the point that he is not a conduit for divine wisdom, like the epic narrator, but that he keeps the Muses in his back pocket and calls on them when needed for his new, independent, didactic project. There is a biographical chronology between the Theogony and the Works and Days,15 with Hesiod evolving from ignorant shepherd 15 Whether this corresponds to actual compositional chronology does not concern me here: I follow Clay (n.3) in valuing a synchronic view of the poems’ composition.
through Muse-inspired poet to, finally, a self-sufficient didactic authority on, as we shall see, just about anything.
The next clue comes in the form of Perses, Hesiod’s first explicit addressee. That there is a direct addressee at all marks the Works and Days as separate from narrative epic and from Hesiod’s own Theogony. Perses is first and foremost a didactic tool. We soon learn that he has taken more than his fair share of the brothers’ inheritance (37-8); he has ingratiated himself with corrupt kings by bribery (38-9); he is both a spectator of disputes (29) and an active litigant (34); and, worst of all in Hesiod’s estimation, he is an idler with no secure βίος, livelihood (31). He then evolves in the course of the poem as he listens to his brother’s advice. That Perses is accused of having many different faults serves to make him the perfect didactic addressee: Hesiod uses his brother’s injustice as an excuse to launch into a diatribe on Justice; he marks Perses as a fool so that there is a need for him to be taught; he takes his addressee’s idleness as a basis for teachings on the benefits of hard work. The use of an addressee as a target for wisdom is a fundamental characteristic of the didactic genre. We see such hierarchical models of instruction in examples of wisdom literature from all over the Ancient Near East.16 Hesiod’s address to rulers (202 νῦν δ’ αἶνον βασιλεῦσιν ἐρέω) is common to extant Near Eastern didactic poetry; such
16 Works such as W. Burkert, Die orientalisierende epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur (Heidelberg, 1984), P. Walcot, Hesiod and the Near east (Cardiff, 1966), C. Penglase, Greek Myths and Mesopotamia: Parallels and Influence in the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod (London, 1994), M.L. West, The east Face of Helikon (Oxford, 1997) and J.H. Haubold, ‘Greek Epic: a Near Eastern genre?’ PCPhS 48 (2002), 1-19 have shown that, whatever we decide to do with the parallels, comparisons between Greek and Near Eastern poetry are at least feasible on historical grounds (the 14th and 9th
centuries BC have been pinpointed as particular moments of cultural exchange).
addresses are found in, for example, the Akkadian Advice to a Prince or the Egyptian Instruction for Merikare. The incorporation of direct addresses to very present characters shows Hesiod slotting his poem into the wisdom tradition. However, the choice of addressees simultaneously shows Hesiod playing with the tradition, adapting the genre to suit his own purposes. In the Near Eastern wisdom tradition, the standard model is that of a father addressing a son. This applies to most of the Egyptian examples,17 as well as the Sumerian Instruction of Suruppak and The Father and his Misguided Son, and the Akkadian Counsels of Wisdom. In the Works and Days, however, Hesiod uses his father as a negative example and sets himself up as superior to (or at least more successful than) his father: while Hesiod’s own short voyage results in success in a poetic competition, his father’s is linked with poverty, misery and desperation. This constitutes quite a shift from traditional didactic models.
Furthermore, the choice of a brother as didactic addressee is (as far as I know) unparalleled in the extant Near Eastern material. By addressing his brother, Hesiod adapts traditional models to fit what he wants to teach.18 The Iron Age is a time of conflict, and so to teach us how to manage the Iron-Age condition he establishes a didactic framework itself rooted in a conflict – the quarrel with Perses. Further, the best way of managing the Iron-Age condition, according to Hesiod, is through self-sufficiency. To instil this ideal, Hesiod employs a didactic method based on intellectual self-sufficiency. He champions the πανάριστος who thinks of
17 Instruction of Amenemhet, Instruction of a Man to his Son, Instruction of Sehetipibre, Instruction of Amen-em-Opet, Instructions of ‘Onchsheshonqy, Instruction of Ptahhotep.
