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This new, annotated translation of Hesiod's Works and Days is a collaboration between David W. Tandy, a classicist, and Walter Neale, an economist and economic historian. Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet whose Works and Days discusses agricultural practices and society in general. Classicists and ancient historians have turned to Works and Days for its insights on Greek mythology and religion. The poem also sheds light on economic history and ancient agriculture, and is a good resource for social scientists interested in these areas. This translation emphasizes the activities and problems of a practicing agriculturist as well as the larger, changing political and economic institutions of the early archaic period.
The authors provide a clear, accurate translation along with notes aimed at a broad audience. The introductory essay discusses the changing economic, political and trading world of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E., while the notes present the range and possible meanings of important Greek terms and references in the poem and highlight areas of ambiguity in our understanding of Works and Days.
The authors provide a clear, accurate translation along with notes aimed at a broad audience. The introductory essay discusses the changing economic, political and trading world of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E., while the notes present the range and possible meanings of important Greek terms and references in the poem and highlight areas of ambiguity in our understanding of Works and Days.
Le informazioni nella sezione "Riassunto" possono far riferimento a edizioni diverse di questo titolo.
Informazioni sull?autore
David W. Tandy is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and coeditor of From Political Economy to Anthropology: Situating Economic Life in Past Societies (1994). Walter C. Neale is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and author of Developing Rural India: Policies, Politics, and Progress (1990).
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Works and Days: A Translation and Commentary for the Social Sciences
By HesiodUniversity of California Press
Copyright 1997 HesiodAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0520203836
Introduction
Works and Days is a Greek poem of 828 hexameter verses1 that was composed in the early seventh century B.C.E. by a man named Hesiod who had a special interest in matters pertaining to agriculture: when to plant what, how to manage labor resources, and above all how to achieve productive independence (autarky) and thus to avoid hunger. In the poem Hesiod offers instruction and advice to his brother, Perses.
Hesiod's poem is important to scholars because it sheds light on the universal plight of the peasantry throughout human history; conversely, studies in peasantry help us to understand Hesiod
The earliest poetry of the Greeks was composed orally in a meter we call dactylic hexameter, each line made up of six measures (dactyls) of one long syllable followed by either two shorts or one long (the sixth measure is always either long-long or long-short). Hence the number of syllables in a line can range from twelve (very rare) to seventeen, the average being close to fifteen. Both Homer and Hesiod composed in dactylic hexameter.
and his world. Classicists and ancient historians tend to study Hesiod; other historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists tend to study peasants. In this work we would like to bring the ancient Greek poet-farmer more clearly into focus for social scientists and to bring some specific tools and assumptions about social organization and forms of economic integration into focus for classicists and ancient historians.
Over the years, most of the work on Hesiod, quite understandably, has been undertaken by ancient historians (with emphasis on religion and myth) and by philologists. Hesiod has always dwelt in the shadow of Homer. In fact, a standardized text of Hesiod did not appear until 1902 (Rzach 1958 [1902]). The great (and prolific) classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff published his edition and commentary on Works and Days in 1928, but it is not unfair to characterize this work as condescending to Hesiod and occasionally peculiar (see, for example, Wilamowitz's brief discussion of Hesiod's status in Ascra, referred to below, p. 26). Most of the best work on Hesiod in the first half of the twentieth century was undertaken by Germans, culminating in Friedrich Solmsen's influential Hesiod and Aeschylus (1949) and the magisterial third chapter of Hermann Frnkel's Dichtung und Philosophie des frhen Griechentums (1951). The generally philological focus of Hesiodic studies is exemplified by the collection of essays in the Fondation Hardt series (Reverdin 1962). Among the essays are Solmsen's "Hesiodic Motifs in Plato," Verdenius's "Aufbau und Absicht der Erga ," and von Fritz's "Das Hesiodische in den Werken Hesiods."
Solmsen's Oxford text displaced that of Alois Rzach as the standard in 1970 (now Solmsen 1990). Martin West's indispensable
edition of Works and Days (1978), with introduction and commentary, focuses on the dependence of the poem on the wisdom literature of the East; W. J. Verdenius's commentary (1985) on the first 382 lines focuses carefully on the text itself. Examples of more recent work along these narrowly philological lines are Robert Lamberton's Hesiod (1988) and Richard Hamilton's Architecture of Hesiodic Poetry (1989), both of which emphasize the literary merits and structure of the poem. Both are excellent studies. Although their intended audiences and their quality vary, the numerous recent translations (Lattimore 1959; Wender 1973; Athanassakis 1983; Frazier 1983; West 1988; Lombardo 1993) attest to increased interest in Hesiod. There are also very interesting new approaches to Hesiod within the discipline of classics, which we will comment on below.
Of course, Hesiod has also been studied by nonclassiciststo wit, sociologists, anthropologists, and economistsand we intend to report much of that work. Some have looked at Hesiod for a kind of validation of observations about other peasant types (e.g., Francis 1945; Redfield 1956, 107ff.). It is valuable to compare the Hesiod of Works and Days and the prophet Amos of the Old Testament (Andrews 1943). Karl Polanyi (1977, chap. 11) looked at Hesiod with an eye on the rise of the individual in early Greece.
Social scientists may find it helpful to view Works and Days as information and advice on the world and how to live in it, the
information and advice being divided into three parts. The first part (1201) is a brief history of the relations of humans with the gods, including a narrative of the degenerative series of five races, culminating in the present-day Iron Race, into which Hesiod wishes he had never been born. Hesiod offers a clear statement to the effect that living today is not as good as it used to be. There are specific but never clearly stated references to a legal problem: it seems not unlikely, perhaps even probable, that Hesiod's brother, Perses, has either brought or is bringing an action against him. If so, such circumstances help us to understand Hesiod's situation and advice later in the poem; but the first part of the poem by itself reveals little about the organization of Hesiod's society or the conduct of daily life there.
From the poem's center (202764) one can derive a good deal of information about the organization of the society in which Hesiod lived. One can also argue ideas about what that society had been and how it was changing; but such constructs can be no more than untestable hypotheses. About what went before Hesiod we have some material evidence in the archaeological record, but textual evidence for the preceding period is limited to the Homeric epics, and interpretation of these also requires care and involves disputes. In Works and Days Hesiod makes remarks about what went before, but we have no way of knowing whether Hesiod's picture of the past was accurate, a nostalgic picture of the "good old days" (perhaps not unlike Homer's world of heroes in the epics), or some unknown and unknowable mixture of the two. In this introduction and in the notes in the text we present some hypotheses that we think are as plausible as others, or more plau-
sible, but we want to stress that these are to be regarded as interpretations, not as explanations of the text.
The last part of the poem (765828) bears little structural relation to what precedes it, and makes no mention of the details of Hesiod's world; it consists largely of advice about what to do month by month and day by day. To modern social scientists this part of the poem will appear to contain more magic than sensible advice for the farmer's quotidian rounds, but within the magic one finds much evidence about what people were doing when, and some further evidence about social organization. Again, while the import of some lines is clear (e.g., when people went on trading trips), one can only guessor, much better, refrain from guessingabout other matters (e.g., what sort of goods were traded, and where). Throughout this part of the poem, as well as throughout the second part, we have offered many hypotheses; but, again, in each case, we have tried to indicate that we are offering possible interpretations, not explanations.
The poem that came to be known by the fifth century as Works and Days was composed shortly after 700 B.C.E.2 by a farmer who worked a parcel of land near Ascra, a village within the political sway of Thespiae, a polis (city-state) in Boeotia. Boeotia is just to the north of Athens and Attica in eastern Greece; its leading polis during most of antiquity was Thebes, mythically ruled long before Hesiod's lifetime by Oedipus. Works and Days , traditionally
For this date we follow Richard Janko (1982, 231).
treated as a poetic manual on farming and general husbandry, appears to be the response of one individual to changes that have occurred in his world.
During Homeric and Hesiodic times there were singers who performed at poetic competitions and at the homes of powerful men. Funeral games, such as those Achilles sponsored for Patroclus in book 23 of the Iliad , were regular settings for competitions, both athletic and poetic. Poetic competitions appear to have been regular aspects also of the great games at Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea. The annual Ionian festival at Delos featured competition in song as well. Hesiod tells us (650659) that he won a tripod at the funeral games of Amphidamas, perhaps with his Theogony .
