Hesiod vs. Homer: Two Greeces, One Alphabet

The oldest Greek literature we have describes two countries that share a language, a pantheon and a metre and almost nothing else. In one of them, the sons of kings quarrel over a captive girl and the whole point of a life is to be talked about after it. In the other, a farmer in a Boeotian village his own poem calls bad in winter, harsh in summer and good at no season is losing a lawsuit to his brother, watching the local lords take gifts to decide it, and worrying about when to sharpen the sickle.¹ The first is Homer's Greece. The second is Hesiod's. The textbook treats them as chapters one and two of the same story. I think they are competing accounts of what a human life is for, that the Greeks themselves knew it, and that Hesiod — the smaller, crankier, less quotable poet — is the one telling the truth. And I think both of them exist for us at all only because of the same piece of technology, which is why the argument about who wins is really an argument about writing.

One housekeeping note. Every line of Homer or Hesiod I give below is my own paraphrase of the Greek, not a quotation from any translator; the footnotes name the editions behind each passage.

Homer's country

Start with what Homer's world runs on. Nobody in the Iliad is ordinary. Even the man who lists the ships is careful to tell you which kings brought them. The one commoner who speaks in the assembly, Thersites, is described as the ugliest man who came to Troy and is beaten with a sceptre for saying more or less what Achilles said a book earlier; the army laughs.² That scene is the aristocratic order explaining itself. Sarpedon explains it more gently to Glaucus: we hold the best land and the full cups in Lycia, so we must stand in the front line, so that men will say we earned it.² The bargain is land and honour for risk, and the currency of the whole system is what other men say. E. R. Dodds called this a shame culture, and whatever you think of the label — it has been picked at for seventy years — the observation under it holds: the highest good in Homer is timē, standing, and the worst thing that can happen to you is not guilt but public diminishment.³ Achilles withdraws from a war because Agamemnon has taken his prize in front of everyone. Hector goes out to die because he cannot face the men and the trailing-robed women of Troy after having led the army to disaster. Nobody works. Odysseus can build a bed and a raft, but he does it as a wonder, not a Tuesday.

Moses Finley spent a career insisting that this world was not a fantasy but a real, if stylised, social order — chiefs, gift-exchange, retainers, no state to speak of, and a peasantry that exists mainly as background.⁴ That is fair. But look at how the background appears when it does. On the shield of Achilles the god makes a ploughing scene, a harvest, and a city at peace where two men argue in the agora over blood-money and the elders give judgment while a prize of gold waits for whoever sets out the straightest judgment.² It is a lovely, calm miniature. It is also decoration on a weapon. In the Odyssey, the dead Achilles says he would rather be a hired hand ploughing for a landless man than king over all the dead — the most famous line in Greek about the value of a plain life, spoken by someone who never lived one and only wants it now that he cannot.² When Homer wants a nightmare he reaches for the labourer, the thēs, the man with nothing but his hands.

Hesiod's country

Now cross the strait. Hesiod tells us more about himself than any Greek before him: his father sailed from Aeolian Cyme running not from wealth but from grinding poverty, and settled at Ascra under Helicon; he himself was tending lambs on the mountain when the Muses handed him a staff and told him — I paraphrase a famous couplet rather than borrow anyone's English for it — that they know how to say false things which pass for true, and how to speak the truth when they choose.⁵ He names himself, which Homer never does. Whether the "I" of the poems is a real Boeotian or a literary mask is itself contested — Mark Griffith and Gregory Nagy have both argued the persona is at least partly a construction, and even the brother Perses may be a device — but the world the persona lives in is not in doubt, because the poem is a manual for surviving it.⁶

The Works and Days opens with an inheritance dispute. Perses has already taken more than his share, after plenty of flattery aimed at the lords who eat gifts and like judging that kind of case, and now wants to fight the rest out in court instead of working.¹ Hesiod's basileis — the same word Homer uses for Agamemnon — are small-town notables who eat bribes and give crooked verdicts, and the poem threatens them, twice, with a Zeus who counts thirty thousand invisible watchers and a daughter called Justice who sits down beside him and reports.¹ Then it tells the lords a fable: a hawk carries off a nightingale and tells her a stronger creature does what it likes, and the fool who resists gets pain on top of shame.¹ There is nothing like that in Homer. It is the view from below, delivered to the men above, in their own metre.

