Ben Radcliffe, Loyola Marymount University
Works and Days posits a famous distinction between two kinds of Erides (“Strifes”), one destructive and the other productive (11-26). This paper argues that Works uses the distinction to trace how violence is shaped and disseminated by the distribution of “surplus”—goods produced in excess of what is needed to sustain a specific, socially defined mode of life (Marx, Harvey). Researchers have interpreted the erides in light of various archaic Greek institutions (agōn, feud, market), but I argue that surplus underscores the poetic dimensions of Hesiodic class antagonisms and the class dimensions of Hesiod’s poetics, especially in rivalries between Greek epic singers and traditions (González, Nelson, Christensen, Scodel).
“Bad” Eris figures the livelihood of (Homeric) warriors, who enter into conflict over seizing and distributing (dasmos) surplus in the form of plunder (Ready, Rose), and of opportunists like Perses, who would exploit polis institutions to steal Hesiod’s inheritance. “Good” Eris disavows expropriation and drives economic actors to emulate their competitors, a directive articulated throughout Works, especially in the farming year (381-617). Hesiod advises farmers to accumulate surplus competitively by adding commodities to existing stores of property, signaled by constructions involving epi (smikron epi smikrōi, 361; epithēkē, 380; ergon ep’ ergōi, 382). This seemingly benign strategy of piecemeal accumulation, however, is deeply equivocal (Scodel, Nagler) and requires proprietors to intensify the exploitation of laborers on their estates (oikoi). This patriarchal domination and its concomitant violence are depicted in the Odyssey but elided in Works (Rose, Thalmann); they surface, however, in Hesiod’s anxiety that the enterprise of accumulation is susceptible to fractious farmhands, belligerent bulls, scheming wives and sons, and even self-destructing tools. Drawing an analogy with Marx’s concept of surplus labor, I frame this pervasive conflict surrounding the conditions of exploitation as “surplus violence.” The farmer’s social relations and capital are strained by intensified exploitation, embodied by “good” Eris, a principle of disseminated violence that at once promotes and endangers surplus accumulation.
To conclude, I consider how Work’s eristic political economy informs the song’s construction of its relation to other epic songs and subgenres. Several passages (e.g., 21-26; 646-662) paradoxically associate singers with “good” Eris and dissociate singers from the accumulative enterprise of the private oikos. Bardic competition is a tertium quid: singers typically defer to the tradition (Scodel) are almost never shown competing directly in archaic epic (Ford). Conversely, strife and violence are directed against singers not by other singers but by employers or basileis (202-12; cf. Od. 22.351-53); singers’ voices are thus appropriated or silenced by the surplus violence that undergirds oikos class-relations. When singers do rival each other, they compete to append piecemeal supplements to the poetic tradition—a public, collective discourse authorized by the Muses (e.g., 11; Od. 1.350-52; Christensen). As an expression of the “surplus-common” (Casarino), song-making is configured as a utopian counterpoint to the thematics of Iron Age scarcity that motivate Hesiod’s retrenchment of the oikos and regimes of private surplus accumulation.