In addition to these public arenas, there were opportunities for singers in the houses of powerful men. Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians in the Odyssey , employs a full-time singer named Demodocus (especially book 8); Odysseus's household is regularly entertained by Phemius (who sings mostly in book 1). Demodocus and Phemius illustrate very clearly the dependence of the singer on the powerful, and they support the notion that the Iliad and Odyssey function to buttress the position of the elites in eighth-century Greek society. Hesiod's Theogony does so as well.
But with Works and Days Hesiod clearly breaks from this dependency. This change may be partly explained by his not being a narrow specialist. There are nonspecialist singers in epic: Achilles sings at Iliad 9.186189; Odysseus himself sings books 912 of his poem. But Hesiod is not a member of their class or of their community. His dependency has been broken, perhaps by the introduction of writing.
Hesiod's other surviving poem, the Theogony , tells of the birth of the universe and of the gods who inhabit and rule it, but tells us little about the real world of the peasant-farmer because it was composed (probably shortly before 700, but certainly before Works and Days ) under the same kind of constraints as Homer's Iliad (about 740) and Odyssey (about 720): that is, the Theogony was produced under the powerful influence of the rulers of the area in which Hesiod resided. Hence, as is the case with the Homeric epics, the Theogony presents a world that is governed well by gods and men; it is a poem that pays scant attention to the everyday life of those away from the center of power. Works and Days , by contrast, takes up precisely what is absent in those other poems, finding fault with the powerful and addressing the problems of those outside the social and economic mainstream.
Various scholars have proposed that Hesiod was a new, or at least different, type of poet, a poet who, instead of drawing from the heroic tradition from which Homer draws his material, taps a tradition of "outsider" poetry. Richard Martin noticed the similarities between Hesiod's narrative of his family's immigration to Ascra and the narrative of Phoenix's own immigration to Phthia preceding his advice to Achilles to relent in his wrath (Iliad 9.475485). Martin concludes that Hesiod offers this particular aspect of his personal history in Works and Days because his authority to be heard rests to some extent on his status as an outsider, "that even in its smallest details, especially those of his father's career, the persona of Hesiod is a traditional way of framing the type of 'exhortation to wisdom' poetry embodied in [Works and Days ]" (Martin 1992, 19). That is, there appears to be a tradition in early Greece of posing as an immigrant when giving advice. Utilizing
a similar approach, Ralph Rosen has ingeniously proposed that Hesiod's discussion of sailing at Works and Days 618694 should not be taken literally but is intended as a metaphor for poetry and as an argument explaining that he writes Hesiodic poetry, not Homeric (epic) poetry (Rosen 1990).
Both Martin and Rosen essentially assert that Hesiod takes on a particular persona or poetic character. We have no objections to these proposals; but this does not mean that, for example in Martin's case, the details of Hesiod's outsider status are not in fact true (or true enough); or that, in Rosen's, Hesiod did not actually go to Chalcis and win a tripod at the funeral games of Amphidamas. And so, while these interesting readings of the poet of Works and Days may seem at first to threaten or compromise the verisimilitude of Hesiod's arrangements in Ascra, nevertheless at the end of the day Hesiod's world is as intact as a literal reading would suggest. We could embrace, with comfort, the outsider's stance that Hesiod takes, and would also be willing to imagine that Hesiod is describing situations that are not specifically or exactly his own; but it is important to acknowledge that the situations that Hesiod describes in his world and the conditions that are being imposed on the fields by the town are real, reflecting the world as Hesiod or "Hesiod" perceives it. As Paul Millett has put it, "It is difficult to imagine any reason why the poet should want to confuse his audience by deliberately archaizing or otherwise misrepresenting social institutions." We, too, consider Works and Days a "faithful formulation of Hesiod's world" (Millett 1984, 86).
Just what was this world? There is no consensus on many aspects of the early Greek world; but our attempts to understand Hesiod both contextually and literally may move us closer to un-
derstanding the Mediterranean world on the eve of classical Greek civilization. What follows is a brief overview of the prehistory of Greece, designed to help contextualize Works and Days .
In the second millennium B.C.E. there had been great centers of political and economic power throughout Greece. These were
located at many sites, now excavated, associated (by later Greeks) with the heroic leaders of later Greek myths: Agamemnon's Mycenae (after whose archaeological prominence this entire civilization is called Mycenaean), Menelaus's Sparta, Oedipus's Thebes, Theseus's Athens, and Nestor's Pylos. The importance of these centers and the complexity of their economic activities are revealed in the documents left behind on clay tablets in a syllabary of eighty-seven signs called Linear B. The tablets, found most numerously at Pylos in southwestern Greece, at Knossos on Crete, and at Thebes in Boeotia, were temporary records of accounts. They survived because they were fired when the buildings that held them were burned. The conflagrations that preserved the tablets are a clear sign that Greek civilization was undergoing a transition during this period.
Indeed, these centers began to collapse beginning about 1200. Few scholars still agree with the ancients themselves that the Mycenaean world fell victim to an invasion by Dorian Greeks from the northwest (the descendants of Heracles [= Hercules] looking for their inheritance). Some put the blame on roving bands of "Sea Peoples." Others have proposed a sudden climatic disaster. Still others have argued for a general system collapse.
The one aspect of the collapse of which we may be reasonably confident is its severity. Between about 1200 and 1000, the population of Greece appears to have been reduced by perhaps as much as three-quarters. The size of settlements became much smaller than before; the actual number of settlements was reduced by perhaps seven-eighths, from about 320 in the late thirteenth century to about 130 in the twelfth to about 40 in the eleventh (Snodgrass 1971, 364; 1980, 20). In a curious convergence of myth and
archaeology, the collapse of the economic centers coincides with the mythic account of the Trojan War and of the almost universal demise of the kingdoms in mainland Greece in the war's aftermath.
From before 1000 until after 800, the Greek world stagnated. Population density remained essentially flat during this period. Contact with the outside world, which had been extensive in the Mycenaean period, came to a halt. (The Mycenaeans had had significant contacts with Egypt and the Near East; their centers faced east and south, for the most part.) The only exception was Lefkandiwe do not know its ancient nameon the large and fertile island of Euboea just off the coast of eastern Greece. It alone appears to have prospered for a while in the mid-tenth century, as increases in its population and in its contacts with outsiders indicate. This revival at Lefkandi continued until about 825. No other mainland site that defies the general pattern of darkness has been found; archaeologists have yet to find an oil lamp: it was a dark age indeed.3
The light at the end of this very dark tunnel appears in the first half of the eighth century, when population density appears on the rise in various locations in Greece. The most dramatic (and, predictably, the most controversial) evidence is the apparent increase in burials, at Athens and in the surrounding countryside of Attica, and in the Argolid in the east-central Peloponnese. There is argument over the size of the increase in burials between about
For good reasons the first half of the European Middle Ages is no longer referred to as the Dark Ages. However, appropriately or not, Dark Age remains the rubric for the eleventh through eighth centuries B.C.E. in Greece.
780 and about 720: according to Snodgrass, there was a sixfold increase (1977, 12; 1980, 2223); according to Tandy, a threefold increase (1997, chap. 2; cf. Sallares 1991, 8990). This disagreement derives from a different argument about whether selectivity4 at different times, certain persons were granted burial, and others were notskewed the evidence. Others have even argued that the increase in burials indicates not more, but fewer, people.5
It seems fair to observe, however, that the burial counts, once adjusted for selectivity, are supported by other less arbitrary and more reliable archaeological evidence, such as an increase in the number of wells and of religious offerings at shrines to the gods. It may also be observed that there are other placesCorinth is a good examplewhere no great increase in burials has been observed but where similar increases in well use and settlement size are documented. We observe further that in the eighth century there are new settlements in the Aegean Sea, a pattern that should reflect the existence of more people than before. Two questions, however, still cannot be answered: Can the population increase
Ian Morris was able to show that until 735 only a very small percentage of those buried are infants and children, between 5 and 10 percent (Morris 1987, chap. 6 and app. 1). Suddenly after 735, infant and child burials rise to 50 to 60 percent, in the range of what palaeodemographers expect to encounter. This increase is to be explained only by a change in the treatment of infants and children. Snodgrass (1991, 1516; 1993, 31) has now come to agree with Morris that much of the increase is attributable to the reduction in exclusivity. See further Tandy 1997, app. to chap. 2.