18 For a fuller discussion of this issue see L.G. Canevaro, ‘Hesiod and Perses: brothers (up) in arms’, in P. Bassino, L.G. Canevaro and B. Graziosi (edd.), Conflict and Consensus (Cambridge, forthcoming).
everything himself, and over and over again tells his audience to ‘consider’, φράζεσθαι, his teachings. This is best channelled through a sibling: someone of supposedly equal standing,19 or at least where the hierarchy is less marked; someone who feels at liberty to question and to protest against injustice. However, to negotiate the apparent contradiction between self-sufficiency and didacticism, between thinking for oneself and being taught by someone else, Hesiod must also retain didactic authority and moral control. To this end, he casts himself as the elder, better brother. Just like Hesiod’s didactic project, poised precariously as it is between autonomy and dependence, the relationship between brothers strikes a delicate balance between equality and hierarchy. Hesiod never makes it explicit who is the elder and who the younger brother, maintaining this image of equality: however, he allies himself with the Good Eris whilst Perses embodies the Bad, and surely it is no coincidence that Good Eris is the elder sibling (17).
It is on the basis of genre that the sibling relationship in the Works and Days is so striking. As I have argued, there is no comparable brother-to-brother example in extant wisdom literature. We can find pairs of brothers scattered all over epic (Hector and Paris, Agamemnon and Menelaus, the list goes on), and even instances of one advising the other, but the generic distinction is enough to render these examples redundant in comparative terms. Further, the way in which Hesiod uses the quarrel with his brother (νεῖκος) reiterates his divergence from heroic epic. Quarrels pervade much of the epic tradition, perhaps the most notable being that between Achilles and Agamemnon.20 19 R. Martin, ‘Hesiod and the Didactic Double’, Synthesis 11 (2004), 31-54. 20 For attempts to parallel the quarrel in the Works and Days with heroic
However, the dispute between Hesiod and Perses is of a markedly different type: they are arguing not over spoils of war, but over the distribution of their inheritance. They are concerned with land and with bios: essentially Iron-Age concerns.
II
Throughout the Works and Days, Hesiod marks his poem out as separate from epic: from cosmogonic epic, from heroic epic. His stance as immanent narrator and his use of direct addressees, not to mention narrative forms such as proverb and maxim, priamel and fable: all of these elements mark the Works and Days as primarily didactic.21 That being said, the Works and Days does not operate solely within the wisdom genre, ignoring all else: it is in dialogue with epic. As Edwards has shown, Hesiod’s language is not that of a separate hexameter tradition, but that of (to a certain extent, at least) the Homeric.22 And as Scodel has argued, Hesiod even slots his Works and Days into the epic cycle.23 Hesiod uses the language of epic when it suits his purpose. For example in the
d’Hésiode’, in F. Blaise, P. Judet de la Combe and P. Rousseau (edd.) Le Métier du mythe: lectures d’Hésiode (Villaneuve d’Ascq, 1996), 93-167, at 54, and Stoddard (n.7), 17.
21 Wisdom literature is often considered to be defined by its forms: by its use of proverbs and maxims, of precepts and admonitions. However, the mere presence of these forms does not suffice to mark out didactic poetry, but rather they must be predominant. Heroic epic, too, encompasses such forms (J.M. Foley, ‘Epic as Genre’, in R. Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge, 2004), 171-87, at 181 describes epic as an ‘omnibus genre’, incorporating e.g. proverbs and catalogues), but in that context they are outweighed by stronger linear narrative elements.
22 G.P. Edwards, The Language of Hesiod in its Traditional Context (Oxford, 1971).
23 R. Scodel, ‘Hesiod and the Epic Cycle’, in F. Montanari, A. Rengakos and C. Tsagalis (edd.), Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry (Berlin, 2012).
fable of the hawk and the nightingale (202-12), the hawk’s speech has much in common with a Homeric battle speech delivered by a warrior with an opponent at his mercy.24 Two examples are Il.16.830-54 Hector to Patroclus, and 22.331-6 Achilles to Hector: both include, like the fable, an insult to the victim’s intelligence (Op.210 ἄφρων, Il. 16.833, 22.333 νήπιε), a claim to superiority (16.834, 22.333), and a warning of a dreadful fate (16.836, 22.335-6). The hawk’s moral is also common to Homeric advice: at Il.7.109-14 Agamemnon warns Menelaus not to fight with a man (Hector) who is better than him.
