1. Hamilton, Richard, The Architecture of Hesiodic Poetry (Baltimore 1989), 64Google Scholar.

2. Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion (Cambridge MA 1985), 138Google Scholar.

3. By ‘deep time’ and ‘mantic space’ I mean the coordinates of purely mythic space and time as treated in oral epic, its implementation of what Eliade calls myth’s ‘archaic ontology’, e.g. in The Myth of the Eternal return (New York 1954)Google Scholar. On mantic space in the Odyssey, cf. Nagler, M., ‘Odysseus, the Proem and the Problem’, CA 9 (1990), 339fGoogle Scholar.

4. In the more usual version of Apollo’s ‘arrival’ myth, for example, he lands on earth, amid the Hyperboreans. Leslie Kurke draws my attention to Pi. Pyth. 4.13–92, in which this land/sea, chariot/ship polarity is very clear. Poseidon embodies this polarity as god of horses and ships; cf. Paus. 7.21.9 and Burkert (n.2 above).

5. Most scholars today regard the Delian and Pythian sections of the existing hymn as originating separately (e.g. Janko, Richard, Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns [Cambridge 1982], 99–132Google Scholar), which is almost necessarily true as far as their content as mythic narratives with epichoric reference is concerned. I am among those who regard our text as a single performance and ‘the poet’ as an individual whose program, partly on the evidence just cited, included a panhellenising fusion of these traditions, perhaps a political program backed as usual by the ontological dimensions of myth: the god of sea and land (here sea to land), a power over both natural realms—and two communities. For this view cf. Miller, Andrew, From Delos to Delphi (Leiden 1986)Google Scholar.

6. A strong inversion also connects the epiphany at Tainaron with a very similar—and in its poetic context, a central—adventure of the Odyssey: at 12.261–419 (note conspicuous references to daemonic control, esp. 295,419) Odysseus and his men are mysteriously becalmed and thus unable to leave Thrinakia, while the Cretan sailors are mysteriously unable to land at Tainaron.

7. To make the inversion complete, the goddess catalogue for the dance climaxes with his sister (homotrophos) who receives her cult epithet iokheaira (199).

8. For the following discussion I have benefitted particularly from Vernant, Jean-Pierre, ‘Sacrifice et alimentation humaine àpropos du Promethée d’Hésiode’, ASNP 7 (1977), 905–40Google Scholar; Pucci, Pietro, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore 1977)Google Scholar; Arthur, Marilyn, ‘The Dream of a World Without Women: Poetics and Circles of Order in the Theogony Proemium’, Arethusa 16 (1983), 97–116Google Scholar; Nagy, Gregory, Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter (Cambridge MA 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Hesiod’, in Luce, T.J. (ed.), Ancient Writers (New York 1982) 43–73Google Scholar; Gagarin, Michael, ‘The Ambiguity of Eris in the Works and Days’, in Griffith, M. and Mastronarde, D. (eds.), Cabinet of the Muses: Studies in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (Atlanta 1990), 173–84Google Scholar; Ferrari, Giovanni, ‘Hesiod’s Mimetic Muses and the Strategies of Deconstruction’, in Benjamin, A. (ed.), Post-Structuralist Classics (New York 1988), 45–78Google Scholar, among others. I shall not attempt to flag exactly where I am indebted to these scholars but pay them the honour of adopting their insights while going on to frame the discussion in my own terms. I am particularly close to the approach and conclusions of Marilyn Arthur (now Marilyn Arthur Katz), though regrettably I worked my way to these conclusions before seeing her excellent study. I would like to thank also both Apostolos Athanassakis and Mark Griffith for carefully reading a draft of this article, contributing good thoughts and saving me from a number of infelicities.

9. Some scholars think pseudea here and in Solon fr. 29 (West) are a deprecatory reference to Homeric poetry. As indicated below, I am loath to read even this general kind of cross-referencing into an oral poet (and I consider Hesiod to be one).

10. The pure, unmanifested source (of poetry, fame, etc.) is inexhaustible; cf. Nagy (Comparative Studies, n.8 above), 244–55, and now Nagy, , Pindar’s Homer (Baltimore 1990), 32Google Scholar and 65ff., on muthos and alētheia.