John Camp (1979) argued that a drought afflicted the Athenian settlement, leading for a time to higher mortality rates and permanently to a reduced population.
be proposed as universal throughout Greece? Did an increase in population play a role in Hesiod's world of rural Boeotia?
Even if one can argue that the population increase was smaller than what the figures we have cited suggest, there is no question or argument about whether something was going on in a number of Greek communities in the mid-eighth century. Rules were changingrules about who got buried, about how status was distributed, and about how basic resources were made available.
An undisputed aspect of the eighth century is that outposts and colonies were founded in southern Italy and on Sicily, as Greece began to look outward again, this time to the west. Before 750 there was a Greek presence on the island of Ischia, off the coast at Naples; arguments abound over the intentions and activities of this settlement. Beginning shortly after 750, numerous settlements cropped up in southern Italy and on Sicily. Some argue that these Greeks were in the west for commercial reasons; others that these were Greeks seeking new starts. In most treatments, scholars connect the "colonizing movement" very closely with the increase in population at home. The problem here is that the very places for which we have the most dramatic evidence for growth of domestic population were not the mother cities of these new settlements. Athens founded none of them; Argos none. Corinth, however, was behind several, and it would appear that there was at least some increase in density there. But the leaders of the settlement at Ischia and of most of the early settlements farther to the south were the Euboeans, and it is not clear that their population was increasing at this time. The Euboeans were also the leading Greeks in the reestablishment, after several hundred years, of the port of trade at Al Mina on the Levantine coast, shortly before 800.
Al Mina, on the mouth of the Orontes River (today called the 'Asi) in northern Syria, appears to have served as the easternmost stop on a great circuit of goods transportation that stretched from there to Ischia, and then, with Phoenician help, to Marseilles and Spain. Among the many stops in between were the western "colonies" that provided Old Greece with access to foreign cultures and foreign goods to a degree unexperienced since the Mycenaean period.
More people will always present new problems to communities, and in the case of Athens the population pressure led to political reforms that eventually changed Athens into a democratic city-state. It is extremely unclear, however, how such developments to the south may have affected Hesiod and his world in central Boeotia; but Hesiod's Works and Days makes more sense if we keep these demographic events in mind.
We do have some thoughts about how these matters were related to Hesiod's frustration. We do not think that our ideas have affected our translation or the explanatory notes to the text. But some readers may find our ideas helpful in interpreting the implications of the text, and so we present them here, very briefly.
Before the new trade routes opened in the eighth century there was a system of interdependence between the local centers of power under basilees (leaders, as explained below) and the subordinate members of their communities. The leaders at the center managed the community and, among other things, settled disputes. The subordinate members supported the centers economically by contributions of goods. As well as putting the goods to their own uses, the leaders stored goods and distributed them
to the other members in times of need and on other occasions. When the new trade routes opened, the leaders were the people who had enough power and resources to take advantage of the new opportunities. They were thus able further to increase their wealth and power and so became much less dependent on the subordinate members of the community. The leaders then ceased to collect goods from the subordinate members, while simultaneously ceasing to support them in times of need. (The leaders did not, however, give up their political authority.) The lack of support in times of need meant that subordinate members of the community, such as Hesiod, became dependent upon neighbors and kin (but, we will see, Hesiod does not find kin particularly dependable either). Mutually supporting relationships with people elsewhere might be established, perhaps based on trade, perhaps on gift and countergift. Since Hesiod speaks of engaging in trade and the gains to be made from it, people in his position must have participated in some kind of trade, but just how we do not know. However, they lacked the resources and power to engage in the new and rewarding long-distance trade on anything approaching the scale necessary to supplant the need for support from the centers. This lack of resources had three further consequences for those in Hesiod's position: generally increased insecurity; the possibilityin contrast to the previous system of generalized mutual obligationof being forced into debt (see below, pp. 3942) and thus losing all to creditors; and no release from the power of the leaders to make and enforce (perhaps irresponsible) judgments in disputes (see the discussion below on dike , pp. 4248). Hence Hesiod's dejection.
Finally, what really makes a dark age dark is not the absence of lamps but the absence of writing. Linear B was a casualty of the collapse of the Mycenaean world. Before 750 a new kind of writing appears, in the alphabet that eventually evolved into those almost all Western populations use today. The alphabet likely came to the Greeks from northern Syria, probably carried by the trading Euboeans or by the Phoenicians, their partners in many of these ventures. It is impossible to account with certainty for the reintroduction of writing at this particular time; we can be fairly certain, however, that the new writing system allowed the freezing of the epic poems, both Homer's and Hesiod's.
Shortly after 750, after many years of oral composition and recomposition, the Iliad and the Odyssey , poems attributed to Homer, appear to have been frozen into the forms in which we have them.6 These long poems, which provide a stunning starting point for the Greek literary tradition, focus on that moment in mythic time that coincides with the actual collapse of the Mycenaean world. The Iliad covers a few days near the end of the Trojan War; the Odyssey narrates the Greek hero Odysseus's return home to Ithaca. Both poems emphasize the importance of being Greek and of Greek institutions. Both poems incorporate the theme of restoration of order: the Greek warriors strive to rescue Helen of Sparta, stolen by Paris in gross violation of the rules of hospitality (xenia );
That is, they were either written down or were frozen in memorized form until written down in the seventh century.
Odysseus brings order back to his household by slaying virtually all the men who have taken up residence in his household and have improperly (i.e., against xenia rules) consumed his goods while wooing his wife.
It is clear that the epics focus on the elite stratum of society, with hardly any notice (virtually none in the Iliad ) given to those who occupied the lower ranks. The leaders in the epics fight and speak well and do good deeds. The institutions and social relations found in the epics are consistent and probably reflect to a great extent the eighth-century world of Homer himself. Homer, of course, intends his world to be heroic, and so he endows his world with a certain otherness, although his ignorance of the Mycenaean world leads to curious results: for example, as Moses Finley (1978, 45) put it, "[Homer's] heroes lived in great palaces unknown in Homer's own day (but unlike the Mycenaean, or any other, palaces)." Homer had no idea how warriors were supposed to use chariots in battle: in the Iliad chariots are used by heroes as taxis to and from the field of battle.
These leaders of the Greek host at Troy, and also those in Hesiod's world, are called basilees . There has been, and continues to be, much discussion about the appropriate translation for the term basileus (pl. basilees ); there is no generally accepted rendering. "King," "roitelet ," "baron," "lord," "big man," and "head man" are each suitable in some ways, but unsuitable in others.
During the Dark Age, the semblance of a political center appears to have been provided by the basileus , a vestige of the Mycenaean age, when the qa-si-re-u was a relatively unimportant intermediary between the outermost political periphery and the
wanax (roughly, "lord"),7 at the center of an elaborate redistributive system. It seems likely that the basilees had been mere heads of villages. The destruction of the Mycenaean centers brought power to the leaders of these newly independent communities: after the Mycenaean collapse, there were only villages, and basileus became the rubric of power (Thomas 1978, 191; Drews 1983, 11214; Fine 1983, 25; Carlier 1984, 10816).
The basilees at Troy are loosely confederated under Agamemnon's leadership. Recent studies of basilees at Troy in the Iliad (Lenz 1993; Ulf 1990) and on Ithaca in the Odyssey (Halverson 1985, 1986) demonstrate the subtle ways in which the pecking order among the basilees is established and readjusted periodically. On the magical island of Scheria in the Odyssey , things are more organized, and Alcinous seems more than primus inter pares . Meetings of the island's basilees take place in his house, and it is Alcinous who announces municipal outlays and presumably has the power to "tax" his people when resources are needed (discussed below, p. 22).
