The drama of Hesiod's farm

Classical Philology

Volumn 91, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 45-53

  Nelson, Stephanie ^a  

^a BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60950538507     PISSN: 0009837X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/367491     Document Type: Note

References (55)

1. The view that Homer provided practical instruction is ridiculed by Plato in the Ion. Among more modern scholars, M. L. West, Hesiod: Works and Days (Oxford, 1978), 59, refers to this section as "technical instruction on agriculture"
2. Bernard Knox, "Work and Justice in Archaic Greece: Hesiod's Works and Days," in Essays: Ancient and Modern (Baltimore, 1989), 7
3. as "some instruction which will help to avoid the irremediable disaster of a crop failure" while Mark Griffith, "Personality in Hesiod," CA 2 (1983): 89, says: "[Hesiod] is now speaking as technical expert..."
4. T. P. Howe ("Linear B and Hesiod's Breadwinners," TAPA 89 [1958]: 44-65) takes this view to an unfortunate extreme
5. For a refutation of her view see Peter Walcot, Greek Peasants Ancient and Modern: A Comparison of Social and Moral Values (Manchester, 1970), 20-23. Although the view that the purpose of the section is not simply instruction has gained favor among recent scholars, little attention has been paid its positive purpose
6. As pointed out, for example, by Kasimierz Kumaniecki, "The Structure of Hesiod's Works and Days," London University Institute of Classical Studies Bulletin 10 (1963): 88-90
7. Malcolm Heath, "Hesiod's Didactic Poetry," CQ 35 (1983): 255-56
8. Alison Burford, Land and Labor in the Greek World (Baltimore, 1993), 103-105
9. See West, Works, 53-54 for an amusing list of Hesiod's aberrations, which he attributes to Hesiod's tendency to get side-tracked
10. On the other hand, he assumes a general understanding of the purpose and method of ploughing, reaping, threshing, and so forth."
11. For example, W. J. Verdenius, A Commentary on Hesiod: Works and Days, vv. 1-382, Supplements to Mnemosyne, 86 (Leiden, 1985)
12. and C. J. Rowe, Essential Hesiod: Theogony 1-232, 453-733, Works and Days 1-307 (Bristol, 1978) have done commentaries on the first half of the poem
13. For the lack of attention paid to this section see also Richard Hamilton, The Architecture of Hesiodic Poetry, AJP Monographs in Classical Philology, ed. Diskin Clay (Baltimore, 1989), 47
14. Cato has six chapters (10-15) on tools, listing eighty different items for the vineyard alone (chap. 11)
15. E.g., Op. 515-18, 585-92 and throughout the section on lucky and unlucky days
16. For animals in ancient agriculture see Signe Isager and Jens Erik Skydsgaard, Ancient Greek Agriculture: an introduction (London and New York, 1992), 83-107
17. Robin Osborne, Classical Landscape with Figures: the Ancient Greek City and its Countryside (London, 1987), 47-52
18. Stephen Hodkinson, "Animal Husbandry in the Greek Polis," in Pastoral Economies in Classical Antiquity, ed. C. R. Whittaker (Cambridge, 1988), 35-74
19. K. D. White, Roman Farming (Ithaca, 1970), 229, sees vines as the most labor intensive product of the farm
20. See also Isager, Agriculture, 26-33. Both Vergil (G. 2.397-419) and Columella (5.7.1), adopting the style at least of a didactic work, treat viniculture as laborious
21. For the importance of the olive see Isager, Agriculture, 20, 23
22. Marie-Claire Amouretti, Le Pain et l'huile dans la Grèce antique (Paris, 1986), 41-45
23. V. D. Hanson, The Other Greeks (New York, 1995), 95-96
24. Text cited is from West; translations are my own
25. B. A. van Groningen, La Composition litteréraire archaïque grecque (Amsterdam, 1958), 347
26. Op. 475-77 and 561-63
27. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Hesiodos' Erga [Berlin, 1928]) notes the contradiction, answered by West, Works, 289
28. and "Miscellaneous Notes on the Works and Days" Philologus 108 (1964): 167-68
29. White, Farming, 173, 176-89
30. Amouretti, Le Pain, 51-75
31. Osborne, Landscape, 40-47
32. West's assumption that the fall sowing is the "beginning of the cereal cycle" (Works, 52) ignores the breaking of fallow land in spring
33. The hysteron proteron of 421 and 422 also serves to emphasize what has just ended. As West, Works, 263, points out, "these visible signs might more naturally have been mentioned before."