11. Cf. Nagler, M., ‘Dread Goddess Revisited’, in Schein, Seth L. (ed.), Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays (Princeton 1991)Google Scholar. Prof. Athanassakis draws my attention to a number of parallels between the Muses and Indie goddesses of speech (Vāc, Saraswatī), parallels which would align Hesiod himself with the inspired seers of that tradition.

12. This is worked out in similar detail by Marilyn Arthur (n.8 above).

13. The Hymn to Hermes provides something of a transition between what I take to be the underlying mythologem of humanity’s choice and the myth’s reversal or displacement of that choice onto Zeus, since in this work it is the newborn god who institutes the sacrifice, a figure between men and Zeus who holds the place of Prometheus in our text, and who experiences desire for the flesh of the sacrificed animal. He controls that desire, and thus gains his position on Olympos (130–34).

14. It must be said against the arguments Latacz presents in ‘Noch einmal zum Opferbetrug des Prometheus’, Glotta 49 (1971), 27–34Google Scholar, that in the narrative time of these key lines Hesiod thinks of mankind as not yet existing; both portions are put before Zeus since no one else is around, and the separation of the human from the divine (from the non-physical state represented by the gods) accompanies the separation of the corruptible from the eternal symbolically enacted as a primordial sacrifice.

15. Cf. Vernant, J.-P., Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (New York 1988), 187Google Scholar and 194f.; Marilyn Arthur (n.8 above), 102ff. For the poetic-political connotations of gastēr see Svenbro, Jesper, La parole et le marbre (Lund 1976)Google Scholar.

16. For a fascinating account of this anthropogenesis by sacrifice, cf. Lincoln, Bruce, ‘The Indo-European Myth of Creation’, HR 15 (1975), 121–45Google Scholar, and the simultaneous discovery of Jaan Puhvel, ‘Remus et Frater’, in that issue. If these scholars are correct (setting aside the etymological arguments, which are controversial) Hesiod’s Prometheus myth preserves a specific, and very ancient, narrative for the aetiological institution of ‘le statut de 1’homme’ (to use Vernant’s phrase).

17. This was pointed out some time ago by Bruno Snell in connection with the non-choice of Achilles; cf. Scenes from Greek Drama (Berkeley & Los Angeles 1964), 19–22Google Scholar. I discuss an exception that illustrates the rule in ‘Ethical Anxiety and Artistic Inconsistency: The Case of Oral Epic’, in Griffith & Mastronarde (n.8 above), 227–31. In accordance with the partly generic, partly diachronic determinants that put an emphasis on the outward representation of acts rather than an inner focus on motivations, archaic poets tell us about the critically different, often polar outcomes that confront heroes but rarely let us overhear them experiencing true inner conflict about which to choose. A close parallel in several ways is the ‘choice’ of Herakles (Prodikos DK B 1 & 2) between the way of warlike valour connected with alētheia, ‘by which the gods disposed human realities’, and inertia. (I am indebted to Mark Griffith for this reference.)

18. Cf. Bakker, and Fabbricotti, , ‘Nuclear and Peripheral Semantics in Homer’, Mnemosyne 44(1991),63–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Prof. Griffiths points out to me that where Hesiod does specifically mention choice (helesthai, 287) there is a simple binary choice involved: see W&D 287–92. I cite other cases below.

20. Against this view see, for example, Diller, Hans, ‘Die dichterische Form von Hesiods Erga’, AAWM 2 (1962), 51Google Scholar. Hamilton, in fact (n.1 above, 52 and 55), accepts that there is an explicit reference to the Theogony; I agree that the ‘world of the Theogony’ is a constant background to Hesiod’s thinking in this poem, if not the text. The Works and Days continues, conceptually, the devolution of the former poem; indeed as Jenny Strauss Clay describes the devolutionary program of the hymns we would have to situate them between these two; cf. The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns (Princeton 1989), 15Google Scholar and 269.