Hesiod's kings are small-town notables who eat bribes and give crooked verdicts, and the poem threatens them, twice, with a Zeus who counts.

And then, for hundreds of lines, the poem is about work. When the Pleiades rise, reap; when they set, plough. When you hear the crane crying overhead, it is time to get the oxen out. When the snail climbs the plants, stop digging the vines and sharpen the sickles. Get a house, a woman and an ox for the plough, in that order, and the woman bought not married so she can follow the oxen. Borrow fair measure from your neighbour and pay it back the same or better, so that when you are in need again he will not refuse. Do not put off till tomorrow; the man who puts things off is always wrestling with ruin. Work is no disgrace — idleness is.¹ Even shame is re-priced: shame, Hesiod says, does not keep a needy man fed, and it is hard not to hear that as a direct comment on the other Greece, where shame is the whole economy.¹ Then come the days: which day of the month to geld a boar, which to open a jar, which to bring a wife home. Victor Davis Hanson has called Hesiod the first voice of the independent family farmer in Western literature, and Anthony Edwards has read Ascra as a village that had not yet been swallowed by any city; the details are argued over, but the shape is clear.⁷ This is a Greece of debt, weather, lawsuits and neighbours, and the heroic Greece is somewhere else — Hesiod actually puts it there. In his myth of the ages, the godlike race of heroes who fought at Thebes and Troy is a bygone generation, better and juster than the present one; the poet himself is stuck in the iron age and wishes he had died earlier or been born later.¹ Homer's people are, on Hesiod's timeline, dead.

The contest the Greeks staged

The Greeks noticed the split, and they made a story out of it. There survives a curious little text called the Certamen, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod. The manuscript version we have was put together in the second century AD, but it draws on a fourth-century BC work by the sophist Alcidamas, and papyrus scraps from the third century BC show the tale was already circulating then.⁸ The two poets meet at Chalcis in Euboea, at the funeral games for a local lord named Amphidamas. They spar with riddles and capping verses. Then each is asked to recite his finest passage. Homer gives a battle-scene from the thirteenth book of the Iliad, shields packed on shields and helmet on helmet. Hesiod gives the lines about the Pleiades: when they rise, begin the harvest, when they set, the ploughing; forty nights and days they are hidden, and then the sickle is sharpened.⁸ The crowd wants Homer. The judge, a king named Panedes, gives the tripod to Hesiod, on the ground that the man who sings of farming and peace deserves it more than the man who sings of war and slaughter.⁸

Almost none of this is history in the ordinary sense — the two poets are not securely contemporaries and the whole thing is a schoolroom set-piece — but it is anchored in something real. Hesiod himself says, in the Works and Days, that the only time he ever went to sea was the crossing from Aulis to Chalcis for the games of Amphidamas, where he won a tripod with a song and dedicated it to the Muses of Helicon.¹ The tradition took that boast, put Homer on the other side of the tripod, and gave the ruling to the farmer. That is not a neutral choice. It says the argument between the two Greeces was live enough, centuries later, that people wanted it settled, and that at least one strand of the tradition settled it against the heroic voice. Herodotus, listing who gave the Greeks their gods, names Hesiod first and Homer second.⁹ Xenophanes attacked them together for making the gods thieves and adulterers.⁹ The pairing was old, and it was a pairing of unequals in fame but rivals in authority — the poet of the palace and the poet of the field, and it was not obvious to everyone which one you should trust.

Why Hesiod is the modern one

Here is my reading, and it is a reading rather than a credential. Homer is the greater poet by any measure that counts lines or tears. But Hesiod is the more honest witness, and the more modern one, for three reasons.

The first is that he has a self. Homer is a voice from nowhere; his narrator has no father, no village, no grievance. Hesiod tells you where his father came from and why, what his brother did to him, what his hometown is like in February, and that he does not like boats. That move — the poet who says I, who has a case to make and a position to lose — is the beginning of everything we recognise as a personal literature, and it is why so many later Greeks, from Archilochus onward, sound like his descendants and not Homer's.

