Hesiod and the Beginnings of

Greek Philosophy

Edited by

Leopoldo Iribarren
Hugo Koning

leiden | boston

For use by the Author only | © 2022 Leopoldo Iribarren and Hugo Koning
 Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations viii
Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction 1
Leopoldo Iribarren and Hugo Koning

part 1
Reflections on Hesiod’s Poetry and the Beginnings of Philosophy

1 On Naming the Origins: Hesiod vs. the Ionians 19

Pierre Judet de La Combe

2 Aristotelian Perspectives on Hesiod: A Programmatic Sketch 39

André Laks

3 Hesiod and the Presocratics: A Hellenistic Perspective? 57

Richard Hunter

part 2
Comparisons of Form and Genre

4 Hesiod, the Presocratic Poets, Aristeas, Epimenides and the Gold

Tablets: Genre and Narrative 81
Tom Mackenzie

5 The World of the Catalogue 104

Glenn W. Most

6 A Grammar of Self-Referential Statements: Claims for Authority from

Hesiod to the Presocratics 117
Ilaria Andolfi

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 vi contents

part 3
Contrasting Worldviews

7 Thinking about Time and Eternity—From Hesiod and the Presocratics

to Plato and Aristotle 139
Sandra Šćepanović

8 Δίκη/δίκη in Hesiod, Anaximander and Heraclitus 159

Stephen Scully

9 Xenophanes’ Rejection of Theogony 177

Shaul Tor

10 Hesiod Reads Empedocles 198

Jenny Strauss Clay

part 4
Intertextuality and Continuity

11 Parmenides and the Language of Constraint 221

Kathryn A. Morgan

12 Hesiod and Some Linguistic Approaches of the 5th Century bce 239
Athanassios Vergados

13 Addressees, Knowledge, and Action in Hesiod and Empedocles 263

Xavier Gheerbrant

14 Divine Crime and Punishment: Breaking the Cosmic Law in Hesiod’s

Theogony 783–806 and Empedocles’ Fragment DK B115 294
Marco Antonio Santamaría

15 From Humans to Kosmos: Daimones in the Derveni Papyrus between

Hesiod and Plato 313
Valeria Piano

General Index 337

Index Locorum 340

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 chapter 2

Aristotelian Perspectives on Hesiod:

A Programmatic Sketch

André Laks

There is little doubt that Hesiod represents a major point of reference for many
of the so-called ‘Presocratic philosophers’, whether as an explicit or implicit
target of direct criticism, or, implicitly, as the provider of questions, motifs or
phrases that are taken up, alluded to and reworked at different junctures, most
of the time crucial ones. Xenophanes’ elegiac verses on the right way to set up a
symposium include an implicit rejection of Hesiod’s depiction of the Olympi-
ans’ war against the Titans and the Giants; a nominal rebuttal is found in his
hexametric poem, which also includes a displaced echo of a famous Hesiodic
phrase relative to statements that ‘resemble realities’;1 Heraclitus, who con-
siders Hesiod a ‘polymath’ on the same footing as Pythagoras, Xenophanes,
and Hecataeus (22B40), derides him in particular (B57) for having ignored the
fundamental unity of day and night, a representative pair of opposites.2 The
meeting between the ‘I’ of Parmenides and the goddess can be decoded as
a detailed reworking of the scene in which the Muses appear to the shep-
herd Hesiod (28B1; Th. 22–23). The mention of the Gates of Day and Night,
also in the proem of Parmenides’ poem (28B1.6), refers to Theogony 748–750.
Parmenides, like Hesiod, counts Eros among the primordial divinities (28B13;
Th. 120). And the division of the account of the goddess into ‘truth’ and ‘mor-
tal opinions’ interprets and deploys, on a grand scale, the Hesiodic Muses’
declaration on which Xenophanes had previously drawn. Hesiodic motifs are
especially numerous—and no less heterogeneous—in Empedocles. Thus the
prayer to the Muse (31B3), the name ‘roots’ for elemental entities (31B6.1),
oaths as regulatory principles of becoming (31B30.3; B115.2), the divine beings
called daimones (31B115), the function of Discord (Neikos) as a principle (for
instance, 31B17.19), the oath-breaking of the divine beings and its consequences

1 DK 21B1.21–24, 21B11 (where Hesiod is named in company of Homer), and 21B35 (a reworking
of Th. 26–28, cf. Od. 19.203), respectively.
2 Heraclitus, 22B57 ~ Th. 748–755 (cf. 123); cf. 22B106, against Hesiod’s division of days in good
and bad (Op. 822–828).