21. In fact, West seems to have intuited that something is wrong when epi gaian is regarded as filler (‘this unemphatic phrase would have gone better at the end of a clause’, Hesiod: Works and Days [Oxford 1978]Google Scholar, ad 11). As he correctly says about the anaphora at line 19, it means that eris is ‘firmly embedded in the earth we live on, fundamental to our diaita’ (emphasis added).

22. 650–662. In other words, muthēsaimēn is a marked word for speech within the realm of human possibilities but unmarked relative to the word for divine speech in the Muses’ couplet. Neither contrast is made explicit in the present passage. Note that in the case of the Theogony passage human speech occupies the first hexameter and divine utterance the second, for reasons of the complex ring-compositional structure of that proem.

23. For another passage that collocates eris, thumos and dikha cf. Il. 21.385f., discussed by Francis, E. D., ‘Virtue, Folly, and Greek Etymology’, in Rubino, C. and Shelmerdine, C. (eds.), Approaches to Homer (Austin 1983), 94Google Scholar, and Hes. fr. 204 M-W, 95f., where dikha thumon comes about ex eridos, ‘from [unpersonified] quarrel’.

24. Cf. Etienne Gilson in Walsh et al., Augustine, City of God (New York 1958), 27f. For the importance of drive theory in the development of peace cf. Nagler, M., ‘Ideas of World Order and the Map of Peace’, in Thompson, et al. (eds.), Approaches to Peace: An Intellectual Map (Washington D.C. 1991), 371–92Google Scholar.

25. Walsh, Thomas R., Kholos and Kotos: Studies in the Semantics of Anger in Homeric Poetry (Diss. University of California, Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar. Walsh argues that in the epics kotos characterises the anger of a superior (e.g. a god) towards a subordinate and implies moral indignation (usually with serious consequences).

26. This kind of empathetic re-creation is a great strength of oral poetry; see the many examples in Martin, Richard, The Language of Heroes (Ithaca 1989)Google Scholar, where this is especially well brought out in relation to the empathetic identity of the singer, Homer, and his protagonist. Il. 23.313–18, made famous by Vernant, and Detienne, in Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Atlantic Highlands NJ 1978), 11–23Google Scholar, is an equally good illustration of how easily ‘success’ shades over to ‘competitive advantage’ especially in a competitive society like that of the Greeks (or our own).

27. Baldry, H. C., The Unity of Mankind in Greek Thought (Cambridge 1965), 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. the definitive study of Keil, Bruno, ‘Eirēnē’, Ber. über die Verh. der Königl Sächs. Ges. der Wiss. lxvii, no. 4(1916)Google Scholar.

28. The translation is that of Walsh (n.24 above), 457.

29. Military thinking to this day is essentially based on this ‘negative peace’ conception; quite recently the United States Navy Department published their negative, not to say cynical definition of ‘peace’ as ‘perpetual pre-hostility’. But non-militaristic thinking all too seldom escapes this inhibitory factor; cf. among others Schneider, Heinrich, Friedensverständnis in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, in Weiler, R. and Zsifkovits, V. (eds.), Unterwegs zum Frieden (Vienna 1973), 131 –56Google Scholar, and for a useful survey, Zampaglione, G., The Idea of Peace in Antiquity (Notre Dame 1967)Google Scholar.

30. Cf. Dillon, Mathew, ‘The Lysistrata as a Post-Deceleian Peace Play’, TAPA 177 (1987), 97–104Google Scholar.

31. In addition to Dillon (n.30 above) cf. Arnould, Dominique, Guerre et paix dans la poésie grecque (New York 1981)Google Scholar. The fateful association is at least as early as the Odyssey (Arnould, 17) and was never quite shaken off. There is, to be sure, a profoundly realistic sense in which war destroys wealth, and therefore justice and peace preserve it (clear in both passages cited above by Baldry). The trope thus rests upon real traditional wisdom; however, the mythologisation and idealisation of the idea (all too common because its practical meaning, namely that peace means the creation of wealth sua sponte, was rarely articulated) remain a primordial, dangerous adunaton. We might note (in particular Ba. fr. 24 [Snell]) a polarity between ‘wealth’ and ‘war’ with the latter split into a polarity of Ares and stasis.

32. This argument is not dissimilar to that of the Eleatic stranger in Plato’s Sophist (222c5f).