Hesiod, Aesop & the First Greek Writers

A History of Mankind (78)

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Unmoored from theology, with a strong strain of creativity, Greek literature had a massive effect on thought. Linus, a mythical demi-god, was considered the first poet of Greece, inventor of verse and measure[1], together with the equally mythical Orpheus and Musaeus of Athens; Orpheus was believed to be the father of song based on recited poetry.

Aristeas, in the Seventh Century BC, was believed to have authored a poem called “Arimaspea” about his travels in the far north, an early display of characteristic Greek wanderlust, mainly known through a fragment anthologized by the First Century AD critic Longinus. He described “men living in water, at a distance from land in the sea/An unhappy people, for their labors are hard.”

Musaeus – revered as a polymath, priest and pretty much a genius in all arts – may have simply been a legend created by the always proud Athenians so that at least one of their own were ranked among the greatest Greeks of ancient times. However, it was Homer, of course, who became the quintessential epic poet of Greece (and, arguably, the world) in the late Eighth or early Seventh Century, relegating his likely contemporary Eumelus of Corinth to obscurity.

Hesiod, a Boeotian roughly of Homer and Eumelus’ generation, focused his poetry on the agricultural tradition of his land, with echoes of the Fertile Crescent’s wisdom literature – his father had been a trader who preferred to settle on a farm that, in Hesiod’s description, was quite miserable but still decent enough for a life of honest toil.

He first wrote the Theogony, an extremely influential account of the genealogies of the gods of Greece that in many ways is a companion for those puzzled by their behavior in the Iliad and the Odyssey[2], and the lesser-appreciated “Catalogue of Women,” detailing the mortal women who had mated with gods, and of the offspring.

An inheritance quarrel with a brother, over his father’s estate, is behind Hesiod’s “Works and days,” a later, more personal work with autobiographical moments in which Hesiod is perhaps the first author to explicitly identify daily struggles with military ones: towards the end of the poem, he writes that there are two kinds of strife, not just one, and there is a more positive and creative kind that reveals itself in the competitiveness of farmers to extract as much as possible from the reluctant soil[3]. This is a key departure from the moral and practical background of the Homeric poems.

Hesiod wasn’t a nobleman unlike most other, later Greek authors, and may have sung the Theogony at public events to gain fame with the populace and favor with local elites. He later used his second book to settle accounts with women – who, amid the growing prominence of male-only games with nude athletes and homosexual encounters, seemed to be sinking in position during this era – and his dastardly brother, while reflecting on the unchangeable, unfair ways of the world:

Good bird, why all this twittering?

A stronger bird than you

Has got you, singer though you be,

and what he will he'll do[4].

These pioneers were followed by others along the same vein, such as the aforementioned Arctinus of Miletus, Tyrtaeus of Sparta – a Seventh Century BC bard who recited to music he himself played – and Alcman from the same city, who was traditionalist in a way that now appears slightly bizarre[5]; these authors were fundamentally in the same tradition of retelling glorious and not-so-glorious deeds and tall tales as their counterparts from China to Hatti, even if they were more influential in Greece than most were in their own homelands[6].

Archilochus (c. 680–645 BC), from the island of Paros, may have accomplished the unique feat of first decoupling the old epic verse narrative from the poetic, pushing Hesiod’s innovations to the limit so that he created an entirely new genre that pushed the boundaries of human expression – lyric poetry, almost entirely on the theme of his own emotions and experiences[7], real or imaginary: these allegedly included the fact that he was the bastard son of an aristocrat, that he thrown away his shield in battle to save his own skin, that he was pioneer in the dubious art of dancing while drunk[8].

What is certain is that Archilochus was the son of Telesicles, leader of Paros’ colonial enterprise on the Thracian coast, and founder of Thasos around 700 BC. He claimed in what sounds as a royal we that “we were the scum of Greece that went to Thasos,” thus summing up centuries of anti-war literature to come, and boasted of his ability to insult, and to drive the father of a girl he wanted to bed to suicide with words only; like a good aristocratic boy, he despised the common folk. 

Aesop (c. 620-564 BC), a mysterious author who appears to have been a slave in Samos at least for a while, may have used Archilocus’ colloquial registers to compile old stories from Greek tradition. Many of these stories possibly were of Asiatic origins and arrived in Greece via Sardis, starring animals and inanimate objects that speak and have human characteristics[9].

Some of his stories are quite sophisticated, and were often recited for centuries, like the fable about the frogs that called on Zeus to send them a king. He first threw down a log, that the frogs made fun of; after a second request, they were sent down a water snake that started eating them. Once more the frogs appealed to Zeus, but the god replied that they must face the consequences of their request.