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 40 laks

(31B115.4), and the idea that there are ages of the world to which human fates are
doomed to belong (31B139) can all be traced back to Hesiod’s poems.3 It is surely
no coincidence that such rewritings should mostly stem from ‘philosopher-
poets’, who by their chosen medium lay claim to membership in a determin-
ate literary tradition. But interpreters have also pointed out that Hesiod’s Tar-
tarus lurked behind relevant prose writers such as Anaximenes; and Diogenes
of Apollonia could implicitly refer to the birth of Aphrodite in the Theogony
(197–198) to support his views on sperm being the foam (aphros) of agitated
blood.4
The list is far from exhaustive, and more cases are discussed in the present
volume.5 References of this kind, however, do not make Hesiod a Presocratic
any more than the myth of Prometheus as told by Protagoras in Plato’s Pro-
tagoras (to take one example among many) makes him a Pre-Platonician, or for
that matter a Pre-Protagorean philosopher.6 They reflect, rather, the fact that
Hesiod was an authority in whose works his audience and readers learned what
needs to be learned, ‘the teacher of most people’, as Heraclitus says (didaskalos
pleistôn, 22B57)—a status that Hesiod shared with Homer, even if his teaching
would later be often taken to be of a more specific nature, namely ‘philosoph-
ical’, than Homer’s—understandably so.7
In order to deal with the specific issue which the conjunct ‘Hesiod and
the Presocratics’ refers to, we need to turn to Aristotle. The term ‘Presocrat-
ics’, which is commonly used as a shorthand for ‘Presocratic philosophers’, is a
historiographical category that has its motivations, its connotations, its advant-
ages and its drawbacks.8 Aristotle’s general expressions ‘those who before us
who embarked upon the study of things that are and philosophized about
the truth’ and, more briefly, ‘the first ones to philosophize’ in Metaphysics
A 3 (1.983b1–3 and 6–7) target a series of authors who spotted from a partial

3 For the latter notion: Op. 174–175 ~ 31B139; for the daimones: Op. 121–126 ~ 31B115; for fallen and
forsworn divinities, Th. 793–798 ~ 31B115.4.
4 Cf. Stokes 1962 and 1963. Stokes’ conclusion is that this influence is greater in Anaximenes
(the later thinker) than in Anaximander (the earlier one). For Diogenes of Apollonia, see DK
64A24 = LM D28a; cf. fr. 10, 45–47 Laks, in Laks 2008: 178.
5 See also the rich overview by Diller 1946: 140–151 (= 1966: 688–707), which collects a series of
themes and traits which present Hesiod as the great precursor of developments to follow in
Presocratic thinkers (especially Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles), starting with the
question of truth.
6 Pl. Prt. 320c–322d. On Hesiod in Plato, see Boys-Stones and Haubold 2010.
7 On the differentiated treatment of Hesiod and Homer in this respect in antiquity, see Koning
2010: 106–109.
8 I have tried to describe those in Laks 2018.

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 aristotelian perspectives on hesiod: a programmatic sketch 41

perspective and in an inadequate, childish language the four causes, no less,

no more, that he had previously identified in his Physics (Metaphysics A 3,
1.983a24-b6). Seen from this angle, it is not entirely clear that Hesiod does not
belong there. Aristotle, in fact, seems to waver both in theory and in practice,
albeit more in practice than in theory. This wavering, should it be called that
way, is interesting, because it raises the question of the relationship between
content (whatever one may identify as a content) and form (whatever one puts
under this term). Whereas there is no doubt that for Aristotle ‘form matters’9
in some construal of the term ‘form’, he is also ready, in certain contexts, to give
priority to what he considers to be a philosophically fruitful content. The name
‘Hesiod’ follows this shifting constellation.
It can be argued that the dissociation of form and content was operative, if
not thematized (we will never know), in the innovative piece of writing by the
sophist Hippias of Elis, some time in second half of the 5th century bce (that is,
still within the so-called ‘Presocratic’ period). This work, which arguably plays
an important role in Plato’s and Aristotle’s views about the beginnings of philo-
sophy, was not referential in the sense defined above but comparative, which
is to say that it aimed at a certain kind of objectivation (taking Hesiod, among
others, as an object, rather than as a source or as a target). The title Collection
(Sunagôgê), which is attested in a context that does not bear on philosophers,
and whose credentials as the title of this work are sometimes questioned, per-
fectly fits the approach.10 It brought together and parallelized, on a variety of
topics, statements originating from different authors, traditions, and forms of
discourse. Thanks to the Christian apologist Clement of Alexandria, who was
especially keen on parallels because they supported his views about Greek pla-
giarism, Hippias’ description of his comparative project, most likely stemming
from the introduction of the work in question, has been preserved:

Of these [probably: opinions] some have doubtless been expressed by

Orpheus, others by Musaeus, to put it briefly, by each one in a differ-
ent place, others by Hesiod, others by Homer, others by the other poets;
others in [sc. prose] treatises (sungraphê); some by Greeks, others by non-
Greeks. But I myself have put together from out of all these the ones that

9 Sassi 2018: 25.

10 The title appears in a passage of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists, 13.608f (DK 86B4), that talks
about the beauty and wisdom of Thargelia of Miletus, who married forty times. For an
explanation on how this could relate to Hippias’ comparative project, see Patzer 1986: 101–
105; about the title more generally, see 97–99. Barney 2012: 88 n. 40 shares the scepticism
reflected in the Diels-Kranz edition (see vol. 2: 331).

