^{page 213 note 2} For the character and aims of the Works and Days see the introduction to the edition of Sinclair, T. A., Hesiod's Works and Days (London, 1932).Google Scholar I take its date to be the late eighth or early-to-middle seventh century. For the remainder of the discussion Hesiod will be regarded as synonymous with the poet of the Works and Days. The Catalogues (which in any case contain almost nothing relevant) and, above all, the Shield of Heracles are, of course, heroic poetry, and are now generally agreed not to be by Hesiod. This throws them wide open to problems of date and conscious literary archaism, which render them ambiguous as social documents. The pointsof relevance from the Shield are the following: (1) Sc. 39–41: Amphitryon, on returning home, did not make his way ‘to his servants and rustic shepherds’ () ) until he had shared his wife's bed. Here, in sharp contrast to the Works and Days, we have the great royal oikos, with its patriarchal ethos. It is worth noting that ‘servants and rustic shepherds’ is probably a hendiadys, so that the effect of the phrase is to define for us the status of the herdsmen. To take here as from the feminine would make poor sense. (2) Sc. 276: the word occurs as antecedent to the feminine plural relative pronoun and is therefore feminine. It thus becomes the one instance in the surviving Hesiodic corpus of a word meaning female servant. It occurs in the courtly context of the marriage scene depicted on the shield and imitated from that on the shield of Achilles, Iliad 18; so that the here, like the of Sc. 39, clearly belong to a royal oikos. (3) Sc. 197: Athena is given the title ‘driver of herds’. This is the only possible reference to capture in the poem. As to the Theogony, the unresolved problem of its Hesiodic authorship can fortunately be by-passed here, since it contains nothing relevant. None of the key words (, etc.) occurs in it; and though the gods live in perfunctory ‘halls’ (), and one might even see in Pegasus a retainer or servant of Zeus (Th. 285–6), the truth is that the poet is not concerned with the domestic life of divine households nor, for that matter, with the way of life or outlook of his divine gallery.

^{page 214 note 1} On the legitimacy of using epic as a social document four passages are worth quoting. Gladstone, W. E., in the Prolegomena to Studies in Homer, 1858Google Scholar (quoted by SirMyres, John in Homer and his Critics, p. 109),Google Scholar has this to say: ‘But first, may we not ask, from whence comes the presumption against Homer as an historical authority? … Does it not arise from this, that his compositions are poetical, that history has long ceased to adopt the poetical form, that an old association has thus been dissolved, that a new and adverse association has taken its place which connects poetry with fiction; and that we illogically reflect this association upon early times?’ Wallon, (op. cit., p. 65)Google Scholar writes: ‘Or, j'oserais dire que la poésie n'est pas un guide moins sûr que l'histoire. Car, si elle néglige la suite des événements, elle en exprime la pensee et la vie, et le fait qu'elle invente dérive de cet ensemble d'idées qui font le caractère d'une époque.’ Aymard makes the same point in L'Idée du travail, etc., p. 31, where he says that the epic poets do not invent either the social or the psychological order which they describe. In the foreword to The World of Odysseus Bowra, p. 9, makes a related point when he says that Homer, though of course he possessed an ancient tradition, was writing for his contemporaries, and therefore of a world akin to theirs and intelligible to them.

^{page 214 note 2} For the small farmer in Homer see Finley, , op. cit., pp. 57–76.Google Scholar It is worth noting that the word oikos is common in the Works and Days, generally with the meaning ‘house’ or ‘homestead’, but also denoting ‘substance’ (Op. 325) and even ‘family’ (Op. 244). But while in principle the peasant oikos is a smaller version of the royal oikos, a very important distinction must be observed: whereas the royal oikos centred round a town palace (, see Finley, , op. cit., p. 95),Google Scholar to which were attached farms and farmhouses that could be scattered far and wide (cf. Od. 14. 96 ff.), the peasant oikos consisted of the farm-house and its surrounding land, and nothing more. This difference affects, among other things, the ratio between male and female servant labour (see p. 219, n. 1, below).

^{page 215 note 1} occurs at 1. 459, 502, 573, 597, 608, and 766. Cf. 441 ff., where Hesiod recommends that ‘a lusty man of 40’ should drive the plough-team, for younger men are too interested in their fellows (), sc. to keep their mind on their work which again implies a plurality of (male) farm hands in whom we surely have the same persons as in the Spaies of the other six passages.

^{page 215 note 2} of the little boy (Op. 470); in the phrase (Op. 430), which is discussed below.

^{page 215 note 3} (Il. 7. 475) is generally agreed to be a post-Archaic textual intrusion.

