Aratus' striking mythical digression (96–136) in the Phaenomena on the constellation of the Maiden (Παρθένος), whom he identifies with the virginal Justice (Δίκη), stands out against the preceding technical description of star groups.Footnote 1 The passage has unsurprisingly received the frequent notice of critics, with particular attention paid to the episode's relation to and refashioning of the Myth of Ages in Hesiod's Works and Days 106–201:Footnote 2 one tale that circulates among men, so the narrator informs us (λόγος γε μὲν ἐντρέχει ἄλλος | ἀνθρώποις, 100–1), has the constellation qua Dike live among men and women in a Golden Age (101–14), withdraw to the mountains but still visit humans in a Silver Age (115–29), and then withdraw permanently to the sky (where, however, she is still visible) in a Bronze Age (129–36).
Dike, who in Hesiod is described as the daughter of Zeus overseeing justice among mankind outside the context of the Myth of Ages (Op. 256–85), is given a central role in the myth by Aratus. Her unique presence is marked all the more by the pronouncement in her own voice of a four-line prophecy to the denizens of the Silver Age (123–6):
What an inferior generation your golden fathers have left! And you are likely to beget a still more evil progeny. There will surely be wars, yes, and unnatural bloodshed among men, and suffering from their troubles will come upon them.Footnote 3
Dike's utterance is the only instance of direct speech in the poem. The limited amount of oratio recta need not surprise us in a poem working within the didactic tradition,Footnote 4 but the singularity of Dike's female voice within Aratus' Phaenomena is nonetheless arresting. The language of Dike's direct address has, however, received only limited attention in previous scholarship. My purpose in what follows is to consider more fully the interpretative implications of this speech, particularly in relation to the model of Hesiod's Works and Days, for the role of women in Aratus' Myth of Ages.
It has been suggested that Dike's direct address is in part modelled upon Zeus's threatening speech to Prometheus at Works and Days 54–8,Footnote 5 in which the father of the gods famously promises to give to mankind a great evil, albeit one that will be embraced, in the form of Pandora:
Son of Iapetos, clever above all others, you are pleased at having stolen fire and outwitted me – a great calamity both for yourself and for men to come. To set against the fire I shall give them an affliction in which they will all delight as they embrace their own misfortune.Footnote 6
There is a natural connection between the two speeches, as both foretell future misery and decline for humankind, in Hesiod through the figure of Pandora, who is tied to humankind's later suffering in the Iron Age.Footnote 7 Aratus, it seems, has transposed the foreboding prophecy of mankind's future from the male voice of Zeus to the female voice of his daughter Dike. The link between Dike and Zeus is suggested obliquely at the outset of the mythical digression, when the poet indicates that one tradition makes the Maiden the daughter of Astraeus, while according to an alternative tradition she is the daughter of ‘some other’ (εἴτε τευ ἄλλου, 99), apparently a reference to Zeus.Footnote 8 Moreover, just a few lines later in the episode we are subtly reminded of Zeus's centrality in the Stoic ordering of the cosmos through an echo of the Phaenomena's prologue: [Δίκη] ἀγειρομένη δὲ γέροντας | ἠέ που εἰν ἀγορῇ ἢ εὐρυχόρῳ ἐν ἀγυιῇ (‘[Dike] gathering together the elders, either in the market-place or the broad highway’; 105–6) recalls μεσταὶ δὲ Διὸς πᾶσαι μὲν ἀγυιαί, | πᾶσαι δ' ἀνθρώπων ἀγοραί (‘Filled with Zeus are all highways and all meeting-places of people; 2–3).Footnote 9 Through this echo, as Fantuzzi and Hunter observe of Aratus' un-Hesiodic inclusion of agriculture in the Golden Age,
the Prologue's emphasis on agriculture (7–9) is now seen not merely to mark the most obvious sphere in which Zeus's ‘signs’ may be exploited and to evoke the Works and Days as primary model, but also to privilege agriculture as a model for the right ordering of the world: honest toil is rewarded with the earth's plenty.Footnote 10
At the same time, the echo aligns the voices of Dike and Zeus. Gathering together the elders in the market-place or streets, Dike speaks to them to urge just decisions for the people (δημοτέρας ἤειδεν ἐπισπέρχουσα θέμιστας, ‘she urged them in prophetic tones to judgements for the good of the people’; 107), while in the prologue Zeus, who fills the marketplaces and streets, not only gives signs but ‘speaks’ to mankind (5–9):
For we are also his children, and he benignly gives helpful signs to men, and rouses people to work, reminding them of their livelihood, tells when the soil is best for oxen and mattocks, and tells when the seasons are right both for planting trees and for sowing every kind of seed.
