1. The Hesiodic Works and Days

The most popular Hesiodic poem nowadays is the Theogony, thanks to its prestige as a source text on Greek mythology. But in antiquity the Works and Days was the centrepiece of the Hesiodic corpus. According to Pausanias, there was a tradition at Mount Helicon in Boeotia that it was the only authentically Hesiodic poem. He reports that the locals even rejected the opening hymn to Zeus (lines 1–10) as an interpolation.Footnote ⁷ The poem's popularity is easy to see from a set of ‘commemograms’ drawn up by Koning, which tabulate references to Hesiodic passages in later Greco-Roman authors.Footnote ⁸ Koning's results are telling: ancient writers quoted the Works and Days more than twice as often as the Theogony, and the least-quoted sections of the poem were quoted as much as the most-quoted parts of the Theogony.

The speaker assumes the persona of Hesiod and addresses the poem to his brother Perses. After their father's death, the backstory goes, Perses brought a case before the leading figures of the community, the big men or basilēës (usually translated as ‘kings’);Footnote ⁹ Perses bribed them in an effort to get more than his fair share of the patrimony. Perses himself slips out of view after the first 300 lines or so. The poem as a whole is an ethical discourse on virtue and the relationship between virtue and work, interspersed with mythological narratives and aphorisms about managing an estate. It fits into a long-standing tradition of wisdom literature, with many parallels in ancient Near Eastern and Greek literature.Footnote ¹⁰

The present book follows Most's (2006) text and translation; for commentaries, see M. L. West (1978) and Ercolani (2010). The poem's structure is as follows:

1. 1–10 Hymnic prelude to Zeus

2. 11–46 Introductory ethical discourse addressed to Perses

3. 47–212 Mythical interlude (Prometheus and Pandora; Myth of the Races; fable of the hawk and nightingale)

4. 213–380 Aphorisms on political (213–85) and personal (286–380) ethics

5. 381–764 The ‘works’: advice on

   1. 383–492 Ploughing and sowing

   2. 493–617 The nature of the seasons

   3. 618–93 Sailing

   4. 694–764 Household management and ethics

6. 765–828 The ‘days’: advice for specific days of the month

Works and Days 654–7 often plays a key role in scholarship on the dating of early hexameter poetry:

Plutarch and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod tell us that this event at Chalcis was considered to be the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, and that Amphidamas was a hero of the Lelantine War.Footnote ¹¹ The story is very doubtful, but a very old one nonetheless. The tradition of the Contest goes back to Alcidamas in the fourth century bce, and before that was probably known to Aristophanes;Footnote ¹² the Lelantine War is attested in Herodotus and Thucydides.Footnote ¹³ But the events themselves are so early that it is impossible to tell where tradition ends and history begins.Footnote ¹⁴ The reports we have of both contest and war are shaped more by tradition and legend than by accurate reporting. If the Lelantine War was a real historical event, one candidate for its date is c.700 bce, based on archaeological indications that the site of Lefkandi was abandoned or destroyed near that date. Now, it would be too credulous to suppose that the composer of the Works and Days genuinely participated in a real-life Contest of Homer and Hesiod. But it may well be that the above passage was designed to evoke the Lelantine War in the minds of its initial audience. If so, the war would probably have been within living memory: this extremely conjectural argument would put the Works and Days in the first half of the seventh century. It is unlikely that we can get any closer to a secure dating.Footnote ¹⁵

The poem's image of domestic economics, and intimations of a class struggle between working landowners and basilēës, cannot be taken as a faithful, impartial account of a real society. But it can be expected to possess verisimilitude. For this reason, ancient historians sometimes give it a prominent role in the study of Iron Age Greek society. That position is not really secure: the picture that the poem paints has various inconsistencies. For example, we can easily imagine the Works and Days being performed in the sympotic context that we routinely suppose to be a normal forum for Archaic poetry, but it is harder to imagine the severe narrator himself tolerating such a leisured environment. He has no time for handouts, yet he is happy to accept a valuable tripod as a prize for his poetry (654–7, quoted above) – even though poetry is not a type of economic activity that fits easily into the conception of ‘work’ presented elsewhere in the poem.Footnote ¹⁶

As a literary work, the Works and Days is far more than just a string of aphorisms.Footnote ¹⁷ It depicts an intimate interdependence between ethics and work. The narrator weaves back and forth between advice on household and farm management, on the one hand, and politics, justice, and obligations, on the other. As Stephanie Nelson has suggested, the poem is not a technical manual about how to do farming but more a self-help manual on how to experience farming.Footnote ¹⁸ The work ethic that emerges is not a rule imposed by an external authority but an integral part of the human experience: only a working person is a fully realized person.

Work is central to the relationship between gods and mortals. It is the gods who provide mortals with this opportunity to become fully human: the gods conceal livelihood from mortals so that they must work (WD 42–6), and they share out work to mortals (397–8). Work is tough and requires sweat, but it is also the only way to avoid misery (287–92):

The sweat of the brow is everything. This Hesiod looks a bit like a proto-libertarian. But he is no amoral egoist: he is also adamant about the importance of honesty, loyalty, and fair dealings with neighbours and outsiders (346–50, 707–23); this way, neighbours can be relied on for aid in the event of future disaster (351, 397–403).

And his philosophy is not blindly laissez-faire either. As mentioned above, he has no problem with handouts when it comes to poetry prizes. Even aside from that, he recognizes that ethical people need an ethical society to live in. It is the responsibility of the basilēës to prevent envious men from taking advantage of the labour of others (248–85), and to ensure that each man has the autonomy to work. The worst dregs of humanity are ‘gift-eaters’ (38–41, 220–1, 263–4), people who live off the labour of others. ‘Gift-eating’ in a basileus is worse still, and stands for corruption. A thing is noble if it encourages labour and enables self-sufficiency. If envy of another man's wealth provokes a lazy man to work and gain wealth for himself (20–6), that is competition, a form of Strife that is good for mortals. It is quite different from the resentment that just men feel against a lazy man who lives without working (303–6).

Within this broad ethical framework – the divine nature of work and the imperative of justice – the poem is full of grey areas, and various interpretations compete with each other with no clear winners. This is especially true for the mythical interludes, the Myth of the Races and the story of Prometheus and Pandora. When Prometheus gives fire to mortals, is that an endorsement of fire as a moral good, on the basis that it enables people to work? Or is it an evil, since it turns mortals into a race of gift-eaters? Pandora is another paradox.Footnote ¹⁹ On the one hand she is all gift, the literal meaning of her name, ‘since all those who live on Olympus had given her a gift’ (80–2); on the other, she counter-balances the gift of fire, since her presence increases the resources and work that a man needs to sustain life. For the narrator, all women are lazy consumers (373–5):

The narrator is deeply and viciously misogynistic. But he is not entirely irrational: he never resorts to fantasizing that women had never been created, and he readily acknowledges the importance of the wife in a working household. The ambiguity extends to Pandora's jar, which infamously retains Anticipation after all its evil contents have escaped (94–104): Anticipation is Most's translation of elpis, more traditionally rendered as ‘Hope’, but the word also means ‘expectation’. Is Pandora's Anticipation a gift or a curse? And does it stay in the jar for mortals to keep and treasure, or to keep it hidden and inaccessible? These questions are left open.