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 42 laks

are most important (megista) and are akin (homophula) to one another,
and on their basis, I shall compose the following new and variegated dis-
course.11

We cannot be sure about how the comparison was exactly set up. On the most
likely hypothesis, it took the form of a synoptic list organized by topic and illus-
trated by selected quotes. A listing of this sort can legitimately be considered
as an inchoative form of a doxographical approach that Plato and above all
Aristotle would develop and systematize for their own critical aims, and as a
remote ancestor of the doxographical handbook that would become famous
under the name of Aetius—with the crucial qualification that Hippias’ interest
went to the detection of similarities, rather than to the registering of diver-
gences. This orientation squares both with what we know, essentially thanks
to Plato, of Hippias’ encyclopaedic profile, his universalistic orientation, and
his diplomatic role as a conciliator.12 The word homophula, which he used to
qualify the opinions he was gathering, means literally ‘belonging to the same
tribe (phulê).’ The term, being used to contrast proximity of content with dif-
ferences of form (verses, prose) and of provenance (Greek, non-Greek), clearly
emphasized the identity side of similarity, rather than its differential compon-
ent.
According to a fairly convincing reconstruction based on crossing doxo-
graphical passages in Plato (Cra. 402a4-d3, Tht. 152e1–10), Aristotle (Metaph.
A 3, 983b20–984a3, de An. 1.2 405a19–20) and Diogenes Laertius (1.24), Aris-
totle was making use, as Plato had already done, of Hippias’ collection when
he grouped Homer and Hesiod with Thales in Metaphysics A 3 for the idea
that water is the source of all things.13 But whereas Plato, closer in this to Hip-
pias, emphasizes similarities in order to reduce new developments to ancient
thoughts (in the Theaetetus, Protagoras defends the same view as Heraclitus,
and Heraclitus’ thought is already in Homer), Aristotle, who is interested in
the advances of the discipline, aims at reconstructing a chronological progres-
sion in the discovery of the different kind of causes. The causes in question,
however—matter, the principle of movement, the form, the what-for, in Aris-
totelian terminology—must be identified behind the particular (and for this
reason philosophically inappropriate) items and names that feature in the

11 Hippias of Elis DK B6 = Clem. Al. Strom. 6.15.

12 See Brunschwig 1984: 269–276, who draws attention to Plato’s Hp.Ma. 301b2-e5 and 304a4–
6 (cf. LM D16, not in DK); cf. also Patzer 1986: 32.
13 The pathbreaking article is Snell 1944 (= 1966 with a few additions). The work was pursued
by Mansfeld 1986 and Patzer 1986.

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 aristotelian perspectives on hesiod: a programmatic sketch 43

authors at stake, water, air or fire, love, numbers and the like.14 Seen in this
perspective, Hesiod becomes a possible, if somewhat chameleonic candidate
for the title of proto-philosopher, which means, in the terminology of modern
scholarship at least, a Presocratic, even if his taking earth, or rather Earth, as
the first element, would place him, in the shifting constellation, on the side
of popular beliefs, rather than on the side of philosophical reflection (Metaph.
A 8, 989a10–12).
Aristotle’s posture towards Hesiod is, as a matter of fact, differentiated. Is
this global wavering, or rather selective precision? In Metaphysics A 3, Aristotle
wonders about whether those who, ‘in most ancient time’ first talked about the
gods, were really saying something, as some people think (arguably Hippias),
‘about nature,’ which in Aristotle’s context refers in the first place to the kind
of item that persists as changes occur, more so than to the so-called ‘natural
world’ (983b29–30, 984a1–2) and serves as one distinctive marker of a philo-
sophical discourse. No proper name is mentioned, and Aristotle might have
had in mind poets still older than Homer and Hesiod,15 but when he quotes
as evidence the water of the Styx, he must have thought of the passage of the
Theogony that makes it ‘the great oath of the gods.’16 Did these ancient ‘theo-
logians’, then, deliver philosophical statements when they located the origin of
everything in water, in a verse such as ‘Ocean, the origin of the gods, and mother
Tethys (Il. 14.201 = 14.302)?17 Aristotle leaves the question open. ‘This might be
unclear’, he says (984a2), a formula that expresses both a certain scepticism and
some scepticism about the scepticism in question. It is quite remarkable, and
perhaps still not sufficiently appreciated, that a more moderate form of scep-
ticism, but a scepticism all the same, affects Aristotle’s report on Thales too,
since, in the absence of any written evidence, Aristotle must rely on hearsay
(legetai, 984a2) and on his own reconstruction of Thales’ missing argumenta-
tion (isôs, 983b22) to assess his case.18 Is Thales in the end so different from the
theologians, one might ask?
Concerning Hesiod and on a different topic, however, Metaphysics A 4 rings
a slightly different bell, still cautious, but more positive: while postponing the

14 This is one possible reason, I submit, of Aristotle’s formula en hylês eidei, 1.983b7 and
1.984a17–18.
15 On the textual problem raised by the sentence, see Bollack 1997: 138–142.
16 Arist. Metaph. A 3, 1.983b27–984a2; Th. 784.
17 Cf. Il. 14.245–246, which would seem to be even more appropriate, since Ocean is said
there to be the origin ‘for all things’, and not only ‘of the gods.’
18 On this issue, see Mansfeld 1990: 115–117; Frede 2004: 126–146; Laks 2007: 163–166; Sassi
2018: 25.

