Eris and Epos Composition, Competition, and the Domestication of Strife

Home , Arete, Arete (mythology), Xenia (Greek)

Joel P. Christensen Brandeis University [email protected]

Abstract

This article examines the development of the theme of eris in Hesiod and Homer. Start- ing from the relationship between the destructive strife in the Theogony (225) and the two versions invoked in the Works and Days (11–12), I argue that considering the two forms of strife as echoing zero and positive sum games helps us to identify the cultural and compositional force of eris as cooperative competition. After establishing eris as a compositional theme from the perspective of oral poetics, I then argue that it develops from the perspective of cosmic history, that is, from the creation of the universe in Hes- iod’s Theogony through the Homeric epics and into its double definition in the Works and Days.To explore and emphasize how this complementarity is itself a manifestation of eris, I survey its deployment in our major extant epic poems.

Keywords eris – competition – conflict – poetics – rivalry

In Cypria fr. 1, Zeus fans “the flames of the great strife of the Trojan war / to lighten the [earth’s] burden with death” (ῥιπίσσας πολέμου μεγάλην ἔριν Ἰλιακοῖο, 5).* Similarly, in Hesiod (fr. 204 M-W), when strife divides the gods at the birth of Hermione—“all the gods were of two minds / because of the strife” (πάν- τες δὲ θεοὶ δίχα θυμὸν ἔθεντο / ἐξ ἔριδος, 94–95)—Zeus hastens the destruction of the Heroes: “And then he hastened to extinguish the great race of human

* A version of this article was given at the Heartland Graduate Conference in Ancient Stud- ies at the University of Missouri in 2015. Special thanks are due as well to Justin Arft, Elton Barker, Erwin Cook, Catherine Keane, and Leonard Muellner for stimulating and challeng- ing conversations. This article was also greatly improved by YAGE’s editors and anonymous referees.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/24688487_00201001Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access 2 christensen beings / and gave this excuse for destroying the souls of the demigods” (ἤδη δὲ γένος μερόπων ἀνθρώπων / πολλὸν ἀϊστῶσαι σ̣π̣ε̣ῦ̣δ̣ε̣, π̣ρ̣[ό]φασιν μὲν ὀλέσθαι / ψυχὰς ἡμιθέω[ν ̣̣̣̣̣ ̣̣̣̣̣ ̣]ο̣ι̣σ̣ι̣βροτοῖσι, 96–98).1 In the Works and Days, Zeus likewise authorizes the death of the race of heroes in wars at Troy and Thebes (158–165).2 Proclus, in his summary of the Epic Cycle, echoes these motifs when describing the origin of the Trojan War (Chrest. 86–90):

παραγενομένη δὲ Ἔρις εὐωχουμένων τῶν θεῶν ἐν τοῖς Πηλέως γάμοις νεῖκος περὶ κάλλους ἀνίστησιν Ἀθηνᾷ, Ἥρᾳ καὶ Ἀφροδίτῃ αἳ πρὸς Ἀλέξανδρον ἐν Ἴδῃ κατὰ Διὸς προσταγὴν ὑφ’ Ἑρμοῦ πρὸς τὴν κρίσιν ἄγονται· καὶ προκρίνει τὴν Ἀφροδίτην ἐπαρθεὶς τοῖς Ἑλένης γάμοις Ἀλέξανδρος.

Eris appeared while the gods were feasting at the marriage banquet of Peleus and set in motion a conflict among Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite who, at the command of Zeus, were led by Hermes to Alexander on Ida for judgment. Alexander earned a marriage with Helen by choosing Aphrodite as the winner.3

Here, conflict (neikos) comes from rival claims to honor in a social setting (a wedding), resolved through a problematic judgment (krisis) that results in a re-arrangement of human honor and position through another marriage. The anthropomorphized Eris of the gods becomes the cataclysmic eris of theTrojan War. But, as we know from Hesiod’s Works and Days, there are two kinds of eris on the earth (Οὐκ ἄρα μοῦνον ἔην Ἐρίδων γένος, ἀλλ’ ἐπὶ γαῖαν / εἰσὶ δύω, 11–12) while only a single eris is born in the Theogony (225). This article examines the interrelationship between eris and early Greek epic to argue that eris impacts the development of individual poems both as a theme (influencing the shape of the poems) and as a cultural aesthetic that drives poets to rival one another.4 I will thus argue as well that the poets’ eristic efforts to contemplate the nature of eris contribute to a shared endeavor to adapt or, for lack of a better term, to domesticate strife. What I mean by domestication is