2. The Hesiodic Theogony

The Theogony is an account of the establishment of the divine world. It begins with the primordial entities Chasm (or ‘Chaos’), Earth, and Eros (‘desire’ or ‘love’); moves on to the succession of Cronus at the head of the Titans, born from Earth and Sky; then considers Zeus and the Olympians; and finally arrives at the organization of the divine world in the ‘now’. Many other miscellaneous divinities, monsters, and other figures appear along the way.

Again, the text and translation used here follows Most (2006); for a critical edition and commentary, see M. L. West (1966). The poem's structure is as follows:

1. 1–103 Hymnic prelude to Muses

2. 104–15 Proem (introductory paragraph)Footnote ²⁰

3. 116–53 The earliest divinities: Chasm to Earth, Sky, and the Titans; various monsters born from Earth

4. 154–210 The Titans; succession of Cronus and castration of Sky; Aphrodite born from Sky's severed genitals

5. 211–452 Various other monsters and divinities born

6. 453–506 The Olympians; succession of Zeus

7. 507–900 Challenges to Zeus:

   1. 521–616 Prometheus; separation at Mecone; Pandora

   2. 617–819 Titanomachy; description of Tartarus

   3. 820–80 Battle with Typhoeus

   4. 881–900 Zeus devours Metis; birth of Athena

8. 901–1020 The ‘Continuation’ (see also below): little catalogues

   1. 901–62 Offspring of male gods and mortal women

   2. 963–4 Farewell to Muses

   3. 965–1020 Offspring of female gods and mortal men

9. {1021–2 First two lines of the Catalogue of Women}

The poet explicitly assumes the persona of Hesiod (Theog. 22–34), so readers who take Hesiodic authorship literally will date the poem close to the Works and Days. And, in fact, stylometric evidence does put the poems close together, so far as that kind of evidence can be trusted.Footnote ²¹ On this literalist interpretation, the conventional date is c.700, around the time of the Lelantine War (see under Works and Days, above), with the Theogony normally supposed to be the earlier of the two poems.Footnote ²² If a later date is accepted for Works and Days, the Theogony's date will also change. But the nature of that change will depend on other assumptions: about the validity of linguistic evidence, and whether the two poems are to be assigned to the same ‘author’ or not.Footnote ²³

More than any other poem discussed in this book, the Hesiodic Theogony needs to be understood in the context of other cosmogonic texts. Current treatments rightly emphasize the importance of older Near Eastern parallels for the succession myth.Footnote ²⁴ But we should also think of later fragmentary Greek theogonies. We have fragments of theogonies attributed to Epimenides and Musaeus; the Derveni Theogony, probably dating to the sixth century; the ‘Eudemian’ Theogony, perhaps c.400 bce; maybe further Orphic and/or Cyclic theogonies; and Titanomachies by Eumelus and Musaeus. And there are other, later, theogonic poems with links to the earlier ones, especially the Hieronyman Theogony and Orphic Rhapsodies, written in the Hellenistic era.Footnote ²⁵ No reliable comprehensive translation of all these fragments is available.

The age and intact state of the Hesiodic Theogony have made its version of the Greek succession myth the most prestigious one for modern readers. The cosmos begins with the primal powers Chasm and Earth, followed by Eros, Erebos, Night, and others; Cronus castrates and overthrows his father Sky; in turn his son, Zeus, overthrows Cronus in the Titanomachy. In many ways the Orphic theogonies follow the same pattern. The Derveni and Eudemian theogonies begin with symbolic entities too (though they place Night first), and proceed through the succession of Cronus and then Zeus. Aristotle, who knew the Eudemian Theogony well, lumps it together with Hesiod in places, on the basis that the two poems' cosmogonies followed a common pattern.Footnote ²⁶

But the Orphic poems are different in some significant ways. The Derveni Theogony avoids relating Zeus's rise to power directly: instead, it casts it as a flashback. As the poem opens, Zeus – already ruler of the universe – is visiting Night in her cave to consult her as an oracle. The setting makes the poem a piece of wisdom literature, where Night instructs Zeus in the history and nature of the cosmos. One thinks also of Parmenides' poem, where the narrator passes through the gates of Night and Day to receive instruction from an unnamed goddess. In Hesiod, after Cronus castrates Sky, the severed genitals engender the goddess Aphrodite, a personification of playful sexual desire; in the Derveni Theogony, Zeus eats Sky's genitals (apparently represented by the Sun) so that he may absorb the identity of all-ancestor and firstborn, establishing himself at once as primal origin, ancestor, and ruler of the cosmos.Footnote ²⁷ Zeus has a habit of eating important symbolic entities in these poems. In Hesiod, he devours Metis (‘cunning’), in accordance with prophecies from Earth and Sky ‘so that the goddess would advise him about good and evil’ (Theog. 899–900). In the much later Hellenistic poems, Zeus takes the identity of prōtogonos (‘first ancestor’) by eating Phanes, a primordial dragon who hatched from a cosmic egg.Footnote ²⁸

The unique poetic achievement of the Hesiodic Theogony, as opposed to its successors, lies in the extraordinary originality of its pan-Hellenic perspective.Footnote ²⁹ Out of thin air it conjures an umbrella story for a bewildering maze of symbols and myths, piecing together elements chosen to be representative of the heritage of all Greeks. Yet its picture of the divine world is not simply copied from religious traditions: already in Hesiod there are attempts to rationalize the gods' relationships to the cosmos and to one another. When the poem makes a symbolic figure such as Eros the source of its genealogical impetus (Theog. 120), that is more than just a tweak to divine genealogy: it is also a statement about the natural forces at work in the universe. Acousilaus and Parmenides understood Hesiod this way, and agreed with him, as Phaedrus points out in Plato's Symposium.Footnote ³⁰ The Theogony belongs as much among the pre-Socratic natural philosophers as among the poets.Footnote ³¹

Individual episodes within the poem are captivating in their own right. The episode where Cronus castrates his father Sky, and subsequently Aphrodite is born (154–206), lends itself to Freudian interpretation with gleeful abandon. Zeus's fireworks in the battles against the Titans and the monster Typhoeus (617–880) not only provide a dazzling spectacle but also illustrate his divine benevolence. The list of Zeus's wives (886–923) – the main highlight being the scene where Athena is born, leaping forth fully armed from his head – illustrates Zeus's position as universal father, the head of the household for an entire universe.