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question of priority, which preoccupies him because of his interest in pro-

gression, to a later inquiry (a promise which, sadly, he did not keep), Aristotle
declares there that ‘somebody could suspect’ (hupopseuaito tis) that Hesiod,
whose name is explicitly mentioned this time, was the first to articulate the
idea of a moving cause, as Parmenides would later do, on the grounds that
he counted Eros among the first beings.19 This is not a clear-cut rejection of
the hypothesis, although cautiousness is audible in the verb used (‘to suspect’)
as well as in the optative mood. Other passages are more directly positive. In
Metaphysics N 4 1091a33-b7, in the course of criticizing Speusippus for having
made ‘the good’ (to agathon) a late-coming entity rather than a primordial one,
he cites, among other examples of an imperfect principle, the original ‘gap’
(Chaos), which must refer to the beginning of the Theogony (without Hesiod’s
name being mentioned). This is according to a definite interpretation of what
Chaos stands for. For in Physics 4.208b29–33, this time with explicit reference,
Aristotle puts forward an interpretation of Chaos as an important insight and
contribution to a theory of place. Although Hesiod is not the only reference
implied there, chapter 3 of Movement of animals (699a27-b11), which translates
the story of Atlas holding up the sky with the Earth as his fulcrum into geo-
metrical and physical terms and criticizes it as such, is also instructive in this
regard (cf. Th. 517–519).20 To be sure, unhindered use and cautiousness yields,
in certain contexts, to a firm and apparently general discount of the relevance
of mythical discourse for philosophical inquiry, in virtue of their mythic form.
This is the case in the famous lines of Metaphysics B 4, 1000a18–20, where, after
having criticized the idea (attributed to ‘Hesiod and the other theologians’)
that the gods are immortal because they feed on nectar and ambrosia, Aristotle
asserts that ‘it is not worthwhile to inquire seriously about those who engage
in mythological subtleties (peri tôn muthikôs sophizomenôn). Instead, we have
to ask those who make use of demonstration […].’ But even this general state-
ment is grounded in a specific, localized criticism that is not incompatible with
looking at other, more promising passages from the point of view of a further,

19 Arist. Metaph. A 4, 984b24–32. Aristotle cites Th. 120 (‘and Eros …’), following 116 and the
beginning of 117, omitting the lines which are not suitable to illustrate his point. The paral-
lel between Hesiod and Parmenides also features in Plato’s Smp. 178a9-c2, which provides
our oldest quotation of Parmenides 28B13. It obviously goes back to Hippias’ Collection too
(see Patzer 1986: 43–48), which is the original, if not the unique, reference of Aristotle’s
‘somebody’ (tis). Further discussion of the passage in Betegh 2012: 121–124.
20 On Aristotle’s argument, see Coope 2020: 240–272 and Morrison 2020: 273–298. Hesiod is
not mentioned in any of these two pieces; for discussion of Hesiod’s passage and parallel
texts, see Lefebvre 2004: 125.

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 aristotelian perspectives on hesiod: a programmatic sketch 45

conceptualized reflexion. For ‘mythical subtleties’ does not imply that myth as
such is made of subtleties not worth of any consideration.21
The passages that Aristotle does take into consideration correspond to what
Fränkel called Ansätze (‘starting-points’ that have the virtue of triggering fur-
ther reflection). In a sentence that is much less anti-Aristotelian than he appar-
ently meant it to be, Fränkel thus wrote: ‘[…] although the epic [i.e. the Theo-
gony] still provides a mythical account, it articulates powerful starting-points
for a resolute speculation about fundamental questions of metaphysics […;]
one cannot make Greek philosophy begin simply with Thales and Anaxim-
ander. If Aristotle considered that ‘it is not worthwhile to examine in earnest
the opinions of those who exercise their witticism in mythical form’ (Metaph.
Beta, 1000a18), there are many reasons for which this is not binding for us.’22
More generally, Aristotle’s differentiated attitude towards the Hesiodic mater-
ial chimes with his attitude to myth, which philosophers not only criticize, but
are also fond of, according to a sentence in Metaphysics A 2, 982b18 that is
much more interesting to read in the text transmitted by the main manuscripts
(EJ), ‘the lover of wisdom (ho philosophos) is also in a way a lover of myth
(philomuthos)’, than in the condescending adaptation of the secondary tradi-
tion (‘the lover of myth is also in a way a lover of wisdom’), which has long
had the favour of the editors.23 The adoption of different standards shows that
Aristotle is aware of the interpretive problem attendant on treating Hesiodic
statements as philosophical tenets. The fundamental question is: does Hesiod
talk about the same thing as the ‘first philosophers’ (provided that the latter talk
about the same things as Aristotle himself)? Whereas Hippias’ undertaking pre-
supposes the independence of content from the way in which it is expressed
(in his case, the relevant difference is put in terms of literary genre: verse vs.
prose), Aristotle considers that story-telling involving traditional divine char-