The second is that he takes institutions seriously. Homer's justice is a scene on a shield; the elders judge, the gold waits, the picture is complete. Hesiod's justice is a process that is currently going wrong, run by people he can name, and fixable only if a god intervenes or the lords are shamed into straightness. That is a political consciousness. It has a theory of why judges take gifts, of what happens to a city where they do — its people waste, its women stop bearing, its walls fall to war Zeus sends — and of what happens in a city where they do not.¹ Homer knows about crooked verdicts too — there is one startling simile in the sixteenth book where Zeus floods the fields of men who give twisted judgments in the marketplace — but in Homer it is a simile; in Hesiod it is the subject.²

The third reason is the one I care about most. Hesiod understands that a life is made of ordinary repeated acts, timed against a calendar you did not choose, and that getting them right is a form of dignity. This is the same intuition that makes his account of Prometheus and Pandora so much darker and more useful than the pretty version — fire comes with the jar, and the jar is why you have to work; I have written about that separately in Prometheus and the Price of Every Tool. Homer's world has no calendar; it has moments, and the moments are for aristocrats. Hesiod's has months, and the months are for everyone. If you want to know what most Greeks actually did with most of their days in the eighth and seventh centuries, you do not read about the shield; you read about the snail.

If you want to know what most Greeks actually did with most of their days, you do not read about the shield; you read about the snail.

None of this means Homer is a liar. It means Homer is a monument, and monuments tell you what a society wanted said about itself. Hesiod is closer to a ledger, and I have argued elsewhere that ledgers are usually the more honest survivors — the Rosetta Stone is famous as a key and was carved as a receipt. The gods in both poets, incidentally, are the same gods and are equally unlike a creed, which is a point I make at length in Greek Myth Was Never a Religion; the difference between the two Greeces is not theological. It is about who is speaking and what they think a day is for.

One alphabet

Which brings me to the technology, because there is a reason these two incompatible worlds arrive together, and it is not that they were composed together. Both poets belong to the moment when Greek first became writable.

Almost everything about that moment is contested, so let me set out the sides. Milman Parry showed in the 1920s that Homer's diction is formulaic in a way that only makes sense as the product of a long oral tradition, and Albert Lord, working with living Balkan singers, showed how such a tradition composes in performance rather than reciting a fixed text.¹⁰ That much is now close to consensus. What follows from it is not. Lord thought the Iliad we have was what he called an oral-dictated text: a singer, at some point, sang it slowly to someone with a stylus.¹⁰ Barry Powell pushed the idea to its limit and argued that the Greek alphabet was adapted from Phoenician letters by a single person, around 800 BC, specifically in order to write down hexameter poetry, and that Homer was the reason.¹¹ That thesis is a minority position — most scholars think the adaptation was for humbler purposes and the vowels came along for phonological reasons rather than poetic ones — but Powell's strongest evidence is stubborn: the two earliest substantial Greek inscriptions we possess, on a jug from Athens and a cup from Pithekoussai off the Bay of Naples, both from the second half of the eighth century, are both in verse, and the cup seems to make a joke about Nestor.¹¹ Whether it is a joke about Homer's Nestor is, of course, argued about.

The dates are argued about too, and here Homer and Hesiod swap places depending on whom you ask. Richard Janko's statistical study of the language put the Iliad and Odyssey in the second half of the eighth century and Hesiod's poems a generation or so after, which is the traditional order.¹² Martin West, who edited both Hesiod poems and knew them better than anyone, came to think that Hesiod was the earlier voice and that the Iliad as we have it belongs to the seventh century, perhaps its middle decades.¹² Nagy rejects the whole search for a composition date and argues the poems went on crystallising in performance down into the sixth century, when Athens gave them a fixed text.⁶ I am not competent to pick a winner and I do not think anyone honest claims certainty. What I notice is that on every one of these accounts the two Greeces are within a few generations of each other, on either side of the arrival of letters, and that Hesiod — with his named self and his argument-shaped poem — reads like a man who knows his words are going to be fixed, while Homer reads like a tradition that has just been caught in the act.

That is the real sense in which there is one alphabet under the two Greeces. Writing did not create either world. But it froze them side by side, at the same moment, in the same script, and handed them down together, so that from Herodotus to the Certamen to a reader in Florida the choice between them has never gone away: the front line and the furrow, the man who wants to be remembered and the man who wants to get the barley in. The Greeks were honest enough to stage the contest and, at least once, to give the tripod to the farmer. My own vote is the same as Panedes'. Homer tells you what the Greeks wished they were. Hesiod tells you what they were doing on a Tuesday, and complains about it, and gets up the next morning and does it anyway. That is the more modern voice because it is the one that still describes most lives, and it is the more honest one because it did not need a hero to be worth writing down.