This last scene brings us to a tricky problem in reading the Theogony as a literary text. It is beyond doubt that the last part of the poem is a hanger-on in some way: it was composed either separately from, or later than, the rest of the poem. Exactly how much of the final section is an intrusion is open to debate. Most scholars would place the cut-off point at line 900, some a bit later.Footnote ³² The old Loeb edition by H. G. Evelyn-White (1914) confused things further by inserting yet another intrusion after line 929, a nineteen-line passage that duplicates the story of Athena's birth.Footnote ³³ Several other parts of the poem are also detachable to some extent: it is possible to read the Theogony without its opening hymn, and the authenticity of the Typhoeomachy has often been doubted.Footnote ³⁴

But the text as it stands shows us a poet who has selected his stories carefully to create and reinforce a narrative about the nature of the universe: a story of divine justice, and of how the stability of the cosmos is underpinned by the threat of violence from Zeus. The episode of the separation at Mecone (Theog. 535–64) was not an automatic inclusion, for example; the story appears in no other ancient source.Footnote ³⁵ The poet chose to include it. Likewise the poet is in full control of the stories of Prometheus and Pandora: he uses them to establish Zeus as the ultimate arbiter of divine and mortal ethics, respectively. The Titanomachy and Typhoeomachy cast the Olympians as a universal police force. And onto this ethical and cosmic constitution the poet superimposes the succession myth, a violent genealogical story-type that we also see in older Near Eastern literature such as the Hurro-Hittite Kumarbi poems and the Babylonian Enuma elish. The poet ratifies and justifies Zeus's position using every tool available to him, to make all the cosmos fall within Zeus's purview. We cannot be certain that our Theogony was the first Greek poem to draw on so many resources to achieve a grand unified picture of the universe, but it was unquestionably the most successful in doing so.

3. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

The Catalogue, in five books, survives only as fragments, but those fragments are extensive: over 1,100 lines are complete or can be restored satisfactorily, representing probably about 25% of the poem. The opening lays out the Catalogue's programme: to tell of famous women from times past, their liaisons with men and gods, and their children (fr. 1.14–18):

Most of the poem is occupied with legendary genealogies. Starting from Deucalion and Pyrrha (frs. 2–6), it spreads its scope genealogically and geographically through the eponymous ancestors of Greece's main ethnic groups, beginning with the Aeolids (fr. 10 onwards) and working forwards, generation by generation, branch by branch, to the time of the Trojan War. At key points narrative vignettes appear, to spice up the genealogies: Heracles' sack of Pylos and duel with Periclymenus; the tricks of hungry Erysichthon and his cunning daughter Mestra; the foot race of Atalanta and Hippomenes. Some genealogical entries open with the formula e¯’ hoiē (‘or like her who’): this has given the poem the alternative title of the Ehoiae.

Book 5 is different. The surviving fragments give an extended account of the courtship of Helen, presided over by her brothers, Castor and Polydeuces. Much of the text is filled with a Catalogue of Helen's Suitors from all over Greece and the marriage gifts they bring to woo her; the formal elements of this catalogue follow much the same model as the Catalogue of Ships in Iliad Book 2 (see Chapter II on catalogues). The surviving text trails off with an account of Zeus's plan to lower the world's population by causing a great war – the Trojan War – and poetic metaphors for the ceaseless cycle of seasons, hinting at the endless nature of genealogy.Footnote ³⁶

There is no single standard edition. The major edition is that of Merkelbach and West (1967); but new fragments have continued to emerge, and their later minor edition (³1990) is just as important. Two more recent editions are also essential: Hirschberger's commentary (2004), and Most's new Loeb edition (2007). It is perhaps frustrating that research on the Catalogue requires four books at one's fingertips, but this also reflects the rapid pace at which our knowledge of the poem has increased.

There is no agreement about the poem's date. Janko's stylometric analysis puts the Catalogue roughly contemporary with or slightly earlier than the Hesiodic Theogony, in the first part of the seventh century;Footnote ³⁷ West interprets a number of supposed references to cult, other poems, and historical events in the poem as collectively pointing to a much later date, between 580 and 520.Footnote ³⁸ In both arguments, no weight can be attached to supposed imitative links between the Catalogue and other poems, since there is a strong presumption that similarities of that kind represent traditional elements, not allusions to a specific text. If West's later date is correct, still that date must not be interpreted simply: the poem contains much traditional material that goes back at least to the eighth century.Footnote ³⁹

Analysis of the fragments of Book 1 indicates that it must have run to well over 800 lines, perhaps as many as 1,100;Footnote ⁴⁰ so the whole poem would have been somewhat under half the length of the Odyssey. On the other hand, Book 5 may have been considerably shorter: it is hard to see what could have filled out the rest of it, unless the surviving fragments come from towards the end of the book.

The Catalogue is difficult to study, both because of its fragmentary nature and because of the disparate bibliography. But it is worth studying. In Roman Egypt it was the third most popular of all literary works, after the Iliad and Odyssey.Footnote ⁴¹ The Catalogue also had an immense impact on Hellenistic mythography, the scholarly trend of producing encyclopaedic summaries of myths, such as the Library of pseudo-Apollodorus. This in turn had knock-on effects on writers who made use of such mythographic texts: literary figures such as Ovid, historians like Diodorus, ethnographers such as Pausanias. These influences are often indirect. Even so, the Catalogue's influence on pseudo-Apollodorus was so strong that ps.-Apollodorus has formed the basis for nearly all reconstructions of the poem's structure in the last fifty years.

Another challenge is that it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the Catalogue and another poem that seems to have been similar: the Great Ehoiae (frs. 185–201 Most, frs. 246–62 Merkelbach–West). Commentaries on the fragments of that poem may be found in Hirschberger (2004) and D'Alessio (2005). With some fragments there is disagreement as to which poem they come from: the assignments in Merkelbach and West, Hirschberger, and Most are all slightly different. Asclepius' parentage (frs. 53–61 and 239–40) is the biggest area of doubt. In one poem his mother was Arsinoe; in the other, Coronis. Merkelbach and West provisionally put all the relevant fragments in the Catalogue; Hirschberger assigns Coronis to the Catalogue and Arsinoe to the Great Ehoiae; Most allocates Arsinoe to the Catalogue but leaves the question over Coronis open. The relevant fragments are linked to other fragments throughout the Catalogue, so the question is an important one, but insoluble on current evidence. Another problem concerns the Atalanta episode (frs. 47–51), and some other fragments attached to it, which may not belong to the Catalogue.

As a guide to the perplexed, an overview of the fragments is given below, based on Most's Loeb edition. This overview is not exhaustive but aims to highlight some of the poem's most interesting episodes, indicated in bold. References to recent discussions (other than Hirschberger's full commentary) are also given here and there.