Other stories have a cosmopolitan tinge that contradicts the notion that Aesop was a mere compiler happily living in isolation in a Greek island. In Fable 112, he tells of the god Hermes, who was driving across the world in a chariot filled with lies, villainy and fraud. To every people he distributed a little of his cargo. In the desert, Aesop adds, the chariot broke, and the Arabs stole the remainder of the contents – which sounds like something that would be written by a person with a traumatic first-hand experience with distant desert-dwellers[10].

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[1]    In archaic and classical times, there was a solemn custom of bewailing annually Greece’s first poet. Pausanias informs us that, before the yearly sacrifice to the Muses on Mount Helicon, the obsequies of Linus were performed; the demi-god had a statue and altar erected to him in that place.

[2]    As previously stated, the Theogony may have been influenced by Eastern tales including the Hittite Kumarbi Cycle, what wouldn’t be shocking given the fact that Hesiod’s father hailed from the Eastern Greek borderlands where such traditions were heard of. A curiosity about the Theogony is that one of its most famous episodes, that of Prometheus being punished by the gods for having helped humans to tame fire, closely echoes an offhand reference in the Iliad to Tityos, a giant who suffers the same punishment of having his liver eaten up and then restored every night. This is further evidence that both works were abundantly informed by earlier tales and traditions. The myth of Prometheus, it must be said, wasn’t as popular in antiquity as in modern times: it received a major boost from Percy Shelley’s play “Prometheus Unbound” (1820).

[3] This idea, much changed, ended up reflected, well over a millennium later, in the dual concept of “Jihad” as Muslim religious war/personal improvement.

[4]    “Works,” 207-9, translated by H.T. Wade-Grey.

[5]    Much of his surviving works are fragments of partheneia, or maiden-songs, supposedly sung by fame choruses before recitations of epic work, as both a prelude and adornment; and also more conventional hymns to the beauty of nature. He may have made some opaque references to homoerotic love in his work, but there’s just not enough scraps along those lines to be certain.

[6]    This is one Tyrtaeus’ most popular efforts, translated by M.L. West, which was typically Spartan but could as well have been typically Assyrian or typically Indian/Iranian-Aryan:

His name and glorious reputation never die;

he is immortal even in his grave,

that man the furious War-god kills as he defends

his soul and children with heroic stand.

Or if in winning his proud spear-vaunt he escapes

the doom of death and grief's long shadow-cast,

then all men do him honor, young and old alike;

much joy is his before he goes below.

He grows old in celebrity, and no one thinks

to cheat him of his due respect and rights,

but all men at the public seats make room for him,

the young, the old and those of his own age.

[7]    “Lyric” really means “usually accompanied by the lyre,” but we’re using the modern meaning of the word here, since Archilochus’ style was obviously very different from, say, Tyrtaeus’. The longest surviving fragment of poetry attributed to Archilochus – a poet otherwise only scantily preserved – survives on a First- or Second-Century AD papyrus discovered in the 1960s amid mummy wrappings from the Abusir el-Melek cemetery at the Faiyum Oasis, south of Cairo. As the mummy was then held at the University of Cologne, the poem is sometimes called the “Cologne Epode.” Another fragment describes events leading to the Trojan war, in the era’s tradition, but that doesn’t appear to be highly representative of Archilochus’ work: although he was a contentious poet who wasn’t included in the list of Nine Lyric poets compiled by Alexandria scholars centuries later, he clearly was personal and was famed for writing in the voice of multiple characters. According to Valerius Maximus, the Spartans banished the works of Archilochus from their state for the sake of their children "... lest it harm their morals more than it benefited their talents,” which to some moderns will appear as extraordinary commendation.

[8] Archilochus’ greatest claim to fame, however, was a single, oft-quoted line: "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing." The line was quoted and discussed by Erasmus in the Sixteenth Century and by Isaiah Berlin in the Twentieth century.

[9] A real Aesop almost certainly existed, although the name later became a byword for fables, and the corpus attributed to him hasn’t stopped growing in over two millennia, like the bon mots attributed to famous wits.

[10] The Arabs retained a poor reputation throughout antiquity. The anonymous author of the travelogue “Expositio totius mundi et gentium,” likely a Syrian Greek, wrote in the Fourth century that the Arabs (whom he called “Sarracenorum”) “spend their lives in plundering… They are also godless and lying, and do not maintain their oaths in war or any other affair.” The author adds that Arabs are ruled by women, which may perhaps suggest some caution about his reliability on the subject.