Hesiod draws most heavily on epic when he turns to the sensitive subject of seafaring. Many phrases Hesiod uses for the sea and the ship are epic: 620 ἠεροειδέα πόντον occurs 11 times in Homer; 622 (and 817) οἴνοπι πόντῳ occurs 18 times in Homer; 628 νηὸς...ποντοπόροιο 19 times in Homer; 631 (and 671) νῆα θοήν is found 59 times elsewhere in early hexameter; 636 νηὶ μελαίνῃ 59 times in Homer; and 648 πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης crops up 10 times in Homer. Various other formulations that appear in the Nautilia are likewise Homeric: 624 ἐπ᾽ ἠπείρου ἐρύσαι is found at Il.1.485, Od.16.325, 359 and Hom. Hymn 3.489; 631 νῆα θοὴν ἅλαδ᾽ ἑλκέμεν recurs at Od.2.389; and 667 Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθων occurs 24 times in Homer. There are even some formulae which seem epic but are not attested in Homer such as 660 νηῶν...πολυγόμφων: Hesiod may be constructing his own formulae along epic lines, or utilising non-Homeric traditional material. Hesiod’s use of epic language here is the result of his professed ignorance of a topic on which epic has a lot to say. With language so markedly different from that of the agricultural Calendar, Hesiod delineates the sea as a separate sphere: and a risky one at that. The language shows
that, although at times Hesiod distances himself from heroic epic, this is a choice on his part about when and how to engage with the genre: he is certainly not ignorant of it, and can in fact make use of it when it serves his purposes. Furthermore, it is here that Hesiod pulls the Muses out of that back pocket of his. At 658-62 Hesiod reiterates the role of the Muses to reinvoke their inspiration, qualifying him to speak of something in which he has only limited experience: just as Homer, in fact, invokes the Muses when in doubt.25
At 650-3, Hesiod tells of his one-and-only sailing expedition: οὐ γάρ πώ ποτε νηί γ᾽ ἐπέπλων εὐρέα πόντον, εἰ μὴ ἐς Εὔβοιαν ἐξ Αὐλίδος, ᾗ ποτ᾽ Ἀχαιοί μείναντες χειμῶνα πολὺν σὺν λαὸν ἄγειραν Ἑλλάδος ἐξ ἱερῆς Τροίην ἐς καλλιγύναικα.
For I have never yet crossed the wide sea in a ship, except to Euboea from Aulis, where once the Achaians, waiting out the winter, gathered a great host to sail from holy Greece to Troy of beautiful women.
The epic allusion here has been explored by works such as Rosen 1990 and Marsilio 2000.26 West comments: ‘it shows how strong was the interest in heroic poetry, that Hesiod cannot mention Aulis without thinking of the Atreidai and their expedition’.27 25 In the Iliad, invocations to the Muses are interspersed at points of high
tension or before an enumeration or catalogue: Il.1.1, 1.8, 2.484-92, 2.761-2, 11.218-20, 14.508-10, 16.112-13. See esp. A. Ford, Homer: the Poetry of the Past (Ithaca, 1992).
26 R. Rosen, ‘Poetry and Sailing in Hesiod’s Works and Days’, CA 9 (1990), 99-113, M. Marsilio, Farming and Poetry in Hesiod’s Works and Days (Lanham MD, 2000).
However, there is more to the Homeric echo than mere thought progression. Hesiod’s use of traditional material here is pointed and sophisticated – he does not just reuse but reworks. At 650 he uses a Homeric phrase ἐπέπλων εὐρέα πόντον, sailing the wide sea (cf. Il.6.291), in a pointedly ironic sense: the voyage is, in fact, only a short one. At 653 he reverses the traditional epithets of Greece and Troy – Greece becomes ἱερῆς and Troy καλλιγύναικα – this both acts as a polemical correction of Homeric diction,28 just like Hesiod corrects his own Theogony at 11-12, and reflects Helen’s move from one to the other.29 Therefore, it is argued, Aulis rather ‘serves as the springboard for a daring poetological leap’.30 Hesiod compares his own poetry with that of Homer: he has made a ‘small voyage’, but is unpractised in heroic epic. As Rosen (n.26, at 112) admits, this interpretation ‘presupposes a degree of literary self-consciousness and gamesmanship that we normally reserve for Hellenistic poets’. However, it does not seem implausible, given Hesiod’s sophisticated use of wordplay and riddling language throughout the Works and Days, and his interest in poetic inspiration, authority and truth as well as poetic self-sufficiency.