We might profitably compare the system in India before the British. There were less- and more-powerful rulers who held sway over political entities as small as villages and as large as provinces and who enjoyed a wide variety of titles (e.g., maharaja, nizam, diwan, for larger areas; raja, jagidar, talukdar , for smaller areas). The regions dominated by these rulers were often, in principle,
The Greek term wanax is used of supreme commanders in the Iliad and is one of two rubrics of paramountcy in the Linear B tablets (the other is la-we-ge-tas , "people leader"). The term resists etymology and is presumed by most scholars to be a foreign borrowing, as basileus also is.
parts of a larger empire, but each ruler tried to be as independent as he could be and was only as loyal and obedient as he had to be.8
The Pidgin English for such institutionalized positions of power in many societiesoften a reasonable translation from the vernacularis "big man" (a variant of which, familiar to readers of stories about India, is burra sahib , "big lord"). In their African empire the British called such people chiefs. However, "big man" always strikes people as a bit silly or even condescending, and "chief" carries a connotation of a backward or uncivilized society. "Baron," suggested by Peter Green (1984, 28 n. 33), is as good a word as we can find in English, although to us "baron" implies the European feudal system and doctrines. Unlike a baron, the basileus did not depend on an overlord for the grant of power (or land) and took no oaths of homage and fealty.
Any practical definition of the basilees would have to begin with the warning: "Don't mess around with them!"
There was a time when Hesiod approved of the basilees:
Sweet words flow from the mouth of a basileus . All the people watch him as he decides law cases with straight dikai; and even he, speaking surely, would put a stop to a great wrangling. For therefore there are basilees with wise hearts, for when the people are being misled in the agora , they easily settle cases that might bring harm, moving them with soothing words. When he goes through the assembly, they greet
For accounts of such people in Oudh (in northern India) in the nineteenth century, see Baden-Powell 1892 and Neale 1962. For an account of the system in Maharashtra (on the Deccan plateau in western India) during the two or three centuries before British conquestand the importance of conditional loyalty in Islamic and Hindu thoughtsee Wink 1986.
him as a god with sweet reverence, and he is conspicuous among those gathered. (Theogony 8492)
It has been noted how similar these sentiments are to those found in the Odyssey , and that Hesiod uses the same language that Odysseus uses to describe a "good" leader: "He carefully addresses them with sweet reverence, and he is conspicuous among those gathered, and when he goes through the town, they look at him as a god" (Odyssey 8.171173; see further Martin 1984). In the Theogony Hesiod speaks, as Homer does, of basilees as consistently good. In Homer, leaders are good, and for that reason people flourish, as we see in these remarks by the disguised Odysseus to his wife, Penelope:
Your fame reaches broad heaven, just like that of a blameless basileus , who god-fearing and ruling over many and mighty men upholds good dike (eudikie) , and the black earth bears wheat and barley, trees are heavy with fruit, flocks give birth continuously, and the sea bears forth fishes, all thanks to his good leadership, and the people prosper under him. (Odyssey 19.108114)
The world of Works and Days is different, however. On the one hand, it is still the case that communities will prosper under excellent leadership:
But those who give straight dikai to outsiders and insiders and do not diverge at all from what is just, for them the polis thrives, and the people in it bloom. And Peace, who nurtures children, is throughout the land; Zeus the Wide-Viewer never assigns painful war to them. And never do Hunger or Calamity attend upon men of straight dikai , but they enjoy at festivi-
ties the fruits of the works they have tended. For them the earth bears much sustenance, and in the mountains the oak bears acorns on top and bees in the middle. Their woolly sheep become heavy all over from their fleeces; women bear children that resemble their parents. They thrive with good things continually. And therefore they do not go onto ships, but the grain-giving plowland bears [enough] produce [every year]. (225237)
But it is also the case now that the basilees cannot be counted on to be so virtuous, as Hesiod immediately turns to another kind of behavior:
To those whose care is evil violence and cruel works Zeus the Wide-Viewer, the son of Cronus, assigns dike . Many times even the entire polis fares ill for an evil man who commits offenses and plots actions of outrage. On them the son of Cronus brings a great disaster from heaven: hunger and plague together. The people die; women do not give birth; oikoi become diminished by the ploys of Olympian Zeus. At different times in turn the son of Cronus destroys their wide army, or their wall, or exacts atonement from their ships upon the open sea. (238247)
Thus does Hesiod abandon any support for the ideology of the early polis , an ideology that includes the notion of equality among all those allowed to participate as citizens but also the notion of the virtues of a centralized leadership that acts on behalf of the citizen body, regardless of the form of government (democracy, oligarchy, tyranny). Above all, the Greek polis was a citizen-state from its earliest appearance in the eighth century (see further Raaflaub 1993, 4246).
Until about Hesiod's time, much, perhaps most, of the production and provisioning of goods was centrally organized in redistributive systems wherein people contributed a good deal, even all, of their production to a center and received back a great variety of goods and services, including feasts and festivals. This was certainly the case during the Mycenaean period and probably the case, on a reduced scale, throughout the Dark Age.
In the Odyssey , on the island of Scheria, a centralized, redistributive system appears the norm. Alcinous, a basileus on Scheria, tells us that "twelve distinguished basilees rule throughout the people (demos ) as rulers, and I am the thirteenth" (Odyssey 8.390391). Of course, the very existence of this strong central group of thirteen leaders may or may not imply redistribution, but we are reminded of Solomon's Israel of the ninth century: "And Solomon had twelve officers over all Israel, which provided victuals for the king and his household: each his month a year made provision" (1 Kings 4.7). When Odysseus is about to leave Scheria, Alcinous publicly announces: "But come now, let us give him a great tripod and a caldron, each man of us; in turn we will get requital by taking a collection throughout the people (demos ): it is a hard thing for one man to make a proper gift from his own gift store" (Odyssey 13.1315). Thus Alcinous and the other leaders are able to recoup their "loss" by taxing the people and will be able to continue to do so as long as it does not appear unfair or avoidable. In these cases, goods move into a central location, and then other goods, or services, move out in turn to the periphery.
While Odysseus is wandering the world, suitors of his wife,
Penelope, are consuming the materials of his household. One player in this arrangement is Eumaeus the swineherd, whose responsibility it is to supply the household of Odysseus with swine; his ability to do this has allowed him to maintain his livelihood both before Odysseus left for the war and during the subsequent occupation of Odysseus's household by the suitors of Penelope. Eumaeus himself tells us that "I myself keep and tend these swine and choose the best of the boars and send it to the suitors" (Odyssey 14.107108). However fond he is of the absent Odysseus, it appears to matter little for Eumaeus's activities who occupies the center.
By Hesiod's time, trade had become important, but we do not know just how it was conducted. About ports of trade we can be fairly sure; about long-distance trade we know a good deal, as indicated in our account of Greek colonies in the discussion of population above. However, about trade over shorter distances and on a smaller scale we can only make some guesses based on a few clues.
Markets in early Greece were for the most part peripheral, by which we mean simply that very few persons depended on markets for their basic needs (food, clothing, and shelter). In addition, most markets in antiquity were controlled, characteristically by the government.9 Good examples of ancient controlled markets
If the inscription executed in 409/8 in Athens of Draco's law on homicide is faithful to the original legislation of about 620, then we have a reference to a peripheral market a mere fifty or so years after Hesiod's Works and Days . In the inscription an ancient Athenian could read a reference to the agora ephoria , the "border market," the "border" in this case referring to political boundaries between city-states.
were those of Babylonia and Assyria, where prices were fixed10 and on which, in fact, few depended for their livelihoods. In the ancient emporia, such as Tilmun (Bahrain) and Al Mina, mostly luxury and prestige goods were transferred (for Tilmun see, for example, Oppenheim 1954; for Al Mina see Tandy 1997, chap. 3). The prophet Ezekiel gives a vivid image of the port of trade at Tyre, cataloging for us the fine goods from faraway places that were exchanged (Ezekiel 27; see further Polanyi 1960, 34345; Tandy and Neale 1994, 15).