• Proem: fr. 1

• Deucalion: frs. 2 to 8 (see also M. L. West 1985: 50–6)

• Hellen's descendants; Dorids, Xouthids: fr. 9 to fr. 10.24 (see also M. L. West 1985: 60–76)

• AEOLIDS: fr. 10.25 to fr. 71

• Thestius' descendants

• Althaea and her children

• Leda and her children (the Oresteia ): fr. 19.7 to fr. 21

• Meleager: fr. 22.1–13

• Deianeira; death and apotheosis of Heracles: fr. 22.14–33

• Hypermestra and her children: fr. 22.34 to fr. 23.4

• Porthaon's daughters; Heracles sacks Oechalia: fr. 23.5–37

• Salmoneus' descendants

• Tyro and Poseidon: fr. 27.24 to fr. 29

• Neleus and Pelias

• Heracles sacks Pylos; duel with Periclymenus: frs. 31 to 33

• Neleus' daughter Pero; Melampus and Bias: fr. 35

• (gap)

• Athamas (son of Aeolus): frs. 38 to 40

• Athamas' descendants by Themisto: frs. 41 to 51

• Atalanta and Hippomenes: frs. 47 to 51 (see also D'Alessio 2005: 213–16; Ormand 2014: 119–51)

• (gap)

• [The Arsinoe/Coronis problem: see above, and also D'Alessio 2005: 208–10]

• Arsinoe; Apollo's servitude to Admetus: frs. 53 to 60

• Coronis (=frs. 59 to 61 Merkelbach–West): see frs. 164, 239, 240

• (gap)

• Mestra and Erysichthon; Bellerophon: frs. 69 to 71 (see also Ormand 2014: 85–118)

• INACHIDS: frs. 72 to 109 (see also M. L. West 1985: 76–82)

• Io and her descendants

• Io: frs. 72 to 74

• Proetus, Acrisius, and their children: frs. 77 to 83

• The madness of Proetus' daughters: frs. 80 to 83

• Europa and her son Sarpedon: frs. 89 to 91 (see also M. L. West 1985: 82–5)

• Minos and Pasiphaë: frs. 92 to 95

• Phineus and his pursuit by the Harpies: frs. 96 to 105

• PELASGIDS

• Pelasgus; Callisto and her son Arcas; Auge and Heracles, and their son Telephus: frs. 110 to 117 (see also M. L. West 1985: 91–4)

• ATLANTIDS: frs. 118 to 141 (see also M. L. West 1985: 94–9)

• Atlas' daughters and descendants: frs. 118 to 122

• Alcyone, Aethusa, and descendants: frs. 123 to 131

• Pelopids: frs. 132 to 141 (see also M. L. West 1985: 109–14)

• Heracles, birth: frs. 138 to 139 (=Shield 1–56; see also Ormand 2014: 152–80)

• Heracles, apotheosis: fr. 140

• ASOPIDS: frs. 142 to 153

• Aeacus; Peleus sacks Iolcus; Peleus and Thetis: frs. 145 to 153

• BOOK FIVE

• Catalogue of Helen's suitors: frs. 154a (or 154b?) to 155.93 (see also M. L. West 1985: 114–19; Cingano 2005; Ormand 2014: 181–202)

• Twilight of the heroes: fr. 155.94–143 (see also M. L. West 1985: 119–24; Koenen 1994; Clay 2003: 169–73; Finkelberg 2004; González 2010; Ormand 2014: 202–16)

• UNPLACED FRAGMENTS: frs. 157 to 184

• Loves of Poseidon and Apollo: fr. 157

• Cyrene, Aristaeus, and Actaeon: frs. 158 to 163 (see also M. L. West 1985: 85–9)

• Athenian genealogies: frs. 169 to 173

• Heracleids: frs. 174, 175

• (Dorians, Leleges [=frs. 233, 234 Merkelbach–West]: see frs. 250, 251)

4. The Hesiodic Shield

The Shield – often known by its Greek or Latin titles, the Aspis or Scutum – is an odd poem, and often derided for its poor literary qualities. But it is our only intact heroic narrative in hexameter verse from between the times of Homer and Apollonius. That by itself is enough to make it important. Martin (2005) has made an attractive argument that the Shield should be read as ‘pulp’ epic: poetry designed around noise and excess, which uses glitzy stylistic effects to exploit its material. It is not compulsory to read the Shield through a ‘trash aesthetic’, as Martin puts it: no-one is obligated to enjoy the poem. But it is important to reject the misguided notion that it is only an adaptation or parody of Homer.Footnote ⁴² The Shield may well be a more typical example of early epic than the Iliad.

This book follows Most's (2007) text and translation; for a critical edition and commentary, Russo (1950; second edition 1965) is standard.Footnote ⁴³ In outline, the poem runs as follows:

1. 1–56 Birth of Heracles (=Catalogue fr. 138.8–63)

2. 57–121 Prelude to duel between Heracles and Cycnus

3. 122–38 Heracles' arming scene

4. 139–319 Rhetorical description (ekphrasis) of Heracles' shield

5. 320–480 Heracles defeats Cycnus and injures the god Ares

The Shield's origins are obscure. A doubtful report tells us that Stesichorus knew the poem (Hesiod test. 52), which would put it before c.560; and it has often been supposed that the fate of Cycnus in the poem's last lines represents the destruction of Crisa in the First Sacred War, in retaliation for Crisa's taxation on access to Delphi, referred to in the poem as Pytho (477–80):

The trouble is, first, that the duel is set at the shrine of Pagasaean Apollo in Thessaly, not at Crisa, and that an allegory for the First Sacred War really ought to depict a victory for a Magnesian hero (Cycnus), not a defeat. Secondly, it is doubtful whether the First Sacred War actually happened. No source prior to 350 gives an explicit sign of having heard of it. The inconsistent accounts of the war that we see after that date may well be ‘just so’ stories to rationalize control over Delphi by the amphictyony, a council of neighbouring states.Footnote ⁴⁴ Be that as it may, the Shield is normally dated to within a few decades of 600: only those who insist on authentic authorship by a historical Hesiod would place it earlier.Footnote ⁴⁵ The poem's geographic origins are also doubtful. It has traditionally been regarded as a Boeotian composition, because (1) the poem celebrates Heracles as a Theban, not Argive, hero, and contains other references to Thebes (104–5, 272); (2) the poem was regarded as Hesiodic in antiquity and Hesiod was Boeotian; (3) the closing lines (see above) may point to a vested interest in the Delphic amphictyony, which included Boeotia.Footnote ⁴⁶ This is not robust evidence. And, again, the theory neglects the Thessalian setting. A final point of obscurity surrounds the opening section of the Shield – on Heracles' birth – which also appeared word for word in Book 4 of the Catalogue of Women (Cat. frs. 138, 139); but exactly what this overlap means for the relationship between the two poems is debated. (For further discussion see Chapter VI on ‘cropping and stitching’ of poems.)

Dense poetic textures and crowded imagery dominate the poem's literary personality.Footnote ⁴⁷ Both in the long ekphrasis of Heracles' shield, which forms the centrepiece of the poem, and in the main narrative, the narrator piles detail upon detail. The ekphrasis of the shield contains no fewer than twelve personifications of Fear, Strife, Murder, and other dreadful entities; groups of boars and lions; three battle scenes – one of the Lapiths and Centaurs (with seventeen named fighters), one of an infantry battle (supervised by Ares, Fear, Rout, and Athena), and one of the siege of a city; a feast of the Olympians; a fishing scene; Perseus running from the Gorgons; a second city with scenes of a wedding, a cavalry parade, farming, sports, and hunting; and the Ocean surrounding everything, symbolically elevating the contents of the shield to a complete world. Myres (1941) makes a noble attempt to reconstruct a possible model where all these scenes could really be squeezed in, and even includes an illustration of his efforts by Joan M. Laing; but, as he points out, no real surviving artwork is nearly as dense and chaotic as this description.