21 ‘Subtleties’ (Ross) captures the scope of sophizômenôn better than ‘speculation’ (Wild-
berg 2009: 161 and 168) or ‘expressions of wisdom’ (Moore 2020: 275). It seems to me that
Socrates’ rejection of the hermeneutical industry in Plato’s Phdr. 229c6-e4 provides an
appropriate background for Aristotle’s wording; but this is a hypothesis in passing.
22 Fränkel 1975: 108 n. 30, commenting on Th. 736–743 (in the description of Tartarus). Note,
however, the ‘if’ that introduces the second sentence. The original German text, published
by the American Philological Association, dates to 1951; this particular note, however, dates
to the 1962 German edition. I have re-translated it (and also provided a translation of the
Greek), given the inaccuracy of the 1975 English version. Fränkel’s approach was initiated
by Gigon 1945 and Diller 1946.
23 See the editions of Bonitz, Ross and Jaeger. The better version is now printed in Primavesi’s
edition in Steel 2012: 473 and 63. For a more resolute defence of the primary text, see
Bollack 1997: 164–166; Sassi 2018: 21 retains the traditional reading. On Aristotle’s differ-
entiated attitude to myth, see Baghdassarian 2013 and Johansen 1999.

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 46 laks

acters, rather than verses, is what is most likely to affect the philosophical
dimension of the content.24 Philosophical discourse should consider straight-
away the nature of what is without indulging in figurative speech and argue
rather than narrate (the latter being, in Burkert’s felicitous wording, going for
‘consequence’, rather than ‘sequence’).25
Now an Aristotelian approach to Hesiod needs not to be limited to the pas-
sages, mostly of ontological and physical import, that Aristotle happened to
concentrate on for contextual reasons. Such an approach helps to consider as
a philosophically relevant ‘starting point’, for example, the distinction intro-
duced at the beginning of the Theogony (26–28) between two types of state-
ment, fictions resembling realities on the one hand, and true pronouncements
on the other, to which Xenophanes’ language referred locally and which Par-
menides exploited structurally; another such starting point would be the dis-
tinction between two kinds of ‘quarrel’ (eris) at the beginning of the Works
and Days (11–12), which, once generalized, says that words are said in more
than one sense. But the most prominent philosophical feature of Hesiod’s two
poems (both considered separately and in conjunction) arguably consists in a
formal trait, namely their systematic character and totalizing scope—another
possible criterion, next to, or in conjunction with ‘nature’ and ‘argumentation’,
that serves to capture the specificity of philosophical discourse. Vernant, while
mentioning ‘range’, emphasizes systematicity when he regards the Theogony
as the ‘typical example’ of ‘a unified, narrative corpus of stories’ that ‘by vir-
tue of its range and internal coherence […], represents an original system of
thought as complex and rigorous in its own way as a philosopher’s construc-
tion may be, in a different mode.’26 Burkert stresses totality, when he talks of ‘an
assemblage of different tale types, complete or fragmentary, held together by
the greatest subject, ‘everything’ or ‘all there is’, which is itself a problem rather
than something definite.’27 It is particularly relevant that Vernant, in stress-
ing the ‘exceptional’ character of the Theogony, distinguishes it from ‘myths’
(that is to say from the many diffuse tales, locally and thematically scattered,
bearing on this or that divinity, this or that hero, this or that episode), by

24 Metre, according to Po. 1.1447b16–23, is not enough to classify an author as a poet rather
than as a doctor, a musician, or a ‘natural philosopher’ (phusiologos). In particular, ‘Homer
and Empedocles have nothing in common except for the meter’ (b17–18). The case of
Hesiod would have to be assessed.
25 Burkert 1979: 32.
26 Vernant 1980 [1974]: 215.
27 Burkert 1999: 88. On the criterion of ‘totality’ see also Long 1999: 10–13 (with mention of
Hesiod) and Sassi 2018: 31.

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 aristotelian perspectives on hesiod: a programmatic sketch 47

reserving for Hesiod’s project the name of ‘mythology.’28 Applying a formula

which Gauchet coined for speaking of Christianity, one could construe Hesiod’s
mythology, taken in this technical sense, as ‘a way out of myth’, with the qual-
ification that Christianity was a process, whereas Hesiod represents a single
achievement.29 What makes this an interesting perspective is that it is, on the
one hand fully compatible (willy-nilly, perhaps) with the Aristotelian notion of
proto-philosophy, and on the other hand completely respectful of the mythical
framework that Aristotle both considers and keeps at an appropriate distance
from a philosophical argumentation, in keeping with his preferred set of cri-
teria.
Can one be more precise? Philippson’s study, Genealogie als mythische Form
(1936), which is more often mentioned than actually discussed, provides inter-
esting insights in this respect.30 Not that she gives detailed attention to the
question of the relationships between Hesiod and first philosophers—in fact,
Parmenides and Empedocles are only mentioned in passing.31 But her analysis
of the structure of the Theogony is rich in implications for an assessment of the
philosophical potential not only of Hesiod’s Theogony, on which she focuses,
but on Hesiod’s œuvre, the Works and Days included.
The title ‘Theogony’, which is unlikely to be original,32 does not reflect the
totalizing ambition of the work. This might not be true of the first component
of the term, ‘Theo-’, which is more misleading for a modern reader than it might
have been or was for an ancient one, because much of what we would describe
as natural, psychological or political entities or notions is, in Hesiod and else-
where, conceived as divinities. Philippson in this connection distinguishes four
initial categories: natural entities and phenomena (the sky, the earth, the stars,
the rivers and streams), active powers (Eros, Eris, Pallas), aspects of the world
(Thauma and Theia) and normative forces (Themis, Nemesis, Mnêmosunê and
Styx).33 But the suffix -gony is definitely too narrow, for the Hesiodic narrat-
ive does not confine itself to the generation of the entities in question (which