The repetition of λέγει δ' ὅτε in lines 7–8 evokes Zeus's verbal capacity,Footnote 11 which through the recollection of the prologue is later taken up by Dike, first in indirect speech and then later in direct speech. The link between Zeus's voice in the prologue and the prophetic speech of Dike is perhaps made even stronger by the rare predicative sense of λέγει in lines 7–8, which is elsewhere connected to oracular response.Footnote 12 Behind the prophetic voices of the Aratean Zeus and Dike hovers the Hesiodic prophecy of Zeus to Prometheus.
Dike's voice is ultimately connected to several voices. Her wandering in the mountains and the introduction of her indirect speech by the verb ἀείδω (107), here to ‘utter solemnly’ but also to ‘sing’, connect her to the figure of the poet: both that of the Aratean poet-narrator, furthered through the ties to the speaking Zeus of the prologue, and that of the Hesiodic poet-narrator,Footnote 13 who prophesies the destruction of the Iron Age by Zeus at Works and Days 180–2:Footnote 14
Yet Zeus will destroy this race of men also, when at birth they turn out grey at the temples. Nor will father be like children nor children to father.
Of course, there are differences: Aratus' Myth of Ages includes only three generations, stopping before the Iron Age, and Zeus in Hesiod (both in this prophecy and more generally in the Myth of Ages) takes an active role in the creation and destruction of the ages, whereas in Aratus Dike plays a more passive role, with the agency for creation and destruction transferred to humankind itself.Footnote 15 Dike's prophecy to humankind nonetheless seems to recall this particular Hesiodic warning.Footnote 16 The theme of degenerative procreation, which in Hesiod gives rise to Zeus's destruction of humankind (Zεὺς δ' ὀλέσει καὶ τοῦτο γένος μερόπων ἀνθρώπων, εὖτ' ἂν γεινόμενοι πολιοκρόταϕοι τελέθωσιν. οὐδὲ πατὴρ παίδεσσιν ὁμοίιος οὐδέ τι παῖδες, ‘Yet Zeus will destroy this race of men also, when at birth they turn out grey at the temples. Nor will father be like children nor children to father’; 180–2), is adapted by Aratus to explain, in the mouth of Dike, the future decline from one age to the next (οἵην χρύσειοι πατέρες γενεὴν ἐλίποντο | χειροτέρην· ὑμεῖς δὲ κακώτερα τεξείεσθε, ‘What an inferior generation your golden fathers have left behind! And you are likely to beget a still more evil progeny’; 123–4).
In this second recollection of male prophecy in Hesiod, the transposition of the foretelling from the male voice of the poet-narrator, ‘Hesiod’, to the female voice of Dike is underscored by the particular choice of language. Dike describes the decline from the Golden Age to the Silver Age as effected through the paternal line (οἵην χρύσειοι πατέρες γενεὴν ἐλίποντο | χειροτέρην, ‘What an inferior generation your golden fathers have left behind!’; 123–4), but the language of leaving behind an inferior race recalls a Hesiodic passage in which Dike features prominently: the man who lies in violation of his oath, thereby harming Dike, will leave behind an unprosperous line ([ὃς] ψεύσεται, ἐν δὲ Δίκην βλάψας νήκεστον ἀάσθη, | τοῦ δέ τ' ἀμαυροτέρη γενεὴ μετόπισθε λέλειπται, ‘but whoever deliberately lies in his sworn testimony, therein, by injuring Right, he is blighted past healing; his family remains more obscure thereafter’; Hes. Op. 283–4), whereas the man who keeps his oath will leave behind a ‘better race’ (ἀμείνων γενεή, Op. 285).