This love of accumulation also appears in the duel of Heracles and Cycnus. The fighting itself occupies only eighteen lines (370–3, 380–5, 413–20). This thin account is filled out by no fewer than six similes (374–9, 386–92, 393–401, 402–4, 405–12, 421–4), four of them without pause; they are followed soon afterwards by a seventh and eighth simile (426–33, 436–42), when Ares attacks Heracles. Taken individually, the similes are perfectly respectable examples of the form, using the natural world to add impact or flavour to the battle:

The narrative technique is a familiar Homeric one: when the narrator approaches a climactic moment, he emphasizes its importance by stretching the narrative out – here, with similes. The oddity lies in the way that they are packed together so breathlessly. The poet actually runs out of steam towards the end: the eighth simile, likening two fighters rushing at each other to rocks bouncing down a cliff, is a reprise of the first.

This poem is a fun, and perhaps lurid, curiosity, tantalizing us with its hints at the many poems that we have lost. It should be sobering to think that a genuinely important and influential poem such as the Cypria may well have had more in common with the Shield than with the Iliad.

5. The Homeric Hymns

The Hymns are a collection of thirty-three poems that celebrate and tell stories about various gods of the Greek pantheon. Thirty-one are intact poems of the Archaic period; one, Hymn 1 (to Dionysus), survives only as fragments; another, Hymn 8 (to Ares), is an intruder in the collection, written over a millennium later.Footnote ⁴⁸ There are other fragmentary poems that we could put on the same shelf as the Hymns, such as the hymns attributed to Orpheus and Terpander, but, even so, the ‘Homeric’ collection shares a set of common generic and stylistic features that unite them as a group.

It is convenient to speak of ‘major’ and ‘minor’ hymns. Hymns 2 to 5, addressed to Demeter, Apollo, Hermes, and Aphrodite, are substantial compositions, each on a similar scale to the Shield. They contain detailed narratives about an important aspect of the relationship between the divine and mortal worlds. It is conventional to cite them by title, without a number. Hymn 1, to Dionysus, was also a major hymn, though only snippets survive. The minor hymns are much more modest pieces, though the two longest also contain narratives of great interest (Hymns 7 and 19, to Dionysus and Pan). When analysed purely in terms of their formal structure, the ‘major’ and ‘minor’ hymns look much less distinct: see the analysis of Janko (1981) and below (pp. 40–2).

This book follows the text and translation of M. L. West (2003b); the standard critical edition is that of Càssola (1986). The major hymns are well served with commentaries, with N. Richardson (1974) on Demeter and (2010) on Apollo, Hermes, and Aphrodite; Vergados (2012) on Hermes; and Faulkner (2008) and Olson (2012) on Aphrodite. Olson also covers nine of the minor hymns. There is little clear evidence for individual hymns' dates, but the major hymns probably range in date from the mid-600s (Aphrodite) to around 500 (Hermes).Footnote ⁴⁹

Alongside the recent crop of commentaries, literary interpretations of the Hymns have also been flourishing. A collection of essays edited by Faulkner (2011a) is an essential piece of bibliography. Clay has influentially argued that the major hymns have a cosmogonic flavour, in the sense that they are preoccupied with the institution of the divine order and establishment of individual gods' spheres of interest and positions in the ‘politics of Olympus'.Footnote ⁵⁰ Much attention has also been paid to ‘epiphanic’ moments in the major hymns, where the god's divine nature is revealed to mortals, or to the cosmos; the Hymn to Hermes has even been considered anomalous for not containing such a moment.Footnote ⁵¹

The Hymn to Demeter tells the story of Hades' rape of Persephone (1–41), Demeter's search for her daughter (42–90), and the institution of rites to honour both goddesses and to secure a blessed afterlife for Eleusinian initiates (268–304, 459–89). The poem is remarkable in many ways, not least in its emphasis on women's agency. Women are the main actors in the central episode of the poem, where Demeter takes refuge at Keleos' house in Eleusis. The same episode contains various hints at religious practices: the rite of Theoxenia, where the celebrants set a place for a god as an invisible guest at a feast; the origin story of the kykeōn potion drunk by Eleusinian initiates (206–11); and the abortive salvation of Demophon, cheated of immortality by his mother's fright (212–74).Footnote ⁵² Even if the poem is not precisely a ‘gospel of Demeter’, it would be fair to say that this is the closest we get to a ‘just so’ story about the theology of a Greek religious cult.

The Hymn to Apollo is the only hymn to which a named author can be attached – Cynaethus of ChiosFootnote ⁵³ – but it also poses the most formidable historical problems. The text as it stands relates three substantial narratives in two settings. The first (1–178) focuses on Apollo's cult site on Delos and relates Leto's long struggle to give birth to the god there; the second and third (179–387, 388–546) focus on Delphi, and tell of Apollo's slaying of a chaos-dragon (known to later authors as the ‘Python’, whence the alternative name for Delphi, ‘Pytho’), and his gathering of a group of Cretans to serve as his ministers. The Hymn has most often been understood as a composite of two poems that were originally separate: hymns to Delian Apollo (1–178) and to Pythian Apollo (179–546). Burkert and others have argued that Cynaethus compiled them into a single poem for the combined Delia–Pythia festival in 523 bce.Footnote ⁵⁴ But some readers have always wished to see the entire thing as a single coherent poem. Richardson sees the poem as a single composition in three parts.Footnote ⁵⁵ This is an appealing analysis, especially in view of the three route descriptions distributed across each section of the poem (Leto's search for a place to give birth, 30–49; Apollo's journey from Olympus to Delphi, 216–86; the journey of Apollo's new ministers from Crete to Delphi, 409–39). Even with Richardson's analysis, however, it remains likely that Cynaethus made extensive use of a lost *Pythian Apollo poem, while putting a considerable degree of his own artistry into the final product.