About food markets we know little. They probably arose spontaneously as one-time ("spot") markets during times of natural disaster.11 There is a description in the Iliad of such a one-time market when ships pulled into the harbor at Troy:
Many ships from Lemnos were at hand carrying wine, ships that Jason's son Euneos had sent out; Hypsipyle had borne Euneos to Jason, shepherd of the people. And only to the Atreidae, Agamemnon and Menelaus, had Jason's son given wine to carry off, one thousand measures. From this source the flowing-haired Achaeans got wine, some by [exchanging] bronze, some by shining iron, some by hides, some by whole oxen, some by slaves. (Iliad 7.467475)
"[The] institution of markets . . . was in Mesopotamia clearly of limited and marginal importance" (Oppenheim 1977, 385 n. 13); cf. Polanyi 1957.
There is a terrific example from ancient Egypt: a woman accused of stealing gold that was found in her house defended herself by asserting: "I got it selling barley in the year of the hyenas, when everyone was short of food" (Montet 1981, 71, 267). This is clear testimony to a one-time market, not (pace Silver 1983, 798; 1986, 78) evidence of quotidian self-regulating markets.
It may have been to such markets, rather than to ports of trade, that Hesiod took or shipped his goods.
Clearly trade was growing important, as were markets, but neither the trade nor even a single one of the markets should ever be treated as part of a self-regulating market system (often assumed by economic historians but never actually existing there).12
What Hesiod is most concerned about is getting enough to eat. He has practical concerns along these lines and spends quite a bit of time on them.
Hesiod worked a parcel of land (Greek kleros , "lot") on which was situated an economic organization called an oikos , for which up to this point we have been using the word "household." An oikos (pl. oikoi ) comprised a piece of land and all the buildings on it, the animals and people who lived on it, and the productive means used to generate subsistence for all who belonged to it. The lot could be divided among sons by inheritance, which appears to be what happened to Hesiod and his brother, Perses, upon the death of their father, who had moved to Ascra from Cume in Greek Asia Minor:
Elsewhere Tandy has developed some models for market types as they may have existed in early Greece. See Tandy 1997, chaps. 4 and 5.
My father and yours . . . used to sail in ships, because he was in need of a good livelihood. Once he came here in his black ship, after making it across much open sea, having left behind Aeolian Cume. He was not fleeing riches, wealth, and prosperity, but the evil poverty that Zeus gives to men. He settled near Helicon in a pitiful village, Ascra, bad in the winter, painful in the summer, never any good. (633640)
It is not the weather that Hesiod is complaining about; in order to understand Hesiod's complaint we have to look elsewhere.
We follow Paul Millett (1984, 107), who, drawing on Robert Redfield's broad definition of peasant (1953, 31), concludes that Hesiod fits the picture well. We also recommend to the reader the intelligent survey of the more recent peasant literature in Victor Magagna's Communities of Grain (1991, 124).
Although it seems rather obvious to many of us that Hesiod is most efficiently studied as a peasant or smallholder, there have been efforts to make him something else. We summarize some of these arguments here. Benedetto Bravo (1977) argues that Perses and Hesiod were, like their father before them, impoverished aristoi , the term used by Homer and other early poets to describe the "best men." Alfonso Mele (1979) sees Hesiod as a representative of this aristocracy, advocating among other things the propriety of nonprofessional "trade" by the aristoi . We dismiss two other positions because there is really no evidence to support them: Chester Starr's modernizing portrait of Hesiod and of his father as "semi-aristocrats" (1977, 12527; cf. 1982, 43233, 434; 1986, 9394) and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's speculation that Hesiod's father was a non-aristos who, when he came to Ascra,
fooled the locals into thinking that he was a descendant of Boeotian aristoi who had emigrated to Aeolis (1928, 76).
Hesiod's farm was part of his oikos and was worked by members of his oikos ; his neighbors in and around the village of Ascra formed some sort of community of such households, each of which existed independently of the others. To the extent that it was possible, the community appears to have been independent of the polis (Thespiae) and its authority.
Hesiod engaged in what we would now call mixed farming. He grew grains, plowing with oxen (436) and asses (46, 607), tended vines, and kept livestock, the same trio of productive categories that we find in Homer's description of a farm in the Iliad (14.122124). He may also have kept livestock on "public" ("common") lands, to judge from his reference to eating the meat of a cow "fed in the woods" (591). But Hesiod's advice is mainly about producing grain.
We cannot know the size of Hesiod's farm, or of the farms of other oikoi in his community, but we can estimate a range of size, using bits of evidence from other times and places and rules of thumb. The range is large, but the farm was small by modern European, to say nothing of modern North American, standards.
We may start with the proposition that when the staple diet is grain, an adult will consume up to but no more than 16 to 18 ounces of food grain. This diet is sufficient for survival but
leaves the person easily subject to disease and certainly does not provide enough to allow the person to work hard. However, once people are consuming this much grain they do not want to eat more grain; rather, they want to supplement the grain with other foodstuffs: milk, curds, whey, cheese, oils, vegetables, roots, fruit, meat. While it is clear from the tenor of Hesiod's comments on the threats of hunger and debt that his oikos is not well-to-do, neither does he appear to be dirt-poor: he has slaves, he hires people, and he speaks of sending goods off for trade. His oikos thus appears to be bigger (and relatively better-to-do) than our typical picture of an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century peasant household but far short of an "estate"and so it is also fair to assume that his farm produces enough grain to feed the people on his oikos with some to spare.
How many people were there in his oikos? Presumably he has a wife, since he appears to have at least one son (271, 376377); this makes three people. If we assume that Hesiod has followed his own good advice, then we can say several things about his oikos . Among the residents is a slave woman who follows his plow and keeps his house in order, although the text is unreliable (405406; see note 93 there). There is another woman (or the same one?) who does the chores in the house (603604). A forty-year-old male laborer does some of the plowing (441446); and he or another man follows the plow as he covers the seeds (469471). This adds another two to four people. Hesiod hires on an occasional worker (thes , pl. thetes ) from outside his oikos , who would have been resident for limited periods. (Thetes are the lowest caste in early Greece. They do not belong anywhere; even slaves belong to an oikos . In Hesiod's oikos, thetes are thrown out when their
work is no longer needed. See lines 600603 and note 150.) Hesiod also occasionally hires a friend (370), who we may presume is never resident. Hesiod has slaves (at least two?) who build granaries (502503), help with the reaping (573) and processing (597), and plow the field for fallow after the harvest (607608). Thus we find seven to nine people mentioned as permanent residents. Hesiod may have other sons, a daughter or daughters, and more than two slaves.
Let us guess that an oikos such as Hesiod's supported ten or twelve adult equivalents, each consuming some 400 pounds of food grains a year, requiring a total of some 4,000 to 4,800 pounds of grain annually. To this quantity we need to add a sixth for seed and some unknown amount to supplement the grazing and fodder diets of working oxen and donkeys and for lactating cows (whether nursing or milk-yielding), and perhaps a bit for other livestock. Hesiod's oikos would thus need upwards of 6,000 pounds of grain each year. However, Hesiod may also have grown more for storage against the threat of crop failure (see below, under "Storage"). Hesiod also speaks of sending goods out in trade (see below); we do not know what goods, but grain is one possibility.
Yields are hard to estimate. The fertility of the soil, the soil's ability to retain water, natural drainage, the amount and distribution of rainfall over the growing season, number of plowings, intensity of cultivation (weeding, loosening of soil)all these factors affect yields, and Hesiod gives us no clues to judge these matters. In modern Boeotia land generates 9 to 12 bushels (570 to 770 pounds) per acre. After two centuries of low population density, land in Hesiod's day may have recovered a good deal of its natural fertility; on the other hand, the plows were probably less
effective and the oxen smaller.13 For one district in northern Indianot Greece, but where a similar ox-plow technology was used on well-worn soilsestimated yields varied from 350 pounds per acre for millets (grown on poor ground) to 620 pounds for wheat during the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century. For the first two decades of the twentieth century the estimates ranged from 450 pounds for millets to 1,000 pounds for barley.