1 For a recent discussion of this passage and relevant scholarship, see Ormand 2014: 201–214. 2 For overlap in the destruction motifs, see Scodel 1982; Koenen 1994 (ancient Near Eastern par- allels); Mayer 1996. Cf. Nagy 1979: 220. For Hesiod, flood narratives, and engagement with the Prometheus myth, see Stamatopoulou 2017: 133–136. 3 All translations are my own. 4 See Griffith 1990 for the competitive character of Greek culture. See also Kurke 1999 and Collins 2004. Cf. Barker and Christensen 2006, 2008.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access eris and epos 3 the transformation through which the eris that appears cosmically threatening at the beginning of Hesiod’s Theogony becomes formative for and espoused by early Greek poetry. This article will survey the primary extant evidence to sketch out the development of strife from Hesiod’s Theogony through the Works and Days. As a result of the limited scope of this approach, many features of the poems will go unmentioned. I will start by addressing a few conceptual frameworks important for my argumentation—a teleological view of Panhellenic epic poetry as cosmic history, modern analogies for types of competition (zero and positive sum games), and a compositional structure called the anticipatory doublet— alongside the problem of eris’s multiple genealogies.5 From there, I will argue that eris (with its near synonym neikos) and the concomitants dasmos and krisis function as a compositional theme from the perspective of oral poetics. After I have established the compositional features of the theme, I will briefly explore its deployment in the Theogony, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Hesiod’s Works and Days. I will argue that the poems appear to work together to domesticate strife, that is, to turn a dangerous feature of the world and human nature into something notionally more productive.

Cosmic History and Complementarity: A Positive Sum Game

It has been argued that when viewed together the poems attributed to Hesiod “impl[y] a narrative of external and intellectual progress” (Haubold 2010: 10– 11). And scholars have also noted a deep complementarity in the worlds created and explored by Homer and Hesiod (see Slatkin 2011).6 An essential feature of my approach to the problem of eris is that it is teleological: following the work of Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold (2005), I imagine the major extant epic poems reflecting a worldview of their audiences.7 This worldview frame-

5 See Snodgrass 1971 for Panhellenism in material culture around the eighth century B.C.E. Cf. Nagy 1979: 7 for Panhellenism and Homer; for Panhellenism and Hesiod, see Nagy 1990: 36–82; Stamatopoulou 2017: 13–16. For Panhellenism in general, including politics, art, and religion, see Mitchell 2007. 6 For Homer and Hesiod as representing a full history of the universe, see Graziosi and Haubold 2005: 31; cf. Koning 2010: 290–294; Mureddu 1983; Edmunds 2016: 19. 7 This is conceptual because it makes no claims about the actual compositional sequence of the poems or their relative dating. Conventional relative chronologies tend to put the Home- ric poems first: see Janko 1982: 13; Koenen 1994; Rose 2012: 170; for an earlier date for Hesiod, see West 2012: 240. For the relation of chronology and writing, see Most 1993: 76.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access 4 christensen work projects upon the mythical past an “evolutionary” development that starts with the creation of the universe and terminates with life in Archaic Greece, as reflected in the Works and Days. Each step in the cosmic narrative sequence allows for a reconsideration of the major forces of the universe and the relative position of human beings. In particular, these stages use the deployment of eris to examine the origins of conflict, the various efforts to mediate conflicts through the distributions of rights and honors, and the consequences and exigencies of incomplete or problematic resolutions. In this way, the theme of strife (eris and neikos) and its critical concomitants, distribution (dasmos) and judgment (krisis), develop as and through compositional features of the epic tradition.8 For the divine realm, these related motifs reflect how the Olympians achieved their stability; for humans, they evoke changes in politics and reflect the concerns of the audience’s real worlds.9 To be clear, I am not asserting that the texts of the poems we have were composed in the sequence I have just outlined, but rather that the poetic tradition generated a series of reflections on eris during countless performances and that these reflections are conducive to and reinforced by a particular conceptual sequence, which in turn functions teleologically to eventuate in an ideological view espoused during the Archaic Age.10This self-conscious positioning—with the Odyssey clearly meant to be understood as coming after the Iliad and with the Works and Days as post-Theogonic—implies a deep dialogue and engagement among the poetic traditions.11 Indeed, the intertextuality of one poem’s contents reacts to another in such a way that recreates the sequence through performance for audiences (cf. Most 1993: 77). Other scholars, indeed, have noted the co-influence and complementarity of the Hesiodic and Homeric treatments of strife (Munding 1995; Havelock 1966). My analysis builds on this work but with the understanding that, instead of one narrative responding to the other directly, we have the end result of a repeated engagement structurally integrated into the poems’ final forms. This repeated engagement was conditioned and encouraged by a generally agonistic culture (see note 4).To put it another way, the reflections on eris in the Homeric and Hesiodic traditions were generated as part of a competitive debate during the development of the poems as they responded both to cultural change