28 This is also the concept of ‘myth’ in Detienne 1981. However, ‘mythology’ for Detienne is
the modern science of ancient myths or its ancient precursors (philosophers, historians,
and mythographers).
29 For Christianity as ‘a religion for departing from religion’ (‘la religion de la sortie de la reli-
gion’) see Gauchet 1990: 4.
30 Philippson 1944.
31 Philippson 1944: 28.
32 See Most 2018, vol. i: xxviii. Herodotus 2.53 uses the word in the famous passage where he
says that Hesiod and Homer (in this order) composed a ‘theogony’ for the Greeks.
33 Philippson 1944: 10–11. For a similar, but more inclusive listing, see Most 2018, vol. i: xxviii–
xxix: ‘familiar deities of the Greek cults’, other gods not venerated in cult (Titans and

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 48 laks

strictly speaking belongs to the genealogical project). It also includes the long
story, within the family history of Earth, of the battles, victories, punishments,
and conciliations between the protagonists, and treats them from a perspect-
ive that leads, in the episode of Prometheus, to the question of the status of
humanity—thus opening the way to the Works and Days.34
Philippson’s analysis rightly highlights that the basic function of the gene-
alogical project of the Theogony is to give the poem its overall structure. Of
course, Chaos and Earth are by definition generative principles—if they were
otherwise, there could be no genealogy. But the divine genealogy, to begin with,
stops at a certain point, when all the gods, meaning the blessed and immortal
beings (the genos makarôn aei eontôn of Theogony 34), have been generated;
the genealogical moment, as far as gods are concerned, turns out to be only a
moment. The divine world is not a world of process, but, as Philippson says, a
world of being (‘eine Seinswelt’, p. 21), made of a certain number of constituents,
which are its population.35 The two lineages that divide up the divine world—
the descendants of Chaos and the descendants of Earth—never mix with nor
fight against one another; they provide, rather, the structural framework where
history, divine history but also and above all human history develops.36 Con-
trasting with the absence of any relation between the two lineages, relations of
extreme complexity hold among the deities who belong to that lineage which
alone gives rise to a narrative (the progeny of Earth). This story, by defini-
tion, breaks the bounds of the ‘world of being.’ Philippson distinguishes in an
illuminating way between the world of generated beings that always are (the
makaroi aei eontes) and ‘the emergence of a cosmos’ (‘die Entstehung eines Kos-
mos’): a cosmos where, as she writes, ‘these particular elementary beings [scil.
the gods] change place, so to speak, and acquire an order under the rubric of
laws which govern them.’37

monsters), ‘the various parts of the physical cosmos’, ‘various kinds of good and bad moral
qualities and humans actions and experiences.’
34 Strauss Clay 2003 has brought to light the fundamental complementarity of Hesiod’s two
poems in her well-named work Hesiod’s Cosmos (see below on the scope of ‘cosmos’).
35 For a suggestive analysis of the primordial powers and divinities of Hesiod in terms of ‘the
naïve metaphysics of things’ see Mourelatos 2008: 313–316.
36 In Philippson’s terms: ‘In polarer Gegensätzlichkeit bilden die beiden Ursprünge ohne
jede ethische Wertung, in gleichmässig göttlichen Da-Sein, eben kraft jener Gegensätz-
lichkeit, die totale Einheit einer Welt’ (1944: 16); cf. p. 20: ‘eine Totalität, die man als eine
Welt bezeichnen kann.’ For the absence of battle and union, see Philippson 1944: 13; Most
2018: xxxi.
37 ‘… dass diese einzelnen Seinselemente ihre Stelle sozusagen wechseln und sich den Geset-
zen, die ihn bestimmen und durch die er erst zu einem Kosmos wird, einordnen’ (Phi-
lippson 1944: 21).

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 aristotelian perspectives on hesiod: a programmatic sketch 49