Dike's use of the verb τίκτω (‘to beget’/‘to birth’) in line 124 (transmitted by the manuscripts ὑμεῖς δὲ κακώτερα τεξείεσθε, ‘You are likely to beget/birth a still more evil progeny’) to describe the decline from the Silver Age to the Bronze Age places even more emphasis on the role of human reproduction in the degeneration of humankind, but also balances the paternal and maternal roles in the process. Whereas the deterioration from the Golden Age to the Silver Age is in Dike's telling patrilineal, the generalized ὑμεῖς (‘you’) potentially places blame on both sexes. This possibility is especially present after the clear statement at the outset of the digression that Dike, in coming face to face with humankind in the Golden Age, spurned the tribes of neither ancient men nor women (οὐδέ ποτ' ἀνδρῶν | οὐδέ ποτ' ἀρχαίων ἠνήνατο ϕῦλα γυναικῶν, 102–3).Footnote 17
The verb τίκτω can describe either men begetting or women giving birth to children,Footnote 18 but there is reason to think that women are at least included as addressees. For the sentiment concerning childbearing/begetting, given the strong background presence of Hesiod's Works and Days, may again recall a Hesiodic passage concerned with Dike, this time in which the production of children by women is closely linked to justice. In contrasting the cities of the just and the unjust, shortly after the introduction of the personified Dike, Hesiod tells that for those who respect justice women bear good children resembling their fathers (τίκτουσιν δὲ γυναῖκες ἐοικότα τέκνα γονεῦσιν, 235), whereas for those who embrace hubris women do not bear children at all (οὐδὲ γυναῖκες τίκτουσιν, 244).Footnote 19 There is a structural parallelism between the two passages. Following Hesiod's positive statement about women bearing ἐοικότα τέκνα γονεῦσιν (‘children resembling their fathers’) to the just, two lines (236–7) expand upon the benefits that such people enjoy (they flourish, never take to the seas, and live with plentiful provision from the land), in language that recalls the description of the Golden Age.Footnote 20 Conversely, following Dike's negative statement in Aratus, two lines (125–6) expand upon the evils that accompany the degenerates of the Bronze Age (war, unnatural bloodshed, and suffering).
In the Hesiodic model, the description of just and unjust cities concludes with a second-person plural address (the only such address in the poem) to the kings responsible for upholding justice (ὦ βασιλῆς, ὑμεῖς δὲ καταϕράζεσθε καὶ αὐτοί | τήνδε δίκην, ‘You too, my lords, attend to the justice-doing of yours’; 248–9).Footnote 21 In Aratus, Dike again takes over the voice of the Hesiodic poet-narrator through the use of the same pronoun, ὑμεῖς,Footnote 22 which however no longer targets kings specifically but humankind as a whole, including both men and women. Aratus thus recasts the Hesiodic role of women in relation to just living, to give them more agency in its maintenance or dissolution. Whereas in Hesiod women's bearing of good children is a consequence of respecting justice and sterility the product of ignoring it, Dike's prophecy in Aratus suggests that women, through their role in childbirth, play an active role in the preservation (or, in this negative exemplum, loss) of justice.