^{page 215 note 4} Op. 405–6: I here follow Sinclair (op. cit., commentary, ad loc.) who also cites Sittl to the effect that, even if 1. 406 is rejected as an interpolation, the of 1. 405 is still a servant, not a wife. This seems likely in view of the immediate context of this line. At 397 ff. Hesiod says ‘Work, foolish Perses, lest you starve with your wife and children’, so that the natural assumption during the lines which follow is that the poet is telling a man with a family to feed how to equip himself with the ‘basics’ needed to make an independent living—a building to house his implements (and the family too, no doubt, but that is not the point here, l. 407) and a minimum labour force (for the meaning of in th's passage cf. Aymard, , Hiérarckie, etc., p. 133, n. 2).Google Scholar One ox was indeed not much (cf. the plural of Il. 406, 607, 434, etc.; two was perhaps normal, cf. Il. 436 ff., 608, etc.). So, too, one female servant, who might ‘at a pinch’ help in the fields, was not much, and several male hands was the norm. Was a woman perhaps cheaper to buy?

^{page 215 note 5} Op. 602–3 . Sinclair (Commentary, ad loc.) translates: ‘I bid thee get a farm steward wimout a household of his own and seek a woman servant without children.’ , he says, are both free paid hirelings, and he disputes the interpretation of Evelyn-White, H. G. (in the Loeb edition, 1914)Google Scholar and of Gow, A. S. F. (C.Q. xi [1917], 116)Google Scholar that Hesiod is telling his farmer to ‘fire’ his man and ‘hire’ a maid. His interpretation is based on three arguments:

1. That is better taken to mean ‘without an oikos of his own’ than ‘without a roof over his head’. But this is a matter of preference (see Liddell and Scott, s.v.), cf. Gow, loc. cit.

2. Sinclair points to the voice of and shows that it ought to mean ‘get for oneself’. But Gow's comparison of Op. 707–8 should, as he himself says, give us pause in coming to that conclusion.

3. Sinclair interprets the whole passage Op. 601–5 as concerned with the safeguarding of the garnered harvest. The maid too is to be hired for this purpose. On this interpretation he bases his translation of as ‘steward’. To this there is a twofold objection: (a) Sinclair, following Gow, rightly rejects Evelyn-White's rendering of as ‘bondman’ on the grounds that the word is never so used in Homer, but always means a hired labourer. Yet the status of steward rings just as unfamiliarly in connexion with this word as does that of bondman. The word simply does not mean ‘steward’ anywhere else. And, as a matter of fact, what would a full-time steward be doing, round the farmer's homestead, watching the grain? A farmer will keep a watchdog, but hardly a watchman. (b) It seems more probable that the maid was hired for the regular female work of grinding the corn to make meal to feed the family during the year. (Cf. Od. 7. 104, etc., though in Homer the women are always owned servants; Aymard, , Hiérarchie, etc., p. 132,Google Scholar thinks that the small farmer gave out his grinding to a professional miller, but there does not seem to be any real evidence for this and it appears unlikely, particularly in view of the present passage.)

4. Lastly, there is the following consideration: The corn has been harvested in May (see Sinclair, , Commentary on Il. 382–4);Google Scholar threshing is to begin in late June or early July; when threshing is over and fodder has been stored for the cattle for winter, then the farm hands and the oxen are to have a rest (Op. 597–608). The rest presumably corresponds to the famous ‘dog days’ of late summer, say the month of August. It is at this point that the injunction concerning the and the occurs. The next operation is the beginning of vintage, in September (Op. 608–11; for the seasonal sequence see Sinclair, Commentary, 597–611). It seems likely enough that the farmer would hire an extra hand late in April for harvest and threshing and then dismiss him before the rest of the dog days and find himself free to hire a maid in his place, who would be more suited to the work now waiting to be done of grinding the family's meal supply. The phrase certainly seems to drive home the hard fact that the man will now be without a roof over his head. But casual labour at harvest time is a common feature of agriculture, and farmers, whose lives are often hard, are notoriously not given to sentiment. On balance, therefore, this would seem a more satisfactory interpretation both of the difficult lines 602–3 and of the whole passage in which they stand (597–608).

^{page 216 note 1} For the composition of the Hymn to Demeter see the discussion in The Homeric Hymns, ed. Allen, , Halliday, , AND Sykes, (2nd ed.Oxford, 1936), pp. 111 ff.Google Scholar Westermann is surely wrong to think that can ever refer to free hirelings in Homer (see p. 213, n. 1, above).

^{page 217 note 1} Aymard (opp. citt.) convincingly argues the thesis that at this stage of Greek development what mattered was not what work a man might do at anyj time, but whether he did it for himself (and family) and as an independent agent or in some way at another's commissioning—in other words, whether the work he did made him more his own master or just the reverse. Cf. Finley, , op. cit., p. 76.Google Scholar