The development in question is not the genealogical development of prim-

ordial entities. It is ‘cosmological’, not in the restricted sense that applies, in
the philosophical tradition, to the natural world, but in a broader sense that
includes every form of organized structure, ‘political’ included. This develop-
ment, which Philippson calls ‘becoming’ (‘Werden’), coincides with a set of
plots, beginning with the conflict between Earth and Cronus and resolving with
the outcome of the confrontation between Zeus and Prometheus. In the end,
the world of Zeus, which is also the world in which Hesiod is living, will have
arisen. It is a world where the moon, stars, and streams, like the rest of the gods,
exist now and forever, but where all remaining conflicts are prevented or at
least regulated by the exercise of justice.
In this scheme, a distinction is to be drawn between a first, limited develop-
ment, consisting only in the generation of the beings that are, and the unfolding
of a global story that leads to and is pursued in the Works and Days. This distinc-
tion modifies and complicates the way in which an Aristotelian perspective,
which is not Aristotle’s any longer, can look at the relationships between the
Theogony and the beginnings of the philosophical discipline in Greece. What
is more, it complicates it from several perspectives. As indicated above, inter-
preters often proceed, in the wake of Aristotle, by comparing the cosmogonies
and cosmologies labelled ‘philosophical’, with selected elements (principles)
drawn from the genealogical and cosmological framework (in the usual sense
of the word ‘cosmological’) of the Theogony. But if Philippson’s analysis is cor-
rect, that which corresponds structurally in Hesiod’s poem to the cosmogonies
and cosmologies of the first philosophers (and beyond them) is not only the
genealogical moment, where principles are found, but also the plot itself. It is
this plot, with all its moving parts and entanglements, by which the world, in
the form of the human world, is finally constituted.
The plot in question turns around two related concerns, one manifest, the
other more covert. There is first the question of how to establish an author-
ity which does not rest on violence or constraint that is to reconcile conflict-
ing forces. But then there is the question about how becoming in general,
and human becoming in particular, goes on once the immortal beings, the aei
eontes, are not only in place, but have agreed on a modus vivendi.
The response to this second concern bears on the distinction between gods
and humans which is brought about in a mysterious place called Mêkônê (Th.
535–537). This, the properly but elided anthropogonic moment of the Theo-
gony, sets off human history, beginning with the creation of woman and ending
in a familial conflict in rural Boeotia, once the age of heroes (that is the Trojan
war and its aftermath) comes to its close. These two concerns—the pacification
of the world-order and the analysis of the human condition—are complement-

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 50 laks

ary, in the sense that human beings are subject to the same political and moral
rules as the world of the gods. The fathomable question of how arbitration
works between the gods and the more opaque one about the function of Hesi-
odic anthropogony in Zeus’ plan, require refined interpretive work.38 But the
point that matters for my present purpose is simply that the cosmological plot
(in the sense defined above), as it appears in Hesiod’s Theogony, taken with its
sequel in the Works and Days, corresponds to what the subsectors of the philo-
sophical discipline, once fully differentiated, will call ethics and politics.
Ethics and politics, which are firmly entangled in Aristotle’s thought, con-
stitute an important dimension in several Presocratic thinkers, which the en-
trenched label ‘natural philosophers’, inherited from Aristotle, does not do
justice to.39 In such a perspective, there is no question that the most interest-
ing relationship between Hesiod and the beginnings of Greek philosophy is to
be sought less in whatever the Hesiodic genealogies have in common with the
first philosophical cosmogonies, than in the challenge posed, for a discourse
which aimed at nothing less than totality, by the totality that Hesiod, for his
part, had delineated and structured in his poems. Indeed, one can conceive of
the history of philosophy up to Plato as a sinuous effort to reconquer a territory
which Hesiod, in his Theogony and Works and Days, had covered in language
and forms of his own. Plato’s Timaeus is most instructive in this respect. It is
fairly obvious that one of Plato’s ambitions in this dialogue was to rival the
great pre-Platonic cosmological systems by integrating their various compon-
ents (considered much like scattered limbs) into a new synthesis.40 But one
could, with good reason, think that Hesiod, in addition to being part of the
material with which Plato means to furnish his synthesis,41 on a par with Anaxi-
menes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Philolaus, or any of the others whose clear
echoes we hear over the course of the Timaeus, provides the model of a truly
all-encompassing schema. The Timaeus itself is only a fragment, flanked on the
left by the Republic and on the right by the Critias (or what remains of it), and
this synthesis, which encompasses in one part what has being (the Forms of the

38 See Wismann 1996: 20–22 and Judet de La Combe 1996: 270–280 (and also the latter’s con-
tribution to the present volume).
39 Cf. Laks 2017.
40 On the Timaeus as being both a ‘summa’ and a ‘critique’ of Presocratic philosophy, see
Menn 2010: 140–143. See also Kahn 2010: 71: ‘The Timaeus has the literary form of a Preso-
cratic treatise, beginning with the origin of the cosmos and ending with the nature of
human beings (27a). This was the pattern established already in Hesiod’s Theogony and
apparently followed by most Presocratics.’
41 See Pender 2010; Sedley 2010; Regali 2010.

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 aristotelian perspectives on hesiod: a programmatic sketch 51

Republic) and in the other that which becomes, first at the level of the universe
(the Timaeus), then of human history (the Critias), corresponds to that other
totality which is the sum of the Theogony and the Works and Days—transposed
and renovated from top to bottom, as goes without saying, by the knowledge
and interests of Plato’s day.42 Surely a non-narrative interpretation of this philo-
sophical narrative is needed in this case, too.
Philosophy, not even Plato’s, could never compete with the concreteness
of the Hesiodic world, given its specific language and the nature of its basic
orientations. Naturalization, conceptualization, justification, all notions that
legitimately point to the intellectual forces and interests that are at work in the
non-linear development of early Greek philosophy, define a new territory, the
richness of which is of a different kind, and which had to be constructed, since
it did not benefit from the immemorial tradition that Hesiod inherits.43 But
that question, for once, has less to do with what is specific to Hesiod than with
the nature of mythic discourse (of which Hesiod remains an eminent repres-
entative, however remarkably ‘mythological’ he is). It is the question of what
relation myth in general bears to philosophy in general. It has now become
a commonplace for many specialists in ancient thought to question the suit-
ability of formula ‘from myth to reason’—a formula which Nestle, at a date
when anti-rationalism had become a fateful political slogan, made the title of
his famous book.44 The formula is apt to give rise to misunderstandings, if it is
taken to imply that (philosophical) reason is capable of replacing (irrational)
myth, as in a certain construal of ‘Enlightenment.’ But this does not mean that

