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.

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.

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.