^{page 217 note 2} Wade-Gery, H. T. in his essay on Hesiod (Essays in Greek History, Oxford, 1958, no. I)Google Scholar says that for a poet of Hesiod's time not to treat of war was as remarkable as it would be for a modern author to ignore love (p. 14). War there certainly was in Hesiod's time and it must have furnished a large proportion of the servants whom we find in Homeric and Hesiodic society, though Hesiod, in those passages in which he does mention war (Op. 161–8, 228–9, 245–7) makes no mention of captivity, but simply regards it in toto as an unmitigated curse. While Wade-Gery's remark may be true as a judgement on the literature of the period, Aymard, (Hiérarchie, etc., p. 143)Google Scholar is surely right in pointing out that war actually increased in importance with the coming of the Classical period. ‘Heroic’ war of the Homeric type (cf. Op. 161–8) was part of the ‘glorious’ legendary material which Homer handled, but not necessarily of the times in which and for which he and, above all, Hesiod wrote. Perhaps we need not be quite so surprised if war is conspicuous by its absence from the contents of Pandora's box of human ills (Op. 100–4) and from the portrait of the evil Iron Age (Op. 144–201). We may add that in both these passages there is certainly no mention of captivity or servanthood (let alone ‘slavery’; see below, p. 218) as characteristics of the wretchedness of the human condition.

^{page 218 note 1} All the writers cited on p. 213, n. I, above use the term ‘slavery’ in relation to house-hold labour in Archaic Greece. The point is only tangential in the case of Finley, and of Aymard, who is primarily concerned with the psychology of work in relation to the free individual, not with the psychology of status in relation to ‘class’. On this point the etymological link of , the characteristic Homeric-Hesiodic term, with has perhaps done much to project into our picture of Archaic society the idea, not born till the age of the sophists, that ‘slavery is based on force’ and the like. For if Homeric society used a word to mean ‘servant’ whose root idea was that of forcible overpowering, this suggests that the Sophistic notion was some-how already inherent in the Homeric outlook. The attractiveness of this idea to scholars like Wallon (see op. cit., p. 66) again shows, as does the use of the word ‘slave’, the hold which the assumptions of the Classical era have established over our minds. Recent philology strongly favours the etymological link of with domo– ‘house’ (see Boissacq, , Dictionnaire étymologique de la langne grecqve, 4th ed., s.v.; Frisk, H., Griechisches elymolo-gisches Wörterbuch, Lieferung 5, 1957,Google Scholar s.v., who, however, still renders as ‘slave’, which Boissacq rightly avoids). Nevertheless this red herring is still with us, e.g. Pohlenz, MaxGriechische Freiheit (Heidelberg, 1955), p. 8.Google Scholar

^{page 219 note 1} This conclusion seems to me to raise the very real difficulty that, as generally assumed, this is the reverse of the position in the great Homeric oikos, where modern writers strongly discount male servant labour on any scale (see Wallon, p. 79; Finley, p. 56; Westermann, p. 2). How then do we account for this difference as between the noble and the peasant labour force? It is not possible to do more here than indicate the lines of a possible answer:

1. Though in Homer we hear much more of female servants, this is because the poet is not primarily interested, as is Hesiod, in the work of the fields. His scene is laid mostly in the great town dwelling (see Finley, p. 95) which, as we have already noted (p. 214, n. 2 above), does not form part of the peasant oikos of Hesiod; and there we would indeed expect a heavy preponderance of female over male servant labour. On the land, however, the noble did indeed have servant labour proportionable to that of the Hesiodic farmer, and thus owned male and female servants in roughly equal proportions: see especially Od. 14. 96–104 and 409–17, 24. 210, with which last cf., for what it may be worth, the evidence of the Shield of Heracles cited on p. 213, n. 2 above.

2. The problem of where these equal numbers of male servants came from, since often the men were killed when the women were made captive, may be solved by evidence such as that of Il. 21. 102 ff., which suggests that the making and selling of male prisoners-of-war may have been a common enough practice. In default of some such explanation two things would follow: first, passages such as those from Od. 14 just cited would imply that free retainers or thetes worked on the land of great nobles on a much larger scale than owned servants; secondly, it would make the problem of accounting for the source of the Hesiodic farmer's male labour force so difficult (on the assumption that they were in fact the victims of wars or kidnapping raids made captive and transported and sold) that we should be driven back on to ex silentio speculations. For example: might they after all be sold debt-bondsmen ? Might they, in Boeotia, belong to something like a subdued serf class, like the Thessalian Penestae, which became extinct soon afterwards—and so not be at all parallel to the Homeric , since Homer wrote in lands and of lands which had not experienced the Dorian invasion as had Boeotia ? Or, finally, are the mentioned in the Works and Days a peculiar property of Hesiod and Perses whom their father—an Aeolian, we remember, from Cyme—had owned in Asia Minor and had brought with him to a land where farmers, for the most part, did not in fact own servants?

^{page 219 note 2} The root occurs in Homer at the following points: Il. 3. 409, Od. 4. 12; : Il. 6. 463, Od. 14. 340, 17. 323; : Od. 24. 252; : Od. 22. 423. occurs at Il. 6. 455 and 528, 16. 831 and 20. 193; it does not occur in the Odyssey.

^{page 219 note 3} For demioergoi see Finley, , op. cit., pp. 58–59.Google Scholar