I have had a great deal of difficulty fathoming Hesiod and his works and times. It has likewise been difficult to decide if he belongs in Norns of Arуas or Enemy of All Mankind. At last, after a week in a room with the old poet’s recordings, I have been convinced by him to place his work at the very head of the latter work which attempts to trace the common thread of anti-human conspiracy.
The Sources:
The primary audio is of Hesiod’s three major works, of Richmond Latimore’s translation, with an introduction by James Davies and John Henry Freeze. This is an Audible production replete with music and read by the excellent voice artist Charlton Griffon, who also reads Arrian’s Alexander Anabasis as translated by Aubrey de Selencourt. That rich work has kept me company for some 20 recitations of the 3.41.09 hours. This work is recorded in order of composition, beginning with Works and Days, then Theogony, and concluding with The Shield of Herakles.
I have listened three times each to another reading, of another translation, of Theogony and Works and Days.
There is also a reading of Theogony, woodenly done, by a third, lesser reader, from yet a third translation, which I have listened to over ten times, only twice this week though.
The print translation of M. L. West has been my constant companion for three months and has been read six times, the final reading being done while listening to the Latimore translation. This final method, pen in hand, was instructive. West corrupts the text by misrepresenting slaves as workmen, laborers and a boy.
Davies and Freeze have the curation knives out against Hesiod in favor of his contemporary, Homer. Though Homer obvious represents a clan of Homerids who made their family business the preservation of the one greatest hero tale, this is not mentioned as Hesiod is accused of imitating and being indebted to Homer. Hesiod might have predated Homer. No effort is made to understand that Hesiod “Ode-singer” and Homer [0], may have been independently recording common and well-known traditions at one and the same time. The modern academic can only think in terms of creative debt and theft, not congruence of art.
Ovid and Plutarch, of later times were surely working from Hesiod, but also probably of other, since lost, sources.
Only the Latimore translation of The Shield of Herakles on audio has come to me, which I have only listened to five times. Hesiod is charged with ripping off Homer’s The Shield of Achilles, though there are sharp differences. I mention here the repeated stabs at Hesiod’s character as an introduction to Enemy of All Mankind.
For who are the majority of All Mankind?
Yes, the working man, not the baron, judge or academic.
Herodotus, impugned also in this edition, has been attacked by modern scholars in favor of his appreciative reader, Thucydides. This is transparently due to Herdotus’ habit of recording folk tales. Though the recording of folklore by anthropologists from recent tribal races is regarded as a work of history, ancient Arуan folklore is universally impugned. I see this largely as class prejudice.
Hesiod was a working man, a man who just got by, whose father had been impoverished, migrated and left a moderate inheritance for Hesiod and his brother Perses. Perses squandered his half, then bribed local judges to be awarded Hesiod’s flocks and goods. Squandering these ill-gotten gains, once again Perses begs his brother directly, who is yet generous while facing a second lawsuit.
Hesiod, working his way out of poverty twice, having won a poetry prize and dedicated it to the muses [still on display in about A.D. 200 when Pausanius visited], left the poor town that their father had fled to in poverty. Hesiod inherited a deep fear of the sea based on his father’s flight from Asia before what was probably a climate change disaster.
Hesiod’s life was bracketed by two astronomical disasters described in Hezekiah and a half dozen later Biblical prophets. These events are also described by Hesiod and Homer. The first of these events in about 750 B.C. corresponds with the beginning of true horsemanship and migratory life among the Arуans of the hinterlands. Herodotus mentions this event as a heavenly shower of brazen artifacts. The second event in about 685 B.C. around the time of Hesiod’s death, corresponds with the foundation of the Pythian games at Delphi.
Near that holy sanctuary, close to his model city of Seven-Gated Thebes, away from the sea that gripped him with such terror, Hesiod, possibly preaching about governmental and priestly corruption and perhaps reciting prophecies of Zeus’ wrath, which would come to pass at about the time of his passing, sought sanctuary. He may have simply been pursued by creditors hunting debt generated by his wastrel brother. Astle cites this land near Thebes as the regional hub of financial capitalism based in distant Babylon. [1]
Hesiod went on the run as a despoiled bachelor, son of a woe-befallen father. Both made at least one hard-working bootstrap comeback into the ranks of the peasantry, that is the FREE working class of antiquity. Hesiod left his native land and migrated to Naupactus and was murdered by the sons of his host in the sacred enclosure of Nemean Zeus. His remains were removed by command of the Delphic Oracle, thereby casting judgment that his death was against Justice, a goddess he often appealed to, who was ever silent in his case. His consecrated grave at Orchomenus was still intact in about A.D. 200 when visited by Pausanius.
Hesiod was the father of Didactic Poetry, that is instructive verse. He is one of only two poets surviving from the Hellenic world from this heroic age of epic, where the Bible preserved many more voices of this period. [2]
As an actual writer of numerous works, and having listened to the three works in the likely order of composition, I HEAR the voice of a common composer, recorded, I should think, by listeners in his time, rather than written by his hand. I envision the poet writing with the lyre string as a copyist wrote it on lambskin. I take the Shield of Herakles as having been incomplete, lacking the final battle scene, at the poet’s death. This work the most, and the other two to lesser degrees, certainly had some reworking in the hands of later copyists and rhapsody men.
The life of Hesiod, Ode-singer was begun in sorrow and poverty, progressed in hard work as the poet was robbed and defrauded, had a high point during a spiritual crisis herding sheep on a holy mountain, Helicon, when angelic beings came to him and imbued him with a prophetic voice, and continued in spiritual harmony as his patrimony and work were taken completely, and ended with the murder of a tramp musician who sang of right and wrong and of heaven, hell and earth between.
In the end, faithful and pious Hesiod ended up like the nightingale clutched in the talons of the pitiless hawk he sang about when he committed our eldest animal fable to song.
750 B.C., and the fix was already in, of corruption over production, of debt over faith, in the hands of powers in heaven and on earth, which Hesiod had sung of being in league against the honest man.
Notes
-0. Homer is of Greek origin and means “security,” “pledge,” “hostage,” which in the case of a hostage taken for security of loyalty on the part of relatives, was a common practice in antiquity. Might Homer have been held by a King or Tyrant as a POW, debtor or exile? Might he, like the slave girl composer of the Arabian Nights, have performed for his captor, for the hawk who held him dove like in its claws? Despite the modern academic thirst to set these poets at one another, they were probably more brothers than Hesiod and Perses. I would be moved to name Homer in English “Pledger,” for he was quite a witness as well. Also, his status as a possible hostage does explain how he wrote the subtext of the Iliad as a war protest, even as the main text was of kingly glory in war.
-1. Conspiracy Against Mankind #0 thru #14: The Babylonian Woe by David Astle, 1975, a core portion of this work.
-2. The Homerica, idylls and other fragmentary works attributed to Hesiod, shall be investigated under the Norns of Arуas title, not this work on conspiracy, but on Arуan patrimony.