34. White, Farming, 185-88, notes the difficulty and the crucial, although undramatic, importance of threshing, cleaning, sorting, and storing the grain. Although the danger of summer storms is less significant in Greece than in Italy, a picnic could hardly claim priority over threshing even there
35. Hence the belief that Hesiod's account of sailing is independent of the farming section, as Pierre Waltz, Hésiode et son poème moral. Bibliothèque des Universités du Midi, Fascicule 12 (Bordeaux, 1906), 67
36. Hamilton, Architecture, 65
37. van Groningen, Composition, 351
38. and Peter Walcot, "The Composition of the Works and Days," Revue des Études Grecques 74 (1971): 11
39. All these fail to notice that Hesiod's seasons for sailing are precisely the times when the farmer can afford to be away from the farm. Hesiod's sailor spends his winter plowing (Op. 623)
40. W. J. Verdenius, "Aufbau und Absicht der Erga," in Hésiode et son influence. Entretiens sur l'antiquité classique vii
41. (Geneva, 1962), 111-59 and "L'Association des idées comme principe de composition dans Homère, Hésiode, Théognis, " Revue des Études Grecques 73 (1960): 345-61. These lines indicate that Hesiod is able to use this device to serve rather sophisticated ends
42. Friedrich Solmsen, Review of Hesiod: Works and Days by M. L. West, in Gnomon 52 (1980): 217
43. In fall Hesiod moves from the hired plowman (441) to slaves (459): "then drive on your servants and yourself, all of you" to (461): "you [singular] must hurry, to be very early" to the farmer at the plow. In spring he moves from (573): "sharpen your blades, and waken your work-people" to (576-77): "this is the hour of haste and gather your harvest homewards, / though you [singular] rise before dawn to do it." See West, Works, 54, 308-9 and below, pp. 52-53, for the audience as Hesiod's "you."
44. Mazon, Les travaux et les jours, Le Bouclier (Paris, 1928), 110, inverts 462 and 463, which does not help much
45. See Pierre Bourdieu, "The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant toward Time," in Mediterranean Countrymen, ed. Julian Pitt-Rivers (Paris, 1963), 59-69
46. and J. K. Campbell, Honour, Family, and Patronage, A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community (Oxford, 1964), 34, on modern peasants' tendency to measure time in terms of their tasks
47. As the Persians said to Cyrus, then we had everything bad, now we have everything good (Hdt. 1.126). For these oppositions informing a modern peasant calendar, Bourdieu, Time, 56
48. N. J. Richardson, Review of Hesiod: Works and Days, by M. L. West, JHS 99 (1979): 170
49. and N. J. Richardson and S. Piggott, "Hesiod's wagon, text and technology," JHS 102 (1982): 225-29
50. Hesiod's introduction to the section stretches from 383-413; the farmer's year from 414-617. The sections I have counted as "descriptive" are on fall, 414-21; on the crane, 448-52; on sowing, 467-69; on the harvests, 475-90; on poverty, 496-99; on winter, 504-35 and 547-56; on the swallow, 564-69; on the snail, 571-72; on the dawn, 578-81; on the picnic, 582-96. As Peter Walcot, "Hesiod and the Law," SO 38 (1963): 6, points out: "To call the poem a handbook on farming or a farmer's calendar is to consider only a small part of the complete text. Such a description applies to verses 383-614 alone, a mere 235 out of more than 750 lines, and even from these we must deduct the poet's digressions and particularly his sketches of winter (verses 504-63) and the height of summer (verses 582-96)."
51. It is, for example, fairly common knowledge that one must plow land before sowing it, and harvest the crops later. Nor is the concept of threshing a particularly technical one. For anyone living in a Mediterranean climate the knowledge that one sows in the fall and harvests in the spring would be as common as our understanding that one sows in the spring and harvests in the fall
52. and Peter Walcot, Hesiod and the Near East (Cardiff, 1966)
53. and G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures, (Berkeley, 1970)
54. Here ("but when... then ... that is the time" 414, 420, 422). Hesiod also uses ("but when ... then ... but at that time" 582, 585, 588), ("but when ... for then it is ... then ... that is the time" 414, 417, 420, 422) and (paradoxically) ("When ... then ... 571, 573) to the same purpose
55. 12 (New York, 1945), 1:72