42 There is no mention of this aspect of things in the collective volume edited by Boys-Stones
and Haubold 2010.
43 One can ask, of course, whether all the features, be they substantial or formal, belong
properly to Hesiod, or whether he is not himself, here as elsewhere, an heir of Near East-
ern traditions, and ultimately of a common Indo-European background. The extent and
nature of the dependence, which by itself is now beyond question, is debated, but even
putting it at the highest, it would still be true that the Hesiodic narrative constitutes a rad-
ical innovation within Greek culture. On this issue, see Burkert 1999: 88 and Sassi 2018:
8–18. For a detailed presentation of the status quaestionis with regard to the relationships
between Hesiod and Near Eastern traditions see Rutherford 2009.
44 Nestle 1940, on which see Most 1999: 26–31. I used to think (Laks 2018: 105) that Nestle’s
declaration in the Introduction of his book (1940: vi) about ‘the privilege that seems to
have been reserved to Aryan people as the race that is best endowed by nature’, had a
purely opportunistic character (see also Most 1999: 30 about Nestle: ‘not at all a Nazi him-
self’). But Nestle was in fact more engaged than that, as his 1934 and 1935 contributions
to the Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift auf nationalsozialistischer Grundlage show (see Fowler
2011, p. 48–49, n. 14; cf. Sassi 2018: 9). How this engagement relates to his positive appreci-
ation of the Greek Enlightenment remains to be explained.

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we should consider the distinction between myth and reason as illegitimate, as

many interpreters are tempted to do.45 This is not only because myth, once dis-
associated from reason, still threatens to return in the political arena in much
degraded forms,46 but also because within the historical disciplines, a func-
tional distinction between myth and reason is needed.47 It is no easy matter, in
particular, to dispense with the idea of rationalization. In fact, there are ways
to understand the formula ‘from … to …’ which get away from the most artless
interpretations. It is enough to read the final pages of Nestle’s book to see that
he, for one, did not think that myth had been overcome. In fact, it is quite the
opposite: the end of antiquity, for him, corresponds to the return of the gods
and of religion more broadly, under the auspices of Christianity. Some philo-
sophers of culture, like Cassirer, or, in a very different spirit, Blumenberg, have
no difficulties in recognizing simultaneously that on the one hand, yes, there
exist certain (historically attested) paths which lead from myth to reason(s),
but that on the other hand there is no reason to think that the one could or
should ever be replaced by the other. This is because myth is an autonomous
form of discourse (in Cassirer’s terms, a symbolic form among others), which
logos can never do away with, and with which it is forced to coexist, in one way
or another.48 The resilience of myth, surely, is nothing other than the coun-
terpart of the intrinsic, self-imposed limitations of philosophy itself. The very
fact that the idea of putting an end to myth is itself mythical (as Blumen-
berg has it)49 guarantees that myth is assured a long life. But this means that
Hesiod has not only delivered a mythology opening the way to the abandon-
ment of myth, but that he can still provide powerful material for a philosophical
debate which is not indebted any more to an Aristotelian approach, but is,
rather, referential, as it was once upon a time.50 Starting points can also serve

45 Buxton 1999’s Introduction is an extreme representative of a deep trend that it will be

interesting to analyse in its origins and implications some time.
46 Cassirer: 1946.
47 Cf. Laks 2018: 38–40. Morgan 2004 notes rightly that ‘myth and philosophy are dynamic,
not static categories’ (5) and observes that ‘the dynamic of the relationship of myth and
philosophy involve not only the most ancient, but the most modern speculation on the
nature of language’ (38).
48 Cassirer 1957 (vol. ii) and Cassirer 1946 (see especially part ii, ‘The Myth of the Twentieth
Century’); Blumenberg 2014, whose entire book is devoted to this issue.
49 See especially the sections entitled ‘Den Mythos zu Ende zu bringen’ (2014: 291) and ‘Wenn
nicht den Mythos, dann wenigstens einen zu Ende bringen’ (2014: 679).
50 Blumenberg 2014 turns around the reception of the Prometheus’ story, of which Hesiod
offers one particularly important version. On the role that Hesiod played in the French
post-structuralist and deconstructionist era, see Stocking 2017.

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 aristotelian perspectives on hesiod: a programmatic sketch 53

as references, and Aristotelianism can lead beyond Aristotelianism, back to the

Presocratics, so to speak.

Acknowledgements

I express many thanks to Tom Davies (Princeton University) who translated

into English an earlier draft of this piece, as well as to the editors of the volume
for their useful observations on the penultimate draft.

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