As indicated above, Aratus makes explicit earlier in the mythical digression that Dike comes face to face with both men and women (102–3), a feature that has been connected by Schiesaro to Stoic thought concerning the participation of both men and women in political activities.Footnote 23 This is an attractive supposition. According to Diogenes Laertius, the Stoic Zeno advocated no distinction between the sexes in matters of dress, presumably because he held that there was no essential difference between men and women, and there is a good amount of evidence for Stoics treating men and women as equally capable of philosophizing and attaining virtue.Footnote 24 It seems safe to assume also that in Zeno's ideal republic, as in Plato's, women should share political responsibilities with men.Footnote 25 If such Stoic thinking does lie behind the explicitly public role of women in Aratus' Golden Age,Footnote 26 Dike's prophecy carries further the implications of this role by pointing to the significance of women's shared activity for a just, harmonious existence. Importantly, the decline of humankind in Aratus' Myth of Ages is not an inevitable moral degeneration, as in Hesiod, but a process brought about through human actions – the threats which Dike makes in her prophecy imply that humankind, men and women together, can change its lot in life.Footnote 27
The verbal connection between Dike's ὑμεῖς δὲ κακώτερα τεξείεσθε (‘You are likely to beget/birth a still more evil progeny’; 124) and Works and Days 235 (τίκτουσιν δὲ γυναῖκες ἐοικότα τέκνα γονεῦσιν, ‘women bear children resembling their fathers’) would be strengthened should one adopt Kaibel's conjecture τέκνα τεκεῖσθαι for the unparalleled form τεξείεσθε, often taken as desiderative.Footnote 28 Martin, who adopts Kaibel's proposal, rejects the transmitted form as a ‘monster’.Footnote 29 Kidd retains it on the grounds that the manuscript evidence is strong, but follows Veitsch in taking τεξείεσθε as a future form.Footnote 30 The transmitted text might well stand as a unique poetic future, but it is worth pointing out that Kaibel's κακώτερα τέκνα τεκεῖσθαι, with cognate accusative, would potentially evoke more than one relevant intertext. Not only would this strengthen the verbal allusion to Op. 235 τίκτουσιν…ἐοικότα τέκνα (with which, as I have suggested above, Aratus seems to engage),Footnote 31 but it would also bring into play the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 127, ἀγλαὰ τέκνα τεκεῖσθαι (‘to give birth to glorious children’), on which Kaibel based his conjecture.Footnote 32
In that poem, the phrase is used by the goddess Aphrodite, who in disguise as a mortal Phrygian princess is foretelling to Anchises, as part of an elaborate lie intended to seduce him, the future children whom she will bear as his wife. Here we have not only another prophecy, but a mendacious one in the mouth of a trickster goddess: that is, a prophecy whose nature stands in direct opposition to the Hesiodic figure of Dike. As we have seen, at Works and Days 282–5, the man who lies (ψεύσεται, 283) in violation of his oath harms Dike and leaves behind a reduced generation (τοῦ δέ τ' ἀμαυροτέρη γενεὴ μετόπισθε λέλειπται, 284), a passage recalled by the language of Dike's prophecy in Aratus. Also relevant here is Dike's relation to the Hesiodic Muses, who in contrast to the clearly visible Dike are able to speak both lies and truth.Footnote 33 The potential allusion also to the false prophecy of Aphrodite would in this context serve as a pointed foil for the prophecy of the upright and truthful Dike.
Whether one accepts Kaibel's conjecture or not, the figure of Aphrodite-Love is undoubtedly at play in Aratus' Dike episode. In addition to Hesiod's Myth of Ages, Aratus also summons up Empedocles' Golden Age, in which there was no Ares, Battle-Din (Κυδοιμός), Zeus, Kronos, or Poseidon, but Aphrodite-Love was queen (βασίλεια), and men did not eat the flesh of the ox.Footnote 34 Aratus' Golden Age similarly contains neither violence nor battle-din (οὔπω λευγαλέου τότε νείκεος ἠπίσταντο | οὐδὲ διακρίσιος περιμεμϕέος οὐδὲ κυδοιμοῦ, ‘At that time they still had no knowledge of painful strife or quarrelsome conflict or noise of battle’; 108–9), while the degenerate Bronze Age is the first to eat ploughing oxen (132).Footnote 35 Moreover, whereas in Empedocles Aphrodite-Love is portrayed as a queen (βασίλεια), in Aratus it is Dike who is queen (αὐτὴ πότνια λαῶν, ‘Justice herself, queen of the people’; 112).Footnote 36 Divine παρθένοι (‘maidens’), although virginal, contain a strong potential for fecundity and are often connected to vegetal and human fertility,Footnote 37 as Dike is linked here to Demeter (97, Στάχυν, ‘Spica’) and generation of humankind.Footnote 38 Empedocles' cosmogonic force of Love naturally lacks the deceptiveness and emphasis on physical beauty of the Hesiodic Aphrodite, who within the mythological tradition deceptively wields her sexuality, beauty, and charm to get what she wants.Footnote 39 She is instead a unifying cosmogonic force (in contrast to the dividing force Strife), a being who engenders harmony and causes mortals to work together.Footnote 40 Aratus' honest and virginal Dike, whose advice to men and women concerning good judgements (θέμιστας, 107) ensures the harmony of the Golden Age, is an alternative form of such positive female agency, reorienting the Empedoclean image of feminine power toward the primacy of Justice in the cosmic order.