The Hymn to Hermes is a humorous story of the exploits and trickery of Hermes as a baby.Footnote ⁵⁶ Shortly after his birth he steals out of his crib at night and goes on a cattle raid against his older brother Apollo; along the way he invents the tortoiseshell lyre, sandals, and kindling, in quick succession (17–183). Apollo discovers the theft and confronts him, and the two gods try to outwit each other (184–321) but eventually go to Zeus for arbitration (322–96). Afterwards Apollo becomes entranced by Hermes' lyre (397–502) and, with the gift of the lyre, the two are reconciled before Zeus (503–78). The story is entertaining not just for Hermes' numerous deceptions but also for the irony of his disingenuous performance as a baby: ironic, since of course he genuinely is a baby. The poem's use of body language (laughter, farting, sneezing) suggests an element of farce that is reminiscent of Old Comedy. This poem is probably the latest of the major hymns, but recent studies have shown that it draws on some very archaic elements: the motif of a cattle raid as an initiatory act is of great antiquity, and is all the more striking since the poem does not seem to have been designed for any kind of initiatory function; and the abortive sacrifice scene where Hermes slaughters two of Apollo's oxen but does not eat them has parallels in an early Sumerian story about the hero Lugalbanda.Footnote ⁵⁷

The Hymn to Aphrodite, the shortest and probably the earliest of the major hymns, relates Aphrodite's love affair with the Trojan hero Anchises, and a lengthy prophecy made by Aphrodite about the birth of Aeneas. The most tantalizing points in this poem, apart from its archaic style, relate to Aphrodite's declaration about Aeneas' descendants (196–7):

Ancient writers sometimes took these lines as a reference to a supposed contemporary dynasty of Aeneadae who held power in the seventh-century Troad. The truth of the matter is obscure and continues to be debated.Footnote ⁵⁸ The poem ties itself to Trojan material in other ways too: when Aphrodite reassures Anchises, she draws parallels to his great-uncle Ganymede (202–17) and to Tithonus, brother of Priam and father of Memnon (218–38).

6. The Epic Cycle

Of all lost hexameter poems, the ones most often lamented by modern enthusiasts are those constituting the Epic Cycle. This was a group of eight early epics, including the two Homeric epics, which when spliced together formed a complete continuous account of the Trojan War: in sequence, the Cypria, Iliad, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Ilion, Returns, Odyssey, and Telegony. Alongside West's translated edition of the fragments (M. L. West 2003b) we have the critical editions of Bernabé (1996 [first published 1987]) and Davies (1988), and several commentaries and analyses of the fragments.Footnote ⁵⁹

The bulk of our knowledge of the six lost epics comes from a set of summaries in the Chrestomathy ascribed to ‘Proclus’. The identity of this Proclus is uncertain – it may be the famous Neoplatonist philosopher – but immaterial, as Proclus' summaries are in turn extracts from a mythographic source dating to the Hellenistic or early Roman period.Footnote ⁶⁰ There is considerable evidence that the epics originally extended further than Proclus indicates: for example, Burgess sees evidence that the Cypria was originally an Iliaca that covered the entire war.Footnote ⁶¹ We shall return to Burgess' ‘cropping hypothesis’ in Chapter VI. For now, we shall focus on the story as told by Proclus, since it is in that form that the epics made up a continuous ‘cycle’:

Cypria , 11 books, usually attributed to Cyprias of Halicarnassus or Stasinus of Cyprus.Footnote ⁶² The lead-up to the Trojan War and first nine years of the war, starting from the dispute of the goddesses at Peleus' and Thetis' wedding feast, extending through the judgment of Paris, the rape of Helen, the gathering of the fleet at Aulis, the landing at Troy, and events leading into Book 1 of the Iliad.

Iliad , 24 books, attributed to Homer. Achilles' wrath against Agamemnon and Hector; the deaths of Sarpedon, Patroclus, and Hector; funeral games for Patroclus; the ransom and burial of Hector's body.

Aethiopis , 5 books, usually attributed to Arctinus. The arrival of the Amazons and the death of Penthesileia (the so-called ‘Amazonis’); the arrival of the Aethiopes led by Memnon; the deaths of Antilochus, Memnon, and Achilles; funeral games for Achilles; the beginning of the quarrel over Achilles' arms.

Little Iliad , 4 books, usually attributed to Lesches of Mytilene. The judgment of the arms; the capture of Helenus, and his prophecies; the fetching of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes; the building of the wooden horse and its introduction into the walls of Troy.

Sack of Ilion , 2 books, attributed to Arctinus. The Trojans' debate over the wooden horse; the death of Laocoön; the sack of Troy, with deeds of Neoptolemus, Menelaus, the lesser Ajax, and Odysseus; the sacrifice of Polyxena.

Returns , 5 books, usually attributed to Agias. The dispute of Agamemnon and Menelaus; the departure of the Greeks; Menelaus' arrival in Egypt; the wrath of Athena and death of the lesser Ajax; the return of Neoptolemus; the murder of Agamemnon; the return of Menelaus.

Odyssey , 24 books, attributed to Homer. Telemachus' expedition to search for his father; Odysseus' departure from Calypso's island, sojourn among the Phaeacians, and account of his wanderings; the returns of Odysseus and Telemachus; the slaughter of Penelope's suitors.

Telegony , 2 books, usually attributed to Eugammon of Cyrene. Odysseus' voyage to Elis; his sojourn in Thesprotia; Telegonus' expedition to search for his father, and killing of Odysseus; the establishment of Odysseus' family as cult figures.

Isolated pieces of testimony attach other poems to a ‘cycle’: a theogony, Eumelus' Titanomachy, the Danais, Cinaethon's Oedipodea, the Homeric Thebaid and Epigoni, and the Alcmeonis.Footnote ⁶³ In terms of mythological content, a single cycle containing all of these plus the Trojan epics would be a hopeless mess. The only way to imagine a coherent longer cycle is to cherry-pick the ancient testimony. West suggests instead that there were multiple cycles, of which the Trojan Cycle was one. Scholars sometimes refer to the Oedipodea, Thebaid, Epigoni, and Alcmeonis as a ‘Theban cycle’, but they were not grouped together in antiquity.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Trojan epics, by contrast, do form a coherent group in Proclus' surviving summaries, and when modern scholars refer to the ‘Epic Cycle’ it is normally the Trojan epics that they are talking about.

We have no good evidence of any of the six lost epics being read after the time of Pausanias in the second century ce.Footnote ⁶⁵ Quotations and references transmitted in later sources are typically distilled from earlier scholarship, not based directly on the poems. One reference suggests that Porphyry (mid-to-late third century) may have known the Little Iliad personally;Footnote ⁶⁶ but in some cases (Aethiopis, Telegony) we have no evidence that the poems survived beyond the time of Augustus.Footnote ⁶⁷ They were certainly lost before the sixth century.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Cycle is of enormous importance for the history of the development of the Trojan War legend and for the study of Hellenistic mythographic traditions. Purely in terms of literary merit, though, it is fair to question whether we are missing out on very much. Ancient writers often contrast the Cyclic epics with Homer, with the implication that they are inferior. Aristotle famously criticizes the Cypria and Little Iliad for their episodic character, lacking an overarching plot-shape or unity.Footnote ⁶⁹ He does not extend the contrast to the other Cyclic epics, but he does tell us that they also contained much less direct speech than Homer.Footnote ⁷⁰ For Hellenistic literary critics, ‘cyclic’ became a general derogatory term meaning ‘banal, conventional’.Footnote ⁷¹ Horace, criticizing ‘the cyclic writer of old’ (scriptor cyclicus olim), prefers Homer's rushing ‘into the midst of things' (in medias res) to the practice of narrating the Trojan War from its very beginnings (gemino…ab ovo).Footnote ⁷² An epigram by Pollianus rages against the Cycle for plagiarizing Homer, and for droning on repeating ‘and then…and then…’.Footnote ⁷³ And Proclus' Chrestomathy tells us that literary standards of the day – the era of Proclus' Hellenistic source, that is – did not prize the Cycle for its poetic qualities but for its thorough and continuous narration of the legends.Footnote ⁷⁴