Though this has been the most discussed passage in terms of poetological allusions, epic references in the Nautilia are not confined to the autobiographical narratives. In his description of the first sailing season, Hesiod continues to allude to epic, now in a particularly Odyssean vein.
28 B. Graziosi, Inventing Homer (Cambridge, 2002), 170. Edwards (n.22), 80 sees Hesiod’s sense of humour here.
29 G. Arrighetti, esiodo: Opere (Turin, 1998) ad loc.
30 C. Tsagalis, ‘Poetry and Poetics in the Hesiodic Corpus’, in F. Montanari, A. Rengakos and C. Tsagalis (edd.), Brill’s Companion to Hesiod (Leiden, 2009), 151.
ἤματα πεντήκοντα μετὰ τροπὰς ἠελίοιο, ἐς τέλος ἐλθόντος θέρεος, καματώδεος ὥρης, ὡραῖος πέλεται θνητοῖς πλόος: οὔτέ κε νῆα καυάξαις οὔτ᾽ ἄνδρας ἀποφθείσειε θάλασσα, εἰ δὴ μὴ πρόφρων γε Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθων ἢ Ζεὺς ἀθανάτων βασιλεὺς ἐθέλησιν ὀλέσσαι: ἐν τοῖς γὰρ τέλος ἐστὶν ὁμῶς ἀγαθῶν τε κακῶν τε. τῆμος δ᾽ εὐκρινέες τ᾽ αὖραι καὶ πόντος ἀπήμων: εὔκηλος τότε νῆα θοὴν ἀνέμοισι πιθήσας ἑλκέμεν ἐς πόντον φόρτόν τ᾽ ἐς πάντα τίθεσθαι. σπεύδειν δ᾽ ὅττι τάχιστα πάλιν οἶκόνδε νέεσθαι, μηδὲ μένειν οἶνόν τε νέον καὶ ὀπωρινὸν ὄμβρον καὶ χειμῶν᾽ ἐπιόντα Νότοιό τε δεινὰς ἀήτας, ὅς τ᾽ ὤρινε θάλασσαν ὁμαρτήσας Διὸς ὄμβρῳ πολλῷ ὀπωρινῷ, χαλεπὸν δέ τε πόντον ἔθηκεν.
For fifty days after the solstice,
when the summer comes to its end, the toilsome season: this is the right time for men to sail. You will not wreck your ship nor will the sea drown your men,
unless Poseidon the earth-shaker
or Zeus king of the immortals should wish to destroy them. For in these is the end of good and evil men alike. At this time the breezes are easy to judge and the sea painless; then having trusted your swift ship confidently to the winds, drag it to the sea and put in it all your cargo.
But hurry to return home as quickly as possible, do not wait for the new wine and the autumnal rains and the approaching winter and the terrible blasts of the South wind,
which stirs up the sea, accompanying Zeus’ heavy autumn rain, and makes the sea difficult.
At 665-6 the dangers to be avoided by sailing at the right time are specified as destroying one’s ship and one’s men: Odysseus’ own fate. 667 Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθων reinforces this Odyssean connection: a key character in the Odyssey, Poseidon appears only here in the Works and Days. The epithet used to describe Poseidon, ἐνοσίχθων, is the closest to a ‘sea’ epithet he has in Homer, and in fact is used at Od.5.282 when Poseidon decides to wreck Odysseus’ ship off the land of the Phaeacians. Further, 670 εὐκρινέες τ᾽ αὖραι καὶ πόντος ἀπήμων reshuffles the elements of the Odyssean formula for navigational winds: οὖρος ἀπήμων (Od.5.268, 7.266, 12.167). These allusions give Hesiod’s teachings extra admonitory force: if you listen to Hesiod, you will not suffer disaster on the sea as Odysseus did (Od.1.4 πολλὰ δ’ ὅ γ’ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα). I must add that the allusions are not necessarily to the Odyssey itself, but rather to the nostos tradition in general: this all depends on thorny issues such as the relative dating of Homer and Hesiod, the advent of writing and the degree of fixity of the epics at an early stage, issues which I don’t presume to resolve either in this paper or, probably, ever. Regardless, the implications in this passage are rather more complex than in the autobiographical sphragis, because of the essential relevance to Hesiod’s own enterprise of the nostos tradition. He is concerned throughout the Works and Days with the home, the farm, the self-sufficiency of the oikos. Whilst in the sphragis the hints were to martial epic (heroes off to war), something which Hesiod can happily disown, here he simultaneously discredits the venture of seafaring (epic), and supports the fundamental idea of nostos – the desire to return home (673 πάλιν οἶκόνδε νέεσθαι).