8 On the compositional nature of theme, see the discussion on page 10. 9 On the different perspectives of human and divine in Hesiod’s world, see Clay 2003. 10 For ideology in Homer, see note 65 and Thalmann 1998: 298–302. 11 See Most 1993: 76: “the Hesiod of WD presuppose[s] his audience’s familiarity with Th.”; for the force of intertextuality in the poems’ composition and recomposition, see Pucci 1987. For the dialogic nature of epic, see Peradotto 1990: 62–63; Heiden 1991: 5.

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(and audience interest) and each other.12 The aesthetic and structural effects of rivalry produced more sophisticated outcomes that are in effect, if not inten- tion, cooperative. The assertion that competition is actually cooperation may seem an Orwel- lian paradox but is grounded in the stories that Hesiod tells in his poems.13 The Theogony provides a memorable genealogy for eris (224–232):

Νὺξ ὀλοή· μετὰ τὴν δ’ Ἀπάτην τέκε καὶ Φιλότητα Γῆράς τ’ οὐλόμενον, καὶ Ἔριν τέκε καρτερόθυμον. αὐτὰρ Ἔρις στυγερὴ τέκε μὲν Πόνον ἀλγινόεντα Λήθην τε Λιμόν τε καὶ Ἄλγεα δακρυόεντα Ὑσμίνας τε Μάχας τε Φόνους τ’ Ἀνδροκτασίας τε Νείκεά τε Ψεύδεά τε Λόγους τ’ Ἀμφιλλογίας τε Δυσνομίην τ’ Ἄτην τε, συνήθεας ἀλλήλῃσιν, Ὅρκόν θ’, ὃς δὴ πλεῖστον ἐπιχθονίους ἀνθρώπους πημαίνει, ὅτε κέν τις ἑκὼν ἐπίορκον ὀμόσσῃ·

Ruinous night then gave birth to Deception and Sex And destructive Old Age, and also strong-hearted Strife. Then hateful Strife gave birth to grief-causing Toil, And Forgetfulness, and Hunger, and tearful Pains, Battles, Wars, Murders, and Man-killings, Conflicts, Lies, Arguments, Doubletalk, Bad-government, Blindness, and Gatherings with others, And even Oath, who pains mortal men the most of all Whenever someone willingly breaks a sworn word.

Here, eris is positioned as prior to and in some way responsible for both the major sources of human conflict (scarcity, desire, mortality) and the manifes- tations of conflict (arguments, violence). In the Works and Days, the different genealogies correlate to different expectations about what eris may produce (11–26):

12 The complementarity of Homer and Hesiod was dependent in part on their representation as rivals occupying different spheres as the story of the Certamen illustrates: see Koning 2010: 245–247; cf. Nagy 1990: 77–78. 13 Cf. “warrior society is … organized by relations and contests having to do with power and dominance. It is at the same time cooperative, constrained by social rules and to some degree by generic institutions” (Wilson 2002: 36).