The particular language of Dike's prophecy, which as we have seen recalls Hesiod's concern with the role of women in a just society, underscores this relevance of female justice on the mortal plane also. For lurking in the shadows of Dike's speech is a quite different and dangerous image of female power, Pandora, evoked through recollection of the Hesiodic model for Dike's prophecy with which we began: Zeus's speech to Prometheus foretelling the suffering that he will inflict on mankind through Pandora (Op. 54–8). For in her ideal beauty and her capacity for deception (indeed in her very nature as δόλος, ‘trick/deceit’; Th. 589, Op. 83), Pandora gives mortal expression to essential elements of the more familiar deceptive Aphrodite of the mythological tradition.Footnote 41 Divine and mortal archetypes thus converge as Dike's prophecy, in conversation with key passages of Hesiod's Works and Days, recasts the potentialities of female power in human society. In Dike's prophecy, women may still play a role in engendering suffering (κακῶν…ἄλγος, 126),Footnote 42 but this is no longer, as for Pandora, tied to inherent traits of beauty and deception, nor in Aratus' recasting of the Myth of Ages are women, as is Pandora, a ‘fundamentally different breed’, such that ‘man and woman cannot converse with one another because she conceals the truth in order to deceive’.Footnote 43 Dike's strong female voice, in contrast to the models of male prophetic speech in Hesiod's Works and Days, places men and women on a more equal footing.
Like Dike, mortal women do converse publicly with men in an ideal society (102–3). Furthermore, Dike's prophetic language, which through its recollection of Hesiod's treatment of women suggests that women are to be included as addressees in the unspecified ὑμεῖς in line 104, implies that the potential for women to help or harm society is controlled not only by male, as in Hesiod, but also by female agency. In line with Stoic views, men and women must work together to ensure a harmonious society of concord. As if to underscore this point, the discordant separation of men and women is enacted at the end of the episode, as the female Dike sets herself at a permanent remove from the degenerate Bronze Age. Whereas the description of her interaction with humankind of the Golden and Silver Ages is either explicitly inclusive of both sexes or generic (102–3: οὐδέ ποτ' ἀνδρῶν | οὐδέ ποτ' ἀρχαίων ἠνήνατο ϕῦλα γυναικῶν, ‘and she did not ever spurn the tribes of ancient men and women’;Footnote 44 116: ποθέουσα παλαιῶν ἤθεα λαῶν, ‘she longed for the ways of the earlier folk’; 120: ἀλλ' ὁπότ' ἀνθρώπων μεγάλας πλήσαιτο κολώνας, ‘But filling the broad hillsides with people’; 127: τοὺς δ' ἄρα λαούς, ‘the people’), subsequent to her prophecy Dike is unambiguously at odds with ἄνδρες (‘men’): the Bronze Age consists of ὀλοώτεροι ἄνδρες (‘men more dstructive’; 130) and Dike withdraws to the sky in hatred of the γένος ἀνδρῶν (καὶ τότε μισήσασα Δίκη κείνων γένος ἀνδρῶν | ἔπταθ' ὑπουρανίη, ‘then Justice, conceiving a hatred for the generation of these men, flew up to the sky’; 133–4).Footnote 45 The estrangement of Dike from the Bronze Age is therefore also representative of an estrangement of the sexes. The unjust actions of men (ἄνδρες) who act apart from her, a divine paradigm of human female voice and agency, are simultaneously a symptom and a cause of dissonance in Aratus' humanity. Men might take special care not to disenfranchise women. For if, as a constellation in the night sky, Justice remains a ray of hope, she is once more a visible sign relevant to all humankind (ἔτι ϕαίνεται ἀνθρώποισιν, 135), men and women alike.