At the end of the Works Hesiod describes φήμη, rumour: φήμη γάρ τε κακὴ πέλεται, κούφη μὲν ἀεῖραι ῥεῖα μάλ᾽, ἀργαλέη δὲ φέρειν, χαλεπὴ δ᾽ ἀποθέσθαι.
φήμη δ᾽ οὔ τις πάμπαν ἀπόλλυται, ἥντινα πολλοί λαοὶ φημίξουσι: θεός νύ τίς ἐστι καὶ αὐτή.
For rumour is evil, light and easy to pick up, but difficult to bear, and hard to get rid of.
That rumour is never entirely destroyed, which many people rumour. She too is herself some goddess.
Works and Days 761-4
As Bakker notes, φήμη is the anti-kleos: whilst kleos is to be heard about in positive terms, φήμη is to be talked about negatively.31 The link between the two is strengthened by 763 φήμη δ᾽ οὔ τις πάμπαν ἀπόλλυται: this recalls the Homeric formula κλέος οὔ ποτ’ ὀλεῖται (Il.2.325, 7.91, Od.24.196), or even κλέος ἄφθιτον. That Hesiod is more concerned with φήμη than with kleos marks his poem as firmly set in the Iron Age: he is composing in and about a post-heroic world. As Clay (n.3, at 148) notes, φήμη takes us back to and makes us reassess the earlier line 3 ὅν τε διὰ βροτοὶ ἄνδρες ὁμῶς ἄφατοί τε φατοί τε. There Zeus made men spoken of or not, here φήμη is generated not by the gods but by πολλοί λαοί: the invocational proem and the mythical narratives are far behind us, by this point in the poem we are firmly entrenched in the Iron Age with its focus on mankind. In the proem it was left unclear which was the positive, ἄφατοί or φατοί – now it is clear that to be φατοί is not something to wish for. The contrast with the heroic epic age could not be starker.
In simultaneously distancing himself from and appropriating epic, Hesiod goes so far as to construct his own versions of epic formulae with very Works and Days concepts. Take, for example,
31 E.J. Bakker, ‘Polyphemus’, ColbyQ 38.2 (2002), 135-50, at 140-1. See 760 δειλήν – variant δεινήν, preferred by e.g. Clay (n.3, at 148 note 48) because φήμη ends up as a goddess to be feared.
the idea of the ‘right time’. In the Works and Days there is a right time to reap, to sow, to sail, to marry, even to urinate. The concept is of such importance that ὥριον is found in the penultimate foot (a typical position for traditional epithets in epic) in formulae at 422 ὥριον ἔργον, 492 ὥριος ὄμβρος, 543 ὥριον ἔλθῃ and 697 ὥριος οὗτος. Another key idea is that of the πανάριστος (293). The man who is best of all is he who thinks for himself: the pinnacle of Hesiod’s ideals of intellectual self-sufficiency. In Homer we often find the formula ὄχ’ ἄριστος: for example at Il.2.761 of ‘the best’ of the men and horses who went with the sons of Atreus; at Il.23.357 of Diomedes ‘the best’ of all; at Od.13.297 of Odysseus ‘the best’ of mortals. Perhaps, then, the πανάριστος (293) is Hesiod’s version of the heroic ὄχ’ ἄριστος: he who thinks for himself is the Hesiodic hero.