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Οὐκ ἄρα μοῦνον ἔην Ἐρίδων γένος, ἀλλ’ ἐπὶ γαῖαν εἰσὶ δύω· τὴν μέν κεν ἐπαινήσειε νοήσας, ἣ δ’ ἐπιμωμητή· διὰ δ’ ἄνδιχα θυμὸν ἔχουσιν. ἣ μὲν γὰρ πόλεμόν τε κακὸν καὶ δῆριν ὀφέλλει, σχετλίη· οὔ τις τήν γε φιλεῖ βροτός, ἀλλ’ ὑπ’ ἀνάγκης ἀθανάτων βουλῇσιν Ἔριν τιμῶσι βαρεῖαν. τὴν δ’ ἑτέρην προτέρην μὲν ἐγείνατο Νὺξ ἐρεβεννή, θῆκε δέ μιν Κρονίδης ὑψίζυγος, αἰθέρι ναίων, γαίης [τ’] ἐν ῥίζῃσι καὶ ἀνδράσι πολλὸν ἀμείνω· ἥ τε καὶ ἀπάλαμόν περ ὁμῶς ἐπὶ ἔργον ἐγείρει· εἰς ἕτερον γάρ τίς τε ἴδεν ἔργοιο χατίζων πλούσιον, ὃς σπεύδει μὲν ἀρόμεναι ἠδὲ φυτεύειν οἶκόν τ’ εὖ θέσθαι· ζηλοῖ δέ τε γείτονα γείτων εἰς ἄφενος σπεύδοντ’· ἀγαθὴ δ’ Ἔρις ἥδε βροτοῖσιν. καὶ κεραμεὺς κεραμεῖ κοτέει καὶ τέκτονι τέκτων, καὶ πτωχὸς πτωχῷ φθονέει καὶ ἀοιδὸς ἀοιδῷ.

There isn’t only a single child called Strife, but there are two On the earth. Whoever recognizes the first, praises her; But the other is much-to-blame. They have distinct characters. The first marshals terrible war and conflict, the ruinous witch, No mortal loves her, I think, but forced by the plans of the gods They honor the burdensome Strife. Dusky night bore the other one first, And Cronus’s high-throned son who lives on high Set her in the roots of the earth and made her much better for men. She readies even those who are lazy to go to work. For, whenever a man who shirks hard work sees Another man who is wealthy, he hurries to plow and plant And order his house well. Neighbor envies his neighbor As he becomes comfortable. This is the good Strife for men. Now, a potter strives with a potter and a carpenter with carpenter— Even a beggar rivals a beggar, and a singer another singer.

Here, in the narrative setting of the poem’s audience eris is disambiguated. This setting is, conceptually, Hesiod’s “Iron Age” (cf. WD. 156–165), which we might call the Archaic Age anachronistically.14 In the first genealogy, eris is related

14 For analyses of the two Erides, see Thalmann 2004 (who argues that the polarization is

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access eris and epos 7 to everything over which men may have conflicts; in the second, the wicked eris is still associated with violence, but her additional aspects are shared with the other strife “set in the roots of the earth.”15 The localization of this second eris on the earth is due in part to her connection with working the land,16 but it is also about her connection to human beings. This new eris, potentially separated from violence, still has an edge: it exists in anger (κοτέει) and envy (φθονέει). But for Hesiod’s Works and Days these forces inspire a desire to work harder, producing more for each party involved in the strife rather than eventuating in one party taking from another. In the story that unfolds in the Theogony, the gods attain honors that never cease: their world and its balances are static.17 In the always unbalanced world of man, survival requires constant effort. Among mortals, strife can be the principle that allows us to survive by doing violence to each other or to thrive by cooperating with one another. Hes- iod does more than merely rename a central aspect of human nature; here he tries to give us a fundamentally different way to think about ourselves. Modern abstractions from game theory (zero-sum and positive-sum) may help characterize the distinction between the singular Theogonic strife and its bifurcation in the Works and Days. Zero-sum frameworks are essentially competitive because for one player to win, another has to lose.18 In athletic contests or games like poker, players’ winnings are their opponents’ losses. The scