This second volume of essays on Hesiod published under the auspices of Ramus is a supplement to Ramus Essays on Hesiod I. Neither this volume by itself nor for that matter both volumes taken together aspire, in the opinion of the editor, to more than addressing some of the key issues of Hesiodic research from a contemporary perspective. To the extent that all contributors are professors at American universities, the effort is limited in compass. Strictures imposed by a very tight publication schedule and a very trim budget made it quite clear from the beginning that a truly comprehensive and, therefore, international effort could not be initiated by the editor and his collaborators at this time. It is sincerely hoped that our successes will spur others on to better ways of interpreting Hesiodic poetry and archaic Greek poetics in general. Perhaps even our mistakes will be of the kind that will provoke ‘the good Eris’.

Much has been written about the question of oral poetry in the earliest attested phases of Greek literature, but not enough attention has yet been paid to the existing internal evidence concerning the authority of actual poetic performance. This essay is meant to highlight this authority and its role in authorisation, that is, in the conferring of authorship. Since the first attested identification of an author in Greek literature takes place in the Hesiodic Theogony, where the figure of Hesiod names himself as the poet of this colossal poem (Hēsiodon, Th. 22), it seems fitting that this very act of self-identification should serve as the focus of inquiry. Further, since the poet defines himself in terms of a dramatised encounter with the Muses, who are represented as giving him the two gifts of a sceptre of authority and poetic inspiration itself, it also seems fitting to take with utmost seriousness the actual wording that describes this encounter. The poet's precisely-worded claim to have received from the Muses the power of telling the absolute truth is key, I shall argue, to his authorship.

The received wisdom about Hesiod's poetics is simple: he is no Homer. His poetry is supposedly rough, awkward, unsophisticated, repetitive, disjointed, a second-best versifier's striving after effect. Too often the rhetoric even of those who respect Hesiodic poetry damns it with faint praise. Readers of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics—to take just one easily available reference that students might consult—learn that Hesiod's ‘didactic epics’ were meant for

the peasant of Boeotia rather than the Ionian aristocrat, being concerned with the morality and beliefs of the small farmer toughly confronting a life of ceaseless labor and few rewards. While they cannot be compared to Homer's works in scope or genius, they often display much poetic power.

Toute pensée de l'origine des choses n'est jamais qu'une revérie de leur disposition actuelle, une manière de dégénérescence du réel, une variation sur ce qui est.
Paul Valéry in his Preface to Poe's Eureka.

The World of Hesiod is familiar as a title, but the world of Hesiod is difficult to locate in a single place. Indeed, it is a number of places. It seems to have its centre in Askra in Boiotia and to extend out in space as far as the high slopes of Mount Helikon. It is a land-locked world and its severe limitations are apparent from what the poet says about the sea and the short sea passage from the mainland at Aulis to Chalkis on Euboia. Even as he offers his advice to the seafarer, he admits that he has no experience in seafaring or ships himself (W&D 649). He had only made the trip across to the island of Euboia once to compete as a poet at the funeral games of Amphidamas (W&D 646-60). Hesiodic poetry, when it centres on Hesiod's home, seems to crowd into a very small and disagreeable patch of typical Greek countryside. But his Muses enlarge this world. They provide him with a knowledge that he cannot gain himself—both of seafaring and of the vast expanse of the physical world whose origins go beyond the very beginnings of human time. Hesiod's local Muses transport him from the springs of Permessos to the deep currents of Ocean and they disclose to him a universe vaster in its extent and deeper in time than that of the Homeric poems. A sign of these enlarged horizons is the fact that in the Theogony Hesiod begins to sing of the Muses of Helikon (1-4), but then shifts attention to the Muses of Olympos (36-80).

Interest in the study of rhetoric and its effects has, of late, seen a notable increase in literary circles. This is understandable, given the whole tendency of current literary theory, but one might equally understandably suppose that that tendency would long postdate Greek poetry of the Archaic period. It would be striking, then, to discover here—at the earliest extant stratum of western literature—a vital interest in the nature of human communication, in its sociological and political effects, and in its relationship to what we have come to think of as artistic creativity. And yet, I submit, that is just what we do discover.

In the case of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the task of extrapolating a synthetic theory of rhetoric would be a complex one, because so much of the text is couched in what Benveniste calls ‘histoire’, i.e. ‘historical narration’—that is, rather than the narrator's addressing the audience, implicitly or explicitly, in a direct I/you relation, both are looking away towards a third point, the site of the dramatic action. Moreover, rather than engage the reader/audience in the consideration of some abstract disquisition, the poet presents a muthos, i.e. represents a series of actions. Much more of Hesiod's verse, however, is in the form of what Benveniste calls ‘discours’, or ‘discourse’, which is directed precisely to the reader/audience. Even the narrative portions of Hesiod often have what we might term a frankly philosophical application; that is, the purpose of the narrative is didactic and, typically, ethical.

A growing area of contemporary legal scholarship is the field loosely described by the expression ‘law and literature’. One of the many points of intersection between law and literature is the study of legal writing, including the opinions of judges and jurists, as a form of literature. Scholars began to study the works of the Attic orators as literature as early as the first century BC, but their specific concern was with these texts as examples of Attic prose and their literary interest primarily concerned matters of rhetoric and prose style. Similarly, modern scholars who have continued this study of the orators have generally examined legal orations not as a separate genre but as another example of prose literature in the same category with history or epideictic oratory. But forensic oratory can also be studied as a form of literature sui generis, whose worth is determined by the special requirements of this genre. As background for such a study I propose to examine the earliest examples of legal oratory, as seen in the works of Homer and Hesiod.

The concept of Homeric or simply Greek honour is not as easy to comprehend as is commonly assumed. Basically it is a system of values stemming from the belief that no harm done to self, kinsman, friend or property should remain uncompensated or unavenged. In a way, what is subsumed under the term honour is an awareness that the higher one bids the higher one is. In the present article the English word ‘honour’ is only a code word for the various fundamentals of life that belong to the semantic compass of Homeric timē. The word ‘cattle’ is also a code word for livestock, especially bovine animals as well as sheep and goats. Honour is not much talked about these days, and many educated people are familiar with some of its aspects mostly through the works of cultural anthropologists who, it seems, have to go to the far corners of the earth to study it. Yet, both honour and the price for honour are ubiquitous in our modern world. The difference is that the state is the keeper of every citizen's honour and as such it regulates punishment for offence to collective or individual honour and, through its courts, decides the material price that must be paid in compensation for real or even intended harm.

One approaches Hesiod's discourse on the two erides—or, if I am correct, the duplicitous nature of eris—with some trepidation, since the scholarship on this passage has been voluminous and rewarding. But the passage, which Hesiod launches into immediately after the formal prologue of the Works and Days (11-26), may yet have more to teach us. It is, as Richard Hamilton has recently shown, programmatic for the entire poem; it may also be a definitive statement on the archaic construction of competition and conflict. In it Hesiod urges his brother explicitly (as he does implicitly throughout the poem) to stop coming after him for their father's patrimony and do some productive work; however this simple message is embedded in traditional allusions, poised between intense ambiguities and (like all good archaic poetry) fraught with the resonance of larger issues. All this has made it difficult to achieve scholarly consensus about the meaning of the passage. A close and helpful parallel is provided in the Works and Days itself by the brief discussion of the two functions of aidōs (317-19), helpful primarily because it is in fact one principle with two functions that Hesiod describes there; but to put into relief more of the complexity of 11-16 we need to look at two other archaic passages that offer some perspective on the application of dualistic logic to conflict and related issues.