I hope to have shown that Hesiod draws on and reacts to elements of both the didactic and the epic genre, whether to align his poem with or set it up in antithesis to them. At this point I would like to refine my initial assertion that the primary generic impetus behind the Works and Days is that of didactic or wisdom poetry. It has often been argued that genre in the archaic world was something defined by metre, by which line of argument the hexameter in which both the Homeric and Hesiodic poems were composed would have lumped them together. Ford (n.5, at 406) argues that ‘the opposition of epic to didactic is wholly inapplicable to the Archaic period’, and Rosen in the same volume asserts that ‘while Hesiodic poetry was not occupied specifically with heroic themes, it was part of the same formal tradition of epic, sharing with Homer key metrical, dialectal, and dictional features.’32 In my own study I have not tried to separate epic and 32 R. Rosen, ‘Homer and Hesiod’, in I. Morris and B. Powell (edd.), A New
didactic in conceptual terms, but have explored the sophisticated ways in which Hesiod responds to elements of each within one poem. Ford (n.5, at 400) proposes a schema, suggesting that ‘epic and all archaic Greek poems were defined in relation to four major categories: (1) the context of the song, (2) its ‘form’ or the ways it marked its language, (3) its ‘contents’ or themes, and (4) the relations between the poet and the audience.’ I have shown that the Works and Days uses both didactic and heroic forms (2) and themes (3) when they suit Hesiod’s purposes. However, it seems to me that the relationship Hesiod has with his audience (4) sets the Works and Days up as a wisdom poem.33 Hesiod’s own immanent, tangible persona and his explicit instruction of a clearly defined internal audience establish a didactic hierarchy to which an external audience then responds. The difference between Hesiod’s persona and that of the Homeric narrator, as well as the presence of an explicit internal addressee whose character progression suggests a process of teaching and learning as the poem unfolds, suffices to tease out didactic poetry from heroic epic. A balanced way of looking at the issue is that proposed by Beall (n.8, at 5): ‘it may be that the Works and Days is didactic in the same sense that the Iliad is a war story, or the Odyssey a tale of a man’s adventures on his way home.’ This is useful in that it shows how we can blur the genre boundaries, thereby reconciling the distinctly didactic Works and Days with the heroic tradition with which the poet is in dialogue. We might say that metre established one corpus of early hexameter, within which effectively ‘sub’ genres operate, didactic being one of them. Similarly, Ercolani argues that alongside heroic epic exists what he calls ‘un epos sapienziale diretto’: wisdom poetry which, because
of metre, is not entirely separate from heroic poetry but rather is a complementary sub-genre of epos.34 Rosen (n.32, at 464) too
suggests that ‘Each [Hesiodic poem] seems to owe its character to distinct poetic sub-genres (‘theogonic’ or ‘didactic-wisdom’ traditions, respectively), appropriate to different occasions.’ Another way of integrating this didactic poem into the epic tradition is the idea of a ‘cosmic history’,35 a narrative continuum
stretching from the cosmogonic Theogony through the age of Heroes in the Iliad and Odyssey to the Iron-Age Works and Days. As Haubold (n.16) writes, ‘Various sub-genres, such as theogonic, hymnic and heroic poetry combine to form a larger picture.’ And the part of the picture contributed by the Works and Days is that of the toilsome present in which we are in need of instruction.
III
My paper does not stop there, because Hesiod doesn’t. He interacts, albeit to a lesser extent, also with other genres, drawing on them when they suit his didactic purpose and using his mastery over them to assert his authority in just about any field. Again, this begins in the proem, where Hesiod establishes a relationship not only with epic, but with hymn. He uses hymnic features, showing expertise in a genre appropriate to a proem: for example δεῦτε (2) is a feature of cletic hymns, which ask the god to ‘come hither’.36 However, he plays with the genre: rather than 34 A. Ercolani, ‘Una rilettura di Esiodo, Opere e giorni. Contributo all’individuazione dell’epos sapienziale greco’, Seminari Romani (2012), 235-52, at 242-3.
35 E.g. Haubold (n.16), Clay (n.3).
36 Cf. C. Calame, ‘Le Proème des Travaux d’Hésiode: Prélude à une poésie d’action’, in F. Blaise, P. Judet de la Combe and P. Rousseau (edd.) Le Métier du mythe: lectures d’Hésiode (Villaneuve d’Ascq, 1996), 169-89, at 174, Rousseau (n.20), at 103-4.