To an extent, however, these charges are themselves only a convention. Ancient testimony is not unanimous in drawing contrasts between Homer and the Cycle: the ancients assigned the Thebaid and Epigoni to Homer, and sometimes also the Cypria, Little Iliad, and Returns. And the Little Iliad probably possessed more unity than Aristotle lets on: Helenus' prophecies almost certainly provided a framing device for the other incidents in the poem. A good deal of thought appears to have gone into the composition of the Aethiopis and Telegony, in particular. Both poems are framed around, not a unity, but a duality of action: each consists of two major episodes that counterpoint each other. In the Aethiopis, the episode of Penthesileia and the ‘Amazonis’ balances the episode of Memnon and Achilles' death: in the first part, Achilles' victory over the Amazons is undermined by Thersites' rumours and murder at Achilles' hands; in the second part, the deaths of Antilochus and Achilles are partially redeemed by the rescue of Achilles' body. As for the Telegony, modern critics usually deride the poem for its inconsistencies with the Odyssey and the odd marriages between stepsons and stepmothers at the end of the poem. But the two halves of the poem appear to celebrate competing claims to Odysseus' grave site: one in Thesprotia, the other in central Italy (the traditional site of Circe's island and Telegonus' home).Footnote ⁷⁵ Sammons identifies both of these as large-scale cases of ‘narrative doublets’, a storytelling technique that is common in Homer and which Sammons shows to be common in the Cycle too; still, it is striking to see entire poems framed around this structure.Footnote ⁷⁶

Our sources cast each of the authors of the Cyclic epics as distinct figures. In other words, the Cycle was not a single monumental creation based on a predetermined design. The poems were originally independent and were only later compiled into a single continuous ‘cycle’. But how, when, and why this compilation happened is very uncertain. It makes most sense to imagine that the compilation happened after the word ‘cycle’ (kyklos, literally ‘circle’) had acquired a literary meaning. That must have appeared earlier than Aristotle, who cites a previous argument where a logician had given kyklos as an example of a word with a figurative sense, namely ‘an epic poem’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Elsewhere Aristotle mentions an obscure figure, Phayllus, who it seems had given a condensed summary of a ‘cycle’ (but we do not know what was in Phayllus' cycle).Footnote ⁷⁸ So we are looking at the mid-fourth century at the latest. There may be some basis for pushing the date back further: ancient commentators on Horace's Art of Poetry, where Horace refers to ‘the cyclic writer of old’, connect the word ‘cyclic’ with Antimachus' Thebaid (c.400 bce).Footnote ⁷⁹ Antimachus was a byword for longwindedness, and supposedly went in circles before getting to the point. However, Horace's commentators are very muddled: one is under the impression that Antimachus meandered for twenty-four books before the plot got under way, and the other somehow manages to take Horace's line ‘I shall sing of Priam's fortune’ as a quotation from the Thebaid. Still, there may possibly be a kernel of truth in their idea that the literary sense of kyklos goes back to Antimachus in some way.Footnote ⁸⁰

7. Oracle collectors (chresmologoi)

Think of prophecies in hexameter verse, and most people will think of the Delphic Oracle. Both in antiquity and in the modern era, Apollo's Pythia at Delphi has had a reputation for obscurity and ambiguity. This stereotype comes from the arcane quotations that Herodotus and Pausanias give us.Footnote ⁸¹ But it is an error. And not a doubtful or a slight error: it is drastically wrong. Historical pronouncements of the Pythia were almost never in verse;Footnote ⁸² they were normally clear and explicit;Footnote ⁸³ and nearly all attested verse oracles were invented after the fact for the sake of telling a good story. (It would, in any case, be the default presumption that most oracles are ex eventu compositions, written in hindsight of the events they ‘foretell’. Inauthenticity is especially clear in cases such as the oracles that Pausanias links to the Messenian Wars of the eighth and seventh centuries: his entire account is pure fiction.Footnote ⁸⁴ )

The stereotypical obscure verse oracle is much more in tune with what we know of the chresmologoi, oracle collectors, of the sixth and fifth centuries.Footnote ⁸⁵ We possess only fragments. Epimenides and Musaeus are the best known names in the genre; testimony about their lost poems appears in Bernabé's edition of the Orphic fragments.Footnote ⁸⁶ Also significant are Abaris of Hyperborea, Bacis of Eleon, and Onomacritus of Athens; then there are minor figures such as Amphilytus, Diopeithes, Euclus, and various individuals called Sibyls. Modern critical editions serve these figures poorly: only the Onomacritus fragments have an adequate edition.Footnote ⁸⁷

The Athenians of the Archaic period, at least, took oracle collectors seriously. According to Herodotus (7.6), Onomacritus was banished for introducing an oracle of his own into his edition of Musaeus' oracles – evidently he was the real author of the poem in question, writing in the persona of Musaeus. Later on, oracle collectors had a mixed reputation both in public forums and in historiography. Aristophanes viciously satirizes Bacis in his Knights, Birds, and Peace; Herodotus is contemptuous of Abaris (4.36); Thucydides reports on Athenian fury at the oracle collectors after the disaster of the Sicilian expedition (8.1.1). But some oracle collectors continued to enjoy favour on a case-by-case basis: Herodotus will not hear a word said against Bacis (8.77; see also 8.20, 8.96, etc.); Musaeus also seems to have retained his popularity (Hdt. 8.96, 9.43; Ar. Ran. 1033); Thucydides reports on popular faith in oracles (2.8.2, 2.54) and himself approves of an oracle at one point (5.26.3); and the Athenians took their loss in the battle of Aegospotami as confirmation of oracles by the Sibyl and Musaeus (Paus. 10.9.11). It is intuitively likely, though unprovable, that many famous oracles supposedly from Delphi actually came from oracle collectors. It is very difficult to sustain a Delphic origin for something like the prophecy of the ‘wooden wall’ that supposedly influenced Themistocles' naval policy, for example.Footnote ⁸⁸

Stylistically, the extant fragments make heavy use of metonymy; animal imagery;Footnote ⁸⁹ and instructions laid out in a conditional ‘If/when X happens, Y will happen’ form.Footnote ⁹⁰ A few seem to contain elements of theogonic material.Footnote ⁹¹ They have some points in common with legendary seers: the same tropes appear in the prophecies of Calchas, Teiresias, and Theoclymenus in Homeric epic.Footnote ⁹² Clement of Alexandria compiles a list of oracle collectors that includes real authors alongside purely legendary figures such as Calchas, Boio, Manto, and the Argonaut Mopsus; he goes on to attribute a Divination of Mopsus poem to Battus, the founder of Cyrene.Footnote ⁹³

A typical example of the genre is the following quotation from Bacis, which Herodotus connects to Xerxes' invasion (Hdt. 8.20):

Supposedly these lines meant that the Euboeans should take Xerxes' bridging the Hellespont as a sign to evacuate the island. The conditional structure, and the metonymy in papyrus = boats, goats = property, are typical features.

