Matthieu Real, Cornell University
According to an ancient tale, Homer and Hesiod once fought for the title of best poet: despite Homer being the crowd’s favorite, the victory went to Hesiod. The Contest of Homer and Hesiod narrates how the competition came to be and what happened during it. Long celebrated as a manifesto of rhapsodic skill (Ritook 1962; Collins 2004: 179-191), the Contest depicts, instead, two Archaic authors anachronistically posing as fifth-century literary critics.
Contrary to what we would expect from a poetical competition, in the Contest, Homer and Hesiod do not limit themselves to reciting bits of their poems, but engage in five different riddling games. Some of these games consist of performing seemingly impossible tasks, e.g., singing about things that are not, will never be, and never were (l. 97–8); others consist of answering trivia-like questions, e.g., how many Achaeans went to Troy (ll. 140–1)?
In this paper, I focus on a specific game: the “ambiguous propositions” (ll. 102–37). First, Hesiod recites a hexameter whose meaning is problematic. Then, Homer adds a new line that turns the original meaning on its head. For example, at line 107 Hesiod utters the following hexameter: δεῖπνον ἔπειθ᾽εἵλοντο βοῶν κρέα, καὐχένας ἵππων. The line signifies that the Greeks were eating their own horses (!) until Homer adds: ἔκλυον ἱδρώοντας, ἐπεὶ πολέμοιο ἐκόρεσθεν. The sentence now makes better sense: “Then, sated with war, they dined on beef and cleansed the sweaty necks of their horses.” At the core of the exchange is the syntactical re-arrangement of the words in a sentence, what Aristotle in Poetics would call diaresis (Poet. 1461a23-25). Once Homer performs his line, καὐχένας ἵππων ceases to be the object of εἵλοντο and becomes the object of ἔκλυον. I show that both the commentator of Derveni and Socrates in Plato’s Protagoras exploit diaresis to defend their (mis)interpretations of, respectively, an Orphic poem and Simonides’ Ode to Scopas. The technique would become a staple of later exegesis, as shown by examples I collect from the Scholia to Homer.
The game of the “ambiguous propositions” also provides us with a sample of the types of criticism that readers subjected their literary texts to. I study the criticisms implicit in Hesiod’s lines and I compare them with the critiques that roughly contemporary critics (Protagoras, Zoilus, and Plato) and later ones (Aristotle and Hellenistic commentators) would level against Homer. For instance, at the core of Plato’s critique (Rep. 391b) of the story of Achilles’ dragging Hector’s corpse (Il. 24.14-18) is the same attitude that makes the line about eating horses problematic: a discomfort with literature that depicts the transgression of standard codes of behavior.
In short, my analysis of the “ambiguous propositions” shows that the vast majority of the issues raised by Hesiod’s lines map well onto the exegetical concerns of the time. In the panorama of Pre-Hellenistic literary exegesis, the Contest constitutes an as-yet underappreciated example of ancient engagement with literary analysis.