ABSTRACT
Whatever be the value of the Homeric poems for the history of Greek Political Thought, there can hardly be any question about the two genuine Hesiodic poems, the Works and Days and the Theogony. They are not of course political literature any more than the Iliad and the Odyssey, but the former at any rate does contain the earliest written record of the conscious application of human thinking to the problems of living together. Hesiod, it is true, was a poet, a singer who, he tells us, learned his craft from the Muses. His metre and diction are still those of the Homeric hexameter—a medium not always well adapted to the ideas which he was trying to express. Moreover he conveys his meaning partly in precept and pardy in myth. But it is not difficult to peer through these conventions and see the rudiments of moral and therefore of political philosophy shaping themselves. When for example in the Theogony he says that Zeus wed Themis, who gave birth to Eunomia, Dikè and Eirenè, we see at once that he is laying down Good Order, Right and Peace as principles of human society. Again, to illustrate the difference between the rule of Force and the rule of Right he tells a fable of the nightingale and the hawk; and when, some three hundred years later Thrasymachus was defining Justice as the rule of the stronger, he was repeating in effect what the hawk said to the nightingale: ‘He is a fool who seeks to resist the mighty.’ It is against such a doctrine and the conduct to which it leads that Hesiod protests. It was all too readily accepted in international affairs (see Chap. VI), and internally too, as Hesiod found, society was too much based on violence and υ῝βρις: the rulers and judges of his land, though called by the good old name βασιλῆϵς, had no longer the kingly virtues of the princes of heroic times, and bribery and perjury were rife. To these unjust judges and to his idle brother Perses are addressed many precepts, moral and agricultural. The poet gives in the Works and Days a vivid picture of the hard life of a small farmer on a Boeotian hillside, so that we know something of his social and economic conditions. He uses the word πόλις frequently and in such a way as to suggest that it was the normal political unit. And though he has nothing to tell us of problems of government, he leaves us in no doubt about the principle on which government should be based—the now familiar principle of Δίκη. Though nowhere defined, Dikè is personified, deified, illustrated as becomes a poet. It is, above all, that which distinguished human society from animals, birds and fishes, for there is no δίκη among them. It is the Right Way or Justice, opposed to lawlessness and violence and to ‘taking the law into one’s own hands’. For this, as Hesiod saw, is the very negation of justice and such people (he calls them χϵιροδίκαι 1 ) would, as we say, strike at the very root of all political association. It is true that people of rank and power, especially when acting together, can often succeed in getting their way contrary to justice, but sooner or later, says Hesiod, they must fail, for the gods mark wicked deeds and punish them; and, in words prophetic of the Just and the Unjust Arguments in Aristophanes’ Clouds, ‘It will be a black day for the Just Man if the Unjust gets the greater δίκη.’ Besides, Justice is a positive boon to a city; without it there can be no prosperity. In a community, therefore, in which judicial and administrative power both rest with an aristocracy, the rulers have a very great responsibility, since the whole people will suffer for their mistakes. And if the aristocrat (ἐσθλός) adheres to his supposed right to do as he likes, while requiring the common people (δϵιλὸς βροτός) to behave in an orderly way, there never will be any Right Way or Justice established for all. Such a sense of responsibility Hesiod found nowhere among the ‘bribe-devouring’ rulers of his time nor was he hopeful of finding better. Good rulers, as he says in the Theogony, are a gift from Zeus, as a good poet is a gift of Apollo. Both need to be blessed and taught by the Muses, for as skill in music and song are necessary to a poet, so skill in speech is necessary for a ruling prince: ‘From his lips come honeyed words and all the people look to him as he gives judgments righteously.’ This goes farther than the Homeric hero’s need ‘to be a speaker of words’. It is the earliest indication of the close connection between eloquence and justice, which many had cause to deplore in the fifth and fourth centuries.