A fourth-century Attic inscription quotes an oracle that was originally designed to fit Xerxes' invasion of Greece in 480 (IG II² 4968.15–21):

Originally the hawk represented Xerxes; at the time of the inscription, it became Philip of Macedon. Parke's analysis of this oracle shows that the oracle collectors were still being quoted and reinterpreted in the mid-fourth century.Footnote ⁹⁴

8. Epigraphy

Hexameter inscriptions do not share a clearly defined genre with literary hexameter poetry, on the whole. They are normally very short and lack tropes such as similes. But themes familiar from literary verse do appear, and occasionally metrical formulae too. Regrettably, the most thorough editions lack a metrical index, so I present a catalogue below. The most important single edition is CEG, Hansen's Carmina Epigraphica Graeca (1983). Wachter's Non-Attic Greek Vase Inscriptions (2001) gives improved texts in places, and adds several new inscriptions. A few are supplied from other sources, including ancient witnesses.

• • Four inscriptions from 700 bce or earlier: Wachter ITH 1 (~CEG 453); CEG 432, 433, 454.

• • Twenty from 600 bce or earlier: Wachter COP 2A, COP 2B, COP 3(b), COP 11(b), DOC 3, IOD 4A; CEG 109, 132, 137, 143, 144, 145, 152, 287, 288, 326, 352, 353, 403, 404.

• • Ninety-two from 500 bce or earlier: Wachter BOI 3 (=CEG 327), BOI 4C (=CEG 445), COP 1A (=CEG 360), COP 1B (=CEG 358), COP 1C (=CEG 359), COP 1D, COP 4, COR 17b (=CEG 452), NAU 1B; CEG 15, 16, 23, 35, 36.ii, 40, 47.i, 53, 55, 59, 62, 65, 71, 110, 129, 138, 139, 146, 157, 166, 181, 182, 183+184+185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 193.i, 195, 198.ii, 203, 204, 206, 211, 215.ii, 217, 281, 282, 290, 291, 294, 299, 301, 333, 334, 335, 337, 338, 344, 345, 348, 354, 355, 363, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 374, 375, 376, 391, 398, 405, 406, 412.i, 422, 423, 424+425, 426, 427, 434, 435.ii, 438, 444.i, 456, 459, 462; Immerwahr 2009 no. 847; Pausanias 5.17–19 (=chest of Kypselos), 6.19.6.

• • Sixty-seven from 400 bce or earlier: Wachter DOC 6; CEG 73, 83, 84, 88, 100, 116, 119, 122, 124, 125, 126, 130, 133, 141, 150.i, 224, 226, 227, 239, 240, 250, 256, 259, 260.i, 265.ii, 267, 271.ii, 273.i, 277, 278.i, 283, 295, 296, 297, 298, 318, 323, 325, 328, 329, 339, 340, 341, 356, 361.i, 364, 377, 378, 384, 388.i, 397, 400, 417, 441, 464, 465; Inscriptiones Graecae I³ 754, 865; Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum 20: 294; Immerwahr 2009 nos. 1641, 2330; Herodotus 5.59, 5.60, 5.61; Contest of Homer and Hesiod 15, 18 (cf. alternate texts in Life of Homer 2.11, 2.36).

• • Six of uncertain, but early, date: Wachter COP 5, COP 6, COP 50; Inscriptiones Graecae XII.3 543; Palatine Anthology 7.177; IG XIV 1293.b.1–3 (i.e. the Tabula Albana; second-hand quotation; =FGrH 40 F 1b; cf. Paus. 9.10.4).

• • Twenty-six damaged and of questionable metre: Wachter COP App. 1A(c), COR GR 26(1), NAU 1G; CEG 17, 29, 30, 63, 64, 107, 114, 128, 223, 249, 255, 257, 289, 292, 300, 303, 310, 319, 402.ii, 408, 419, 420; Immerwahr 2009 no. 1668.

Inscriptions can be a shock for an unwary student trained in Attic and Homeric Greek. Most are in alphabets that use ε and ο where a conventionally trained student would expect η/ει and ω/ου. Vowels that are elided for metrical purposes are usually written rather than omitted (an extreme case is καταέθε̄κε for κατέθηκε, CEG 137). Many retain archaic letters for the sounds h, k, and w; and the last of these, ϝ digamma, often appears with unfamiliar surrounding vowels (e.g. πρόξενϝος for πρόξεινος, CEG 143).Footnote ⁹⁵

The two largest groups are grave epitaphs and dedications. Grave epitaphs are mostly in the elegiac metre, with only a minority in hexameter. In dedicatory and other inscriptions, there is a roughly fifty–fifty split between hexameter and elegiac verse, and a small share set aside for other metres. A few inscriptions do not fit in these two groups, and mark private possessions or celebrations of personal achievements.

Grave epitaphs show the most variety, and occasionally draw on themes familiar from epic to celebrate the deceased. The remarkable epitaph for Deinias is impressively concise (CEG 132; Corinth, c.650):

With a single word, ‘shameless’, the poet encapsulates the frustration and grief felt by Deinias' survivors, and the indignity that his family cannot grieve for him at his actual grave. The anthropomorphization of the sea even hints at epic scenes, such as Poseidon wrathfully stirring up a storm in Odyssey Book 5. Some other particularly striking grave inscriptions are the epitaphs for Menecrates, the Oeanthean proxenos on Cercyra (CEG 143, c.625–600); a touching memorial for Gnathius, dedicated by his young beloved (CEG 47; Attica, c.525–500?); and epitaphs in full-blown heroic style for Arniadas (CEG 145, Cercyra, late seventh or early sixth century) and Pythion of Megara (CEG 83; Athens, 446–425?).

Dedicatory inscriptions are often one- or two-line formulae that vary only in the name of the donor. But they also include two of the most famous of all early inscriptions: the early verse inscription on the Mantiklos Apollo (CEG 326; Thebes, c.700–675), and the ‘Nikandre inscription’ (CEG 403; Delos, c.650). A few of these, too, contain echoes of the epic tradition. One Phaueristos (or Phaneristos?), dedicating a set of vessels to Athena, drew on the age-old heroic trope of ‘unfading fame’, κλέϝος ἄπθιτον (CEG 344, lost; Crisa, c.600–550?). Athletes and lovers sometimes commemorated their conquests with a verse or two, and one Exoida dedicated a discus with an epigram that has resonances in the Iliad and the Hymn to the Dioscuri (CEG 391; Cephallenia, c.550–525?).Footnote ⁹⁶