If we estimate yields on Hesiod's land at 600 pounds per acrealways remembering we may be overestimating by a half or under-estimating by a thirdthen he would have needed about 10 acres under a grain crop each year. This is consistent with the rule of thumb that a man and pair of oxen can manage about 5 acres of arable (land for cropping). More acres would be possible if the soils were light or if only the surface inches were "scratch" plowed. If Hesiod used a three-field systemin which a third of the land is left fallow (uncultivated) to recover each yearhe would have needed 15 acres of arable. If he used a two-field systemin which half the land is left fallow each yearhis total arable would have been about 20 acres (or more, if he grew for storage or trade). Then we should allow some additional acreage for vegetables (which Hesiod does not mention), vines, and some olive and fruit trees. Hesiod's oikos thus contained 25, and perhaps more than 30, acres. While this is a significantly larger property than the 15 acres estimated as the standard farm size for the
For the modern data see Bintliff 1985, 210. But the relationship between ancient and modern (but premechanized) yields is extremely thorny. See Halstead 1987; Halstead and Jones 1989, 54; Garnsey 1992, 149.
seventh century and later (Cooper 197778, 169; Andreyev 1974, 1416), we must keep in mind that there were many more people later, in Boeotia and elsewhere. Even if we overestimate Hesiod's holding by a sizeable amount, we must also keep in mind that Hesiod's father's oikos was twice the size of Hesiod's, a reflection of a time when there were even fewer people in the area. We should also point out that Hesiod's narrative implies that his family did not occupy the best land in the area.
In any case, Hesiod does not think that his oikos is overpopulated: "Easily would Zeus give unquenchable prosperity to more persons. The care of more hands is more, and the increase is greater" (379380). This is a sensible position, taking the good years with the bad, so long as there was still unused land that could be brought into his holding and under the plow.
At lines 420435, Hesiod offers instruction on picking out different woods of differing sizes and shapes for the construction of three different things: a mortar and pestle, a wagon, and a plow. The most detailed information Hesiod provides is about the plow. During the Dark Age people's staple diet was probably the olive, and the plow disappeared from use. The account of the appropriate woods and their joints and joinings may have appealed to Hesiod's audience because the plow was, to them, a new and even exciting implement.
We are of the opinion that Hesiod's plow had an iron plowshare, because of the likelihood that the property that Hesiod inherited from his father had to be cleared and turned for the first time when Hesiod's father arrived from Aeolis. Hesiod does not
mention the iron share, but his preoccupation with the different parts of the wooden structure of the plow may explain this omission (Gow 1914, 266 n. 49). No iron plowshare from ancient Greece has been found anywhere (Schiering 1968, 151), no doubt because the iron was recycled into a new share. The Iliad may provide good evidence for both the iron plowshare and the recycling of its material. When Achilles offers a prize of rough-cast iron at the funeral games of Patroclus, he says of its winner:
He will have it for five full years to use,14 for not for lack of iron will the shepherd or the plowman go into the polis , but this will provide it. (Iliad 23.833835)
The utility of iron to the plowman is clear; it is difficult to imagine how the shepherd might use it, though knives and axes are made of iron in Homer. Of course, this may simply indicate that a worker (shepherd or plowman) routinely went to town to do errands on behalf of the oikos . Note that not only does the passage imply the use of an iron plowshare; it more clearly suggests that iron was not so easy to come by.
During plowing time, Hesiod or his men use a mattock to cover the seeds (470) and a mallet to break the clods (425); they use sickles for reaping (775) and for cutting vines (573); Hesiod oversees his own threshing on a threshing floor (599), for which he needs a winnow; grinding is done with wooden mortar and pestle (423). There is a loom to produce textiles (538, 779); Hesiod has a way to cut felt (542); he also needs a tool for castrating live-
The limit refers not to how long it will last, but how long it may be used before being returned to Achilles.
stock (786, 790791). Other equipment that Hesiod mentions includes wagons (426, 453, 692) and a steering oar (45, 629), which he keeps over his fireplace (and hopes never to use).
Hesiod is very concerned with hunger (limos ) and avoiding it: he mentions hunger no fewer than seven times in Works and Days , twice (404, 647) linking it with the other great dread that will not go away: chrea, "debts" (about which we will say much more below). He associates it with poor husbandry; but, as we are coming to understand it (Garnsey 1988, 816; Garnsey and Morris 1989; Halstead 1989), interannual variability of rainfall in Greece must have resulted in very frequent crop failure, with great variability from region to region every year and great variability from year to year in every region of Greece: good reason to fear hunger. However, Hesiod never refers to crop failure as a cause of hunger and debt, although he does emphasize the importance of filling one's granary. (Perhaps because the poem chastises his brother for poor husbandry, he offers only good husbandry as a solution: after all, he cannot blame Perses for a lack of rain, although he does associate good yields with the moral behavior of the basilees [225237].) Still, readers may ask themselves whether storage or getting grain from elsewhere might not have allowed fairly easy survival in a single year, perhaps longer.
The threat of hunger could be much reduced by storing in good years against crop failure in bad. Hesiod speaks of building granaries (502503); he advises his listeners to leave the majority of
one's production behind when moving the rest by ship (689690). Typically grain was stored in pithoi (sing. pithos ). These large (up to six feet high), thick-sided, sometimes immobile jars (whose shape changed little over millennia) could store grain without spoilage for up to three years. In the second millennium B.C.E., they were used in great numbers at the palaces at Knossos and Pylos. Some have been found at Dark Age sites. But, curiously, Homer and Hesiod mention pithoi as storage containers only for wine (although we cannot be sure that by pithos they refer to the same pot shape that modern archaeologists call a pithos: Odyssey 2.340, 23.305; Works and Days 368, 815, 819).15
We have models of special-design, freestanding granaries from an Athenian burial dated to about 850 B.C.E. (Smithson 1968, 9297) and from eighth-century burials in Athens (Smithson, 92 n. 41, nos. 210). If late eighth-century foundations discovered at Lefkandi (Popham and Sackett 1968, 3031, figs. 6970; Popham, Sackett, and Themelis 1980, pls. 57, 8b) are in fact foundations of granaries (the excavators first thought that they were winepresses), each may have held as many as 450 bushels of grain, or enough to feed more than 60 adults for a year. There is what appears to be a very large storage building dating from the eighth century at Old Smyrna, but it is not certain that it was intended for grain storage (Akurgal 1983, 28; building J in figs. 14, 15, and 18a [a reconstruction reproduced also in Coldstream 1977, 305,
Homer also tells us of the two pithoi in Zeus's house, one containing good things that he distributes to mortals, the other containing evils (Iliad 24.527528); Hesiod tells us that it was from a pithos that Pandora released all the evils into the world (Works and Days 9499).
fig. 96b]; pl. 17). All this evidence indicates that sizeable amounts of grain were being stored, but these granaries seem entirely too large for an oikos the size of Hesiod's.
Another possible defense against hunger is the acquisition of grain from some distance, either by gift16 or by some sort of market exchange. But about this Hesiod tells us nothing. He speaks of shipping (unidentified) goods, but always in an "outward-bound" direction, and always for the gain to be made from shipping them. If this suggests that Hesiod, when he had a surplus of production, could always find a place to carry it (or to send it), it opens the questions of whether he could have brought grain in from a distance, and if he did not, why he did not. Certainly Hesiod strongly emphasizes dependence on the goodwill of local neighbors in times of need; so there may have been some barrier to getting grain from a distance.
Daily life in Hesiod's Boeotia contrasts sharply with the day-to-day life that we glimpse in the Homeric epics. In Hesiod's Boeotia surplus production does not go to a central place for storage and redistribution. Rather, Hesiod takes his goods to sea (probably to the port of Kreusis, about twenty miles away) to be carried by
This is a possibility even over substantial distances. In locally bad years people in Tivland (in central Nigeria) "send hunger"namely, requests for foodto distant relatives who might live as far away as relatives, friends, or mutually supportive "partners" in Greece could have lived (see Bohannan and Bohannan 1968, 143).
ship either to a port of trade or to a peripheral, one-time market. Hesiod advises his listeners to "praise a little ship, but put your cargo in a big one: the greater the cargo, the greater will be the kerdos 17 on top of kerdos , if the winds hold back the evil blasts" (643645). It is curious that the only risks that Hesiod envisions are "evil blasts"; he makes no mention of prices. If the destination of Hesiod's goods is a port of trade, his lack of worry about prices lends some support to the view that prices were fixed at ports of trade (see Revere 1957; Polanyi 1963). However, if Hesiod's goods are destined to a one-time market, the lack of worry about prices could also be attributable to either of two causes: one-time markets arise only in response to local shortages, and thus prices will be high; or, since all of Hesiod's costs have been absorbed within his oikos , any price will be a gain.
