CUP (2025) p/b 407pp £26.99 (9781107483484)
It is a pleasure to welcome this distinguished addition to CUP’s Green-&-Yellow series. The editors follow a long Introduction (divided into six sections) by the text, a Commentary, Genealogical Charts, Works Cited, and Indexes.
Introduction (i). There is little enough that we can say about Hesiod with near-certainty or even plausible conjecture. Born in Ascra in Boeotia—a location for which he has harsh words in his Works and Days, though Pausanias is kinder—he appears to have competed with success (winning a tripod) at the funeral games of King Amphidamas (730 BC), who had been killed in the shadowy Lelantine War: this date does not sit very comfortably with the dates for Theogony proposed by Richard Janko (700-665) and Martin West (680-660): both scholars had modified their views over time. The two ‘lives’ of Hesiod which have come down to us—by Proclus (fourth century AD) and Tzetzes (twelfth century)—add little, except for mentioning the competition at the funeral of Amphidamas.
(ii) The influence of the Near East on Theogony has long been recognised; works by W. Burkert and (again) Martin West are notable examples. The main sources are The Song of Emergence (also known as the Kumarbi Cycle), preserved in Hittite, which displays certain features present in Theogony, and whose material must date back to 1650 BC, and ‘Enuma Elish’, a Babylonian creation, which may go back to a mid-to-late second millennial Sumerian version. A far later source, say C-V, is Sanchuniathon’s Phoenician History (late first-early second century AD), which may preserve ‘older Phoenician traditions’: notable is the inclusion of a Succession Myth, which contains (what would become standard) a castration episode—as does the Song of Emergence.
There are questions about the transmission of the available material where consensus has not been decisively reached—questions which C-V raise in some detail on page 10. Returning to Hesiod, we find a narrative of the Succession Myth that has been tightened, with a strict progression from father to son in three generations—but the prominence of the female as the driving force of succession has no parallel in the Near Eastern texts. C-V see this as a problem, which they name the Sexual Politics of the Theogony. (Your reviewer would have welcomed a little more about the physical nature of the Hittite material referred to above).
(iii) The influence of the Theogony on Greek and Roman literature and philosophy. ‘The depiction of the gods by poets rather than priests shaped the Greek image of the divine and had far-reaching consequences’, and the editors cannot be blamed for saying ‘Even limiting discussion to the influence of the Theogony in antiquity is a topic far too vast to be treated here in any depth’: just so, and your reviewer limits himself to noting, by way of examples, that the Succession Myth casts its shadow over the Prometheus Bound, that the victory of Zeus over the forces of disorder forms the background to the Oresteia, and that, in the Hellenic period, Callimachus’ Aetia can be considered a self-conscious sequel to the Theogony, beginning with an imitation of Hesiod’s encounter with the Muses ( a reference to Harder’s superb Aetia would not have been out of place).
With philosophy, the question of ‘beginnings’ inevitably comes to the fore. Logic comes into play, and it does not help to posit χάος (i.e. ‘gap’) as the prime mover: after all, the word ‘gap’ implies that there exists something for it to come between. C-V, in ‘Pursuing Chaos’ (pp.17-20) go into the implications of this in some detail—they offer ‘an attempt to tease out a possible interpretation of Hesiod’s Chaos’ and suggest that Hesiod progresses ‘from a cosmogony to cosmography, from a genealogy to a form of spatial organization’.
(iv) The fourth section of the Introduction—Structure, Organization, and Narrative—includes a helpful outline of the Theogony, in which we have genealogies and catalogues and a narrative ‘core’, which gives us the Succession Myth (which is not presented as a continuous narrative, but in distinct acts.) Genealogical catalogues are interspersed throughout the poem—with a great deal of intertwining of family trees. A digression on Styx demonstrates how her pre-eminence among the Okeanids arises from her loyalty to Zeus; Styx has 3,000 sisters and is the only female river; there is more to be said, too, on Hecate (see below). Yet there is an overarching question which cannot be deferred; is Theogony a written (M.L. West, G. Most) or an oral composition (G. Nagy)? C-V make the case that Hesiod was aware of writing and used it in the composition of his poem: one can instance in particular the word and sound-plays that sometimes stretch across large portions of the text, or the repeated play on mêtis in the succession myth. Glenn Most writes: ‘For (Hesiod’s) emphatic repudiation of an earlier version presupposes the persistence of that version in an unchanged formulation, beyond the circumstance in which it seemed correct, into a new situation in which it no longer does, and this persistence is made possible only by writing’. C-V make much the same point.
(v) Language and Meter (American spellings are employed here and elsewhere). The editors seem to be sensibly assuming little in the way of attained knowledge of at least Homeric/Hesiodic Greek, nor is Chantraine likely to be close at hand, and with that in mind, the 16 pages devoted to epic Greek’s grammar and syntax should prove helpful and useful. There is a similarly undemanding section on metre—or at least the dactylic hexameter. The reviewer’s eye was caught by the reference to Hermann’s Bridge and thence to Meyer’s First Law, which takes back Hermann’s Bridge from the 4th to the 3rd foot of the hexameter (and is never broken by Callimachus).
(vi) The text is based on M. West’s edition of 1966—differences (about 40, and mainly trivial), are usefully listed on pp.65-6. We have 69 mediaeval and renaissance MSS for Theogony, but the tradition is contaminated; the editors also list 30 papyri plus a couple which were published after West’s edition. C-V comment that ‘West’s edition represents a major step forward toward understanding the poem on its own terms’. The text, with relatively brief apparatus criticus, follows.
The Commentary is conceived on a generous scale, the editors moving, as necessary, from the minor to the major key. Take line 475: περιφραδέτην (‘they declared’: the note explains: ‘(this) is an unaugmented reduplicated epic second aorist dual form’. Quid plura? Helpfully, the editors also allow themselves to amplify at need: thus, at lines 154-182 (Ouranos’ crime and Gaia’s revenge), C-V take ten pages to explain the circumstances, ‘The first act of the Succession Myth … the attempted establishment of a new order’, while the narrative also performs both a cosmogonical and an aetiological function, by explaining how Heaven and Earth became separate, thus creating the space for other divine entities to come into being. Lines 507-616 (‘the line of Iapetos’) feature the introduction of Prometheus and Epimetheus and afford a ‘rare opportunity to observe how the poet adjusts mythical material to the wider context’. By contrast, your reviewer noted with interest that ‘difficulties are caused by γάρ in lines 80 and 94’—difficulties which the editors take two pages to elucidate. Between pp.234 and 239 we learn much more about that ‘maverick’ goddess Hecate, and on the same page 239 we are told that the subjunctive appears without ἄν, as it does elsewhere: why? Because, it is suggested, the presence of ἄν underscores a particular future event, whereas the bare subjunctive refers to the future in a general utterance: one might compare, in Attic, the contrast between the use of the future tense and the optative with ἄν. These examples of treating major and minor subjects with the same scholarly attention to detail could readily be multiplied, and my sampling of the 260-page commentary invariably answered any doubt which had arisen.
This is an important work of scholarship, upon which the editors are warmly to be congratulated: it is well-nigh impossible to imagine that it will be challenged for very many years to come.
Colin Leach