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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2014
Plato's Hesiod is a neglected topic, scholars having long regarded Plato's Homer as a more promising field of inquiry. My aim in this chapter is to demonstrate that this particular bias of scholarly attention, although understandable, is unjustified. Of no other dialogue is this truer than of the Ion.
1 A recent and most welcome exception to this trend is Boys-Stones, G.R. and Haubold, J.H. (edd.), Plato and Hesiod (Oxford, 2010)Google Scholar.
2 This statistic is not as significant as might at first appear since Plato rarely quotes from Hesiod and, when he does so, it is mostly from the Works and Days. The Platonic corpus as a whole contains only one quotation from the Theogony (Symp. 178b5–7). For a detailed study of Plato's quotations from, and references to, Hesiod, see Most, G.W. (ed. and tr.), Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 243–4Google Scholar and, more particularly, id., ‘Plato's Hesiod: an acquired taste’, in Boys-Stones and Haubold (n. 1), 52–67.
3 As argued by B. Graziosi, ‘Hesiod in Classical Athens: orators and Platonic discourse’, in Boys-Stones and Haubold (n. 1), 129.
4 For general references to poets in general at the start of the dialogue, see 531c2–3, d4, 532a5, b4, b6, b9 and c7–8.
5 All quotations from the Ion are in the edition of Rijksbaron, A. (ed.), Plato. Ion. Or: On the Iliad (Leiden and Boston, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The lineation differs slightly from that of Burnet (1903). All translations from the dialogue are my own.
6 In DK 28B1–3 and 28B1.29 the κοῦρος explains that the mares had carried him according to his wishes (cf. ἵπποι ταί με φέρουσιν ὅσον τ' ἐπι θυμὸς ἱκάνοι) on the road which bears the man who knows (cf. εἰδότα φῶτα) over all cities. Admittedly, the context does not make it entirely clear whether εἰδότα φῶτα refers to the state of the κοῦρος before or after enlightenment. While the textual closeness of ὅσον τ' ἐπι θυμὸς ἱκάνοι and εἰδότα φῶτα would incline one to read the lines as above, it could be argued that line 28, which has the goddess tell the κοῦρος that ‘it is needful that you learn all things’, implies that the road mentioned in lines 2–3 is the road that carries those who have already been enlightened.
7 Ibid. 28B29. The fact that εὐκυκλέος in line 29 may be a Neoplatonic interpolation is not relevant to the comparison between the two proems.
8 All quotations of Hesiod are in Most's 2006 rendering (n. 2), with occasional slight modifications, flagged as such.
9 To avoid importing anachronistic assumptions in the discussion of the proem, I have mostly used ‘song’, ‘song composition’ and ‘composer’, as opposed to ‘poetry’, ‘poem’ and ‘poet’, to refer to the Theogony and Hesiod's authorship of it. Not only does Plato use ἀοιδή, ᾠδή and ἀοιδός sparingly but, when he does so, it is mostly in contexts dealing with early poetry, as testified by Phdr. 237a7, 259b6–8 and 278c1–3. He never uses the terms in the Ion. In other dialogues, he generally prefers to use ποίησις and ποιητής. From Diotima's remarks on the semantic range of ποίησις and ποιητής (Symp. 205b8–c9), it seems clear that Plato was aware of the etymology of the words. On the significance of the passage in the Symposium, see Stern-Gillet, S., ‘Poets and other makers: Agathon's speech in context’, Dionysius 26 (2008), 9–27Google Scholar, at 17–19. On terminological shifts from Archaic usage to 4th-century b.c. manner of referring to poetry, see Notomi, N., ‘Image-making in Republic X and the Sophist’, in Destrée, P. and Herrmann, F.-G. (edd.), Plato and the Poets (Leiden and Boston, 2011), 299–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Ion 534d8–e1: εὕρημά τι Μοισᾶν (a discovery of the Muses) is Socrates' phrase to describe the only good poem ever composed by Tynnichus. See also ibid. 534e2–4.
11 Od. 12.44, 183 and 198; see also 1.351; 12.183 and 198 and 24.439.
12 Od. 8.498.
13 For the generic use of ἀοιδή see, e.g. Hymn. Hom. Merc. 149 and 442 and Hymn. Hom. Ap. 169 and 519. For the specific use see, e.g. Hymn. Hom. Ap. 172–3 and Hymn. Hom.16.5 (to Asclepius).
14 See e.g. Verdenius, W.J., ‘Notes on the proem of Hesiod's Theogony’, Mnemosyne Series 4, 25.3 (1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 233 n. 22 and Rijksbaron, A., ‘Discourse cohesion in the proem to Hesiod's Theogony’, in Bakker, S. and Bakker, G. (edd.), Discourse Cohesion in Ancient Greek (Leiden and Boston, 2009), 248–9Google Scholar. In his 2006 translation of the line (‘they [the Muses] taught Hesiod beautiful song’) Most avoids placing either a definite or an indefinite article in front of ‘song’; although this suggests a generic reading, it does not unambiguously do so. The issue is further discussed in §6 below.