A final point on the destination of Hesiod's goods: Hesiod himself would not necessarily need (or want) to know where his goods would be headed before he reached Kreusis. A port of trade's address may have remained constant, but interannual rain variations will have created one-time markets almost every year, with locations changing almost every year as well.
More important, however, than the identification of the precise kind of destination to which Hesiod's goods are traveling, is the recognition that the goods are being taken outside rather than being delivered somewhere within the sort of redistributive formation that we must surmise for the world of Eumaeus. The mechanism for transferring surplus goods within the community has
Kerdos means "gain" in the broadest of senses and seems to be the obverse of chreos , which means "debt" in the broadest of senses.
been replaced by a mechanism outside the community. Furthermore, the goal of such movements is to increase as much as one can one's own kerdos , a gain for oneself in contrast to a gain on behalf of the community (see note 76 on kerdos ).
What has not changed are the relations among neighboring oikoi , which are clearly still reciprocal. Among many examples is the following: "Take good measure from a neighbor, and pay it back well, with the same measure, or better if you can, so that you may later find him reliable should you need him" (349352; our emphasis). This is a classic example of the necessity of apparent generosity in reciprocal relations (see note 83). Sharing and maintaining neighborly relations are recurrent themes throughout Works and Days; the collapse of the redistributive formation has done little to undermine reciprocal relations away from the political center. In fact, we suspect that the collapse of the political center as economic center probably has strengthened these mutual dependencies, since community- or class-awareness begins to emerge (see Magagna 1991, 1221) as the peripheralboth geographical and social/political/economicmembers of the Greek communities begin to perceive their plight.
We are left to conclude that Hesiod's world is without an economic center that benefits those in Hesiod's position, and that Hesiod and his neighbors are forced to fend for themselves by banding together and aspiring to autarky within their independent oikoi .
Hesiod's specific advice about what to do at what times of year adds up collectively to what may be called his farmer's almanac.
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West has a very useful appendix on risings and settings of stars (West 1978, 37681). Bickerman (1980, 5156) is helpful as well. The best rule of thumb is that when Hesiod mentions a rising or setting he is probably referring to a rising or setting just before dawn; less often he means a rising or setting in the early evening.
In this section, we want to lay out fully the players in the narrative drama of Works and Days and the rules behind many of the players' behaviors and behind Hesiod's remarks. We have already discussed interneighbor reciprocity. Now we turn to the actions taken by outsiders that are driven by new rules coming out from the town.
Hesiod addresses Works and Days to his brother, Perses, who appears to have lost his oikos . There are inconsistencies in the depiction of Perses's situation, but we can be sure of this much: Perses has lost his land because he accumulated too many debts (chrea at 404, 647), a new social notion that also indicates the absence of a redistributive system, within which we would ordinarily expect an individual to owe only as much as he can pay. Perses appears to have encumbered his own holding (kleros ) with chrea until he lost it.
Chrea are obligations of many sorts. Chrea include what we think of as debts (in the widest sense) but also much moremore even than is implied in the American vernacular expression "Now you owe me one."
Louis Gernet observed that in the Greek language chreos "is applied to a global notion in which there appear . . . four related ideas: the idea of a constraint that weighs on the debtor; the idea of an obligation that is punishable in case of default; the idea of the very thing that, once received, 'obligates'; the ideas, in addi-
tion, of propriety, duty, and even religious observation" (Gernet 1981, 147).
Some of the breadth of connotation for chreos (also spelled chreios ) can be seen in Homer. Odysseus's absence has brought about a chreios for Telemachus (Odyssey 2.45). Ares acquires a chreios when he is caught in flagrante with Aphrodite (Odyssey 8.353, 355). The Trojans fear that the Achaeans will pay them back a chreios for the defeat the Trojans administered to them the day before (Iliad 13.746); similarly, chreios is used to describe the motivations of the Pylians' and Eleans' recurring raids of each other (Iliad 11.686, 688, 698) and, likewise, to describe Odysseus's trip to Messene to collect a chreos after the Messenians took 300 head of sheep from Ithaca (Odyssey 21.17). These last two examples illustrate obligations resulting from robbery and rustling.
Finally, there are two uses that appear to refer to debt pure and simple (to the extent that there is such a thing), and so mirror the uses in Hesiod: Eurymachus the suitor asks Telemachus whether Mentes the Taphian trader (Athena in disguise) was visiting Ithaca to see to a chreios (Odyssey 1.409); Mentes/Athena says later that he/she is off to visit the Cauconians, "where a chreios is owed me" (Odyssey 3.367). From this we reason that one man's chreos can become another man's kerdos (discussed above). And this kind of chreos appears, from the context of Hesiod's remarks, to be of a new type that can be accumulated against one's land, because too many chrea threaten the loss of land. A chreos used to be a continuing obligation; now a chreos has become collectible and can force foreclosure of land.
Chrea are more than mere vexations. In both of his explicit references to chrea (404, 647), Hesiod links chrea with limos ,
"hunger," and clearly at 404405 Hesiod connects chrea to Perses' loss of his oikos and his livelihood. We reason further from the whole drift of Hesiod's argument that the defense against too many chrea is to accumulate kerdea .
Later, in Athens, chrea led to debt slavery, the abolition of which by Solon's legislative reforms of about 594 B.C.E. may be read as the beginning of a trend that led to democracy in the form of Cleisthenes' reforms in 508. Thus chrea had the unintended but salutary effect of leading to the institutionalization of democracy at Athens; no such eventuality ever occurred in Boeotia.
Hesiod encourages Perses to rid himself of chrea by pursuing the accumulation of kerdea: as we saw above, a successful trading venture will bring "kerdos on top of kerdos " (644). Thus we may surmise that kerdea are a defense against the chrea that can lead to the loss of one's land. Industry leads to autarky; autarky together with kerdea can prevent the harm that chrea can bring. Since it would appear that Perses lost his land to those who held sway in Thespiae, we may conclude that autarky and kerdea are cultural and economic defensive weapons aimed narrowly at the once-redistributive center that has been transformed into something new.
Before moving on, it is appropriate to make reference to the important work of Edouard Will and Marcel Detienne, who argued that since land is not alienable (that is, transferable through sale), the accumulation of debts leads not to the loss of the property but to the loss of control of production. The agrarian crisis, as Detienne called it, originates "in the practice of successive divisions, a practice that was the result of the breakdown of the primitive family" (Will 1957, 17). Sons of a smallholder have a choice
whether to divide their inherited property or not, but because of the inferiority of the holding (because of population pressure), divided or not, they are on occasion forced to borrow from a neighbor, usually a wealthy one. A series of bad harvests leads to the debtor being "sucked down little by little into even greater misery. From loan to loan, he will finally be forced to 'sell' his plot of land" (Detienne 1963, 2526). But, says Will, land is not alienable, and so all that the wealthy aristos can accomplish is eventually to gain complete control over the smallholder's production. Although title is not ceded to the aristos , in effect the land no longer belongs to the indebted smallholder. Over time, the production on more and more holdings comes under the control of the wealthy families (Detienne, 26).
Will's and Detienne's work is important and attractive, but we cannot see how one can avoid concluding that Perses' land has been literally separated from him. Perses has no oikos; he has no kleros .
However interpreted, some kind of legal action by Perses against Hesiod is the starting point of the poem:
Right here let us settle our wrangling (neikos ) with straight dikai , which are from Zeus and best. For we had already distributed the holding, but you snatched and carried off many other things, energetically feeding the pride of gift-eating basilees , who are willing to offer a dike in this case. (3539)
Dike (pl. dikai ) in Works and Days seems to have a primary meaning of "settlement, judgment," when it refers to a judge's
ruling (39, 219, 221, 225, 264), or "plea," when it refers to a contestant's position (36), or both (230, 250, 254, 262). It can also refer to the size of the settlement (272) and to the actual settlement offered by one party to the other (712). In Works and Days these dikai are routinely either "straight" (good) or "crooked" (bad).