15 See e.g. Hesiodi quae feruntur omnia, recensuit A. Rzach (Leipzig, 1903)Google Scholar, Hésiode, Théogonie, Les Travaux et les Jours, le Bouclier, texte établi et traduit par Mazon, P. (Paris, 1964)Google Scholar and Thalmann, W.C., Conventions of Form and Thought in Early Greek Epic Poetry (Baltimore and London, 1984), 136Google Scholar.
16 Lucian, Conversation with Hesiod, 1.6–7, in Kilburn, K. (tr.), Lucian vol. 6 (Cambridge, MA, 1959)Google Scholar. All quotations from Lucian are in Kilburn's translation, with occasional slight modifications, flagged as such.
17 Ibid. 1. I have modified Kilburn's translation of τί δήποτε which is clearly interrogative, although there is no question mark at the end of the very long sentence in which it occurs.
18 There are, of course, other possibilities: it may be that the variant reading was already in Lucian's text of Hesiod or that the variant in the manuscript and Lucian's paraphrase arose independently of each other. The source of the variant, however, is less relevant to the present context than its very existence.
19 Ibid. 7.
20 Ibid. 9.
21 Ion 533d2–3.
22 Ap. 22a–c. See also Meno 96a.
23 West, M.L. (ed.), Hesiod. Theogony (Oxford, 1966)Google Scholar, 161: ‘Perhaps Hesiod is here thinking not of the single epiphany but of a period of practice.’
24 See above, n. 12.
25 Il. 5.51 and 23.307–8.
26 Od. 8.41 and 481. The metaphorical interpretation is defended by e.g. Pratt, L.H., Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar: Falsehood and Deception in Archaic Greek Poetics (Ann Arbor, 1993), 50–2Google Scholar. The fact that δίδωμι was still used by St Paul (I Cor. 12.7–12) to refer to divinely granted abilities testifies to the longevity of the expression.
27 I have altered Most's translation (n. 2) of ἀθεσφατον ὕμνον as ‘an inconceivable hymn’ to ‘a hymn of transcendent merit’. While both translations accord with the definition of ἀθέσφατος as ‘qui n'est pas fixé par les dieux, qui échappe à toute règle’, given by Chantraine, P. in his Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque. Histoire des mots (Paris, 1968–74)Google Scholar, vol. 2, s.v. θέσφατος, my rendering, though hardly elegant, is more transparently descriptive.
28 See §6 below.
29 Rijksbaron (n. 14), 243–4.
30 For ‘timeless’ see West (n. 23), 155; for ‘habitual’, see ibid. 150.
31 As testified by his note on line 7, ἐνεποιήσαντο (ibid. 155).
32 Although Rijksbaron's objection is telling against modern descriptions of the Muses' dance as ‘timeless’, it has to be pointed out that the concept of timelessness (as opposed to everlastingness) took a long time to emerge in Greek thought. Plato's description of time as ‘an everlasting image of eternity’ in Timaeus 37d5 and his analysis of change in Parmenides 155e–157b show the difficulties involved in formulating the concept of timelessness as different from everlastingness. It is therefore unlikely that, some three centuries before Plato, Hesiod could have made a distinction between eternity (or timelessness), everlastingness (or sempiternity) and ‘omnitemporality’. In any case, Hesiod's claim that the Muses gladden the heart of Zeus by ‘telling of what is and what will be and what was before’ shows that he had no conception of timelessness as opposed to sempiternity.
33 στεῖχον, the imperfect of στείχω, is translated by Most as ‘they walk’, presumably to convey what, in common with West, he takes to be the timelessness of the scene. Rijksbaron, in accordance with his interpretation of στεῖχον in line 10 as a focalizing imperfect, follows Ruijgh, C.J., Autour du “te” épique (Amsterdam, 1971), 900–1Google Scholar, in taking it to express a past occurrence. As for the two aorist indicatives in lines 7 and 8 (ἐνεποιήσαντο and ἐπερρώσαντο), both authors take them to mark the gradual transition from the ‘omnitemporal’ state of affairs described in the first six lines of the proem to the tensed event denoted by στεῖχον.
34 In Rijksbaron's own words, (n. 14), 245: ‘the third person narrative of lines 10–23 becomes a first person narrative and thus the report of a personal experience’. On this point, see also Clay, J.S., Hesiod's Cosmos (Cambridge, 2003), 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Rijksbaron (n. 14), 245.
36 On this interesting use of the aorist, see e.g. Smyth, H.W., Greek Grammar, revised by G.M. Messing (Cambridge, MA, 1956)Google Scholar, 1120: ‘The complexive aorist surveys at a glance the course of a past action from beginning to end.’ See, too, Rijksbaron, A., The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek. An Introduction (Amsterdam, 2002 3), 11–12Google Scholar.
37 In enhancing the cohesiveness of the proem, Rijksbaron's interpretation also abides by the principle of charity, as famously defined by Davidson, D., Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar, ch. 3, passim, according to which exegesis should aim at maximizing the truth, rationality and coherence of the target text.
38 For an interesting discussion of rival interpretations of this puzzling line, see Katz, J.T. and Volk, K., ‘Mere bellies? A new look at Theogony 26–8’, JHS 120 (2000), 122–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 129, who claim that in addressing Hesiod as γαστήρ the Muses refer to ‘the belly as a locus of inspiration or possession’. This interpretation, however, strains credibility since it is unlikely that the Muses would belittle the gift they were about to bestow upon Hesiod.
39 As testified by e.g. Hymn. Hom. Ap. 131–2 and 172–3 (which is probably a laudatory reference to Homer). See also Dodds, E.R., The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1951), 73Google Scholar.
40 Il. 1.70.
41 Il. 1.70–1 and 2.326–9.
42 See e.g. Eust. Il. 1.15.12. See also West (n. 23), 163–4, although his reference should be to the scholia to Ar. Nub. 1364, not 1367.
43 In grammatical terms, ῥέει is a present of customary action. On this use of the present indicative, see Goodwin, W.W., A Greek Grammar (Basingstoke, 1983 2)Google Scholar, 1253.1, Smyth (n. 36), 108.2, and Rijksbaron (n. 36), 5.3.
44 See Chantraine (n. 27), 2.432.
45 For a Homeric, less sophisticated, expression of the view that poets are granted supra-human knowledge, see e.g. Odysseus' promise to Demodocus that, if he can sing of episodes of the Trojan War that he never witnessed, he, Odysseus, would ‘proclaim to the world how generously the god has endowed you with the heavenly gift of song’ (Od. 8.498–9).
46 Alfred de Musset's famous sequence of four poems, Les Nuits, composed between 1835 and 1837, in which the Muse figures as a central character, testifies to the longevity of this particular trope.
47 Od. 22.347–8.
48 Ion 534e4–5.
49 Op. 654–7.
50 As noted by Clay, J.S., ‘What the Muses sang: Theogony 1–115’, GRBS 29 (1988), 324Google Scholar. In his Conversation with Hesiod 1, Lucian had already remarked that Hesiod never sings of the future (τά τ' ἐσσόμενα, Theog. 32).
51 Theog. 27–8, tr. Most, modified. According to Heath, M., ‘Hesiod's didactic poetry’, CQ 35 (1985), 258–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, the disclaimer that Hesiod puts in the Muses' mouth shows him to be aware that the truth value of poetic utterances is not subject to the same constraints as other utterances. Although it may seem anachronistic to credit Hesiod with a distinction between fictional truth and truth tout court, the sophisticated manner in which Hesiod integrates the autobiographical episode of the Dichterweihe into the otherwise impersonal narrative of the proem lends supports to Heath's interpretation.
52 Xenophanes, DK 21B11 and 12; Pl. Resp. 377d4–e8.
53 Ion 534b5–6.
54 Il. 2.6: what Homer called a ‘destructive’ dream (οὖλον Ὄνειρον), Plato, referring to the same passage in Resp. 383 a4, would call a ‘lying’ dream (ψεῦδος).
55 While Hesiod describes the poet as a θεράπων of the Muses, Plato prefers to call him a ὑπηρέτης (Ion 534c8). The difference is significant; the two words, although semantically close, are not synonymous since Hesiod's epithet can denote an attendant at a shrine while Plato's almost unfailingly serves to describe a person employed in a menial capacity.
56 See e.g. the link between teachability and knowledge at Meno 87c and the parallel drawn between teaching and learning at Euthyd. 276a3 sqq.
57 DK 68B18 and B21, tr. Freeman, K., Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Oxford, 1966), 97Google Scholar.
58 Dodds (n. 39), 82; Delatte, A., Les Conceptions de l'enthousiasme chez les philosophes présocratiques (Paris, 1934), 28Google Scholar.
59 Ion 533e4–5 and 536B3; Phdr. 241e3–5 and 263d1–2.
60 Ferwerda, R., ‘Democritus and Plato’, Mnemosyne 25 (1972), 342–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar, comes to the same conclusion by a different approach.
61 Most, ‘Plato's Hesiod’ (n. 2), 54.
62 Resp. 607b5–6.
63 I should like to express my gratitude to Malcolm Heath, Denis O'Brien and Albert Rijksbaron, as well as to the anonymous referee for CQ, for their perceptive comments and helpful suggestions.