By extension, dike also refers to the entire process or system within which disputes were settled (here we follow Gagarin 1973, 89): "litigation process, legal system, law, rule of law" (9, 192, 213, 217, 220, 249, 256, 269, 275, 278, 279, 283). (Dike is personified at lines 220 and 256; in both cases we capitalize the noun.) Finally, dike can indicate a penalty as a result of the process (239); it is this meaning that informs the Athenian idiom diken didonai , "to give dike ," or "to pay a penalty."
In Homer, but not in Hesiod, dike may have a moral force and refer to proper or just behavior. In Hesiod, however, dikaios and adikos , the adjectives that are derived from dike , are grounded in this other, moral force; hence, we translate these adjectives "just" and "unjust."
Dike thus refers, in Hesiod, not so much to moral "justice" as to the process, in both its formal and its informal manifestations, of finding bearable solutions to disputes and of keeping the peace. The proceedings leading to dike as decision and traditional modes of dispute settlement in Asian villages may mirror each other sufficiently to illuminate the flexibility of dike in Hesiod's world. Village councils heard the "case." Just a few to all of the villagers could be present; anyone could present further evidence or argument and voice an opinion. Depending on the importance of the dispute and the numbers of people who felt strongly, such meetings could go on all day, even over several days. What ended the
discussions was arrival at a consensusnot a decision about right or wrong, not a vote on the outcome, but a consensus that they had arrived at a decision with which they could all live. The consensus was accepted but not approved by all; some, even many, might have left the meeting despondent. It was a general agreement that no better solution could be found at the time. Certainly ideas about right and wrong affected the outcome, as did knowledge of relationships in the past, anticipation of the consequences of the terms of the settlement, the relative power of the participants, and the intensity of their feelings. In addition, the participants were not only the immediate parties to the dispute but everyone who chose to voice an opinion. The objective of such proceedings was to make it possible for everyone in the village to continue to live together and to carry on their functions. If a powerful man felt strongly, his views might shape the settlement; if he did not much care, a person with little power but who felt strongly could have appreciable influence on the outcome. (Even the most downtrodden had some power if they had allieseven other downtroddenwith whom everybody had to go on living.) The final articulation of the settlement was a summary by the village council of what had become obvious (with, perhaps, grunts of consent by the losing disputants).19 In Indonesia this practice
These processes are common throughout South and Southeast Asia. Neale learned much about them while doing research in India (during 195556, 196061, and 196465), especially from people at the Institute of Community Development (Hyderabad), the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (Poona), the Punjab Board of Economic Enquiry (Ludhiana), and the Planning, Research, and Action Institute (Lucknow). In conversations, scholars who have worked in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand report the same thing. For summary statements, see Rosen 1975, 8889, 101, 207. For accounts of how position (wealth, prestige, political power) affects the conduct and outcomes of disputes, see Bailey 1957, 1046, 19195, 2035.
is called gotong royong (literally, the principle of harmony and its application to the settlement of disputes).
There are no clear lines between the immediate disputants and other interested parties; no clear lines between evidence and argument and opinion; nor is there a clear line between a "decision" and the emerging consensus. In all these respects the Asian village system resembles the neikea in the agora . Where the basileus alone gives dike described by Hesiod in the Theogony as divinely inspiredhis role appears similar to that of elders or council; and the fact that he gives dike after hearing all sorts of people speak, and after the opportunity to see the reactions of all present in the agora , certainly suggests that he is articulating an emerging consensus. Hesiod's description of this process and Homer's description of Achilles' Shield (see below, on neikea ) offer parallels to what we can observe in the Asian village.
This process is common in many small communities and may well be limited to small communities. It does not always work: witness the case of Achilles vs. Agamemnon, where two too-powerful people felt too intensely to allow a consensus to which they would subscribe. But note that the "case" then metamorphosed into something like the warriors vs. Agamemnon in the search for a solutionand this change was enough to get Agamemnon to subscribe to a consensus (although Achilles' consent
waited upon Patroclus's death, by which time the "case" had become the warriors vs. Achilles).
It is worth noting, furthermore, that Hesiod's confidence in the straight dikai of his leaders has been undermined somehow, that the dikai coming out from the polis to the countryside are becoming, in the opinion of those in the fields, more difficult to deal with and more threatening than before. This surely is an indication that the polis , at least in this part of Boeotia, is becoming more dominating (even as it becomes less welcome).
In North American society perhaps only families (and family-like groups) operate in this way (and children know what it is to be powerless in family discussions). The aim is the same: not that justice be done, but that all members of the group can continue to function within the group (see further Gagarin 1986, chap. 2).
Often one is especially interested in getting an advantageous dike when one is involved in a public dispute. We translate the Greek neikos (pl. neikea ) "wrangling." When used in the context of the agora ,20 neikos approaches "lawsuit," meaning a publicly adjudicated dispute, a dispute brought into public space. There is the famous neikos on the Shield of Achilles, for example:
The people were gathered in the agora . For there had arisen a wrangling (neikos ), and two men were engaging in a wrangling (neikos ) over the payment for a man murdered. One claimed that he had paid in full, declaring as much to the
Wranglings often occur in the agora , which means "gathering place." It is not certain whether originally the agora was a gathering place for livestock or people; but it was becoming the new public space of the emergent polis . Since the term is still widely used, we do not translate it.
people (demos ); the other refused to accept anything. Both were eager to receive the verdict from the knower [istor; see note 186]. The people were cheering both, supporting both sides. Heralds restrained the people, and there were old men sitting on polished stones within a sacred circle, and they were holding in their hands the staffs of the clear-voiced heralds. With these then they were darting up, and they were giving dikai each in turn. And in their midst there lay two talents of gold, to award to the man among them who might enunciate the straightest dike . (Iliad 18.497508)
Here the two disputants each offer a dike (plea) as well as a stake of one talent (a large amount of metal). The judge who gives the straightest dike (best settlement) "wins" the stake. Presumably the onlookers judge which dike is best. It may not be "justice," but it keeps people from killing one another, no trivial accomplishment.
Perses appears to have had dealings or to be dealing with the basilees who enunciate dikai at Thespiae, dealings that have something to do with the fact that Perses has tried, is trying, or is about to try to get something from Hesiod that Hesiod does not want to give him. This action, coming, as it does, out of the polis, is also an example of what Hesiod thinks is wrong with the world. The system that allows the action appears to be the same as that which was responsible for Perses' own loss.
We close with a restatement of the limitations that we face in interpreting the poem. In addition to the lack of clarity that surrounds the starting point of the poem and the fuzziness of our understanding of the range of meanings of dike, problems arise from the structure of Hesiod's argument and from how one interprets the larger argument. Throughout, Hesiod complains
about the bad dikai that are now being imposed on him and his neighbors, but what is bad about them is not clear. For instance, the dike that deprived Perses of his oikos if that was what happenedwas certainly bad for Perses; but it may have been reasonable, since, according to Hesiod, Perses "asked for it." The frequent statements to the effect that Zeus would not approve may be appeals to an "external, higher authority" representing a commonly accepted view of equity or justice. They may be resentful statements that these dikai are "not like the (good) ones we used to get." They may simply be inheritances from a splinter, "anti-aristocratic" branch of the oral tradition (Donlan 1973; Rose 1975; Farron 197980). There are other possibilities. We hypothesize that the "centers" of power used to have mutually supportive relations with farmers/peasants, but that the centers have recently withdrawn from their traditional and supportive redistributive role. If this be the case, then the appeals to Zeus may not refer to some commonly held idea of substantive justice but, rather, to an idea of proper procedures for arriving at dike (Gagarin 1973; 1974; 1986, 4650; 1992). Then there is the possibility that Hesiod represented a newly literate but excluded class and was expressing opinions of its members: perhaps opinions that they had long held, perhaps opinions that were emerging along with the new social formations. Not necessarily inconsistent with this is the possibility that Hesiod may be appealing to an earlier, never-existing past, when things were, well, better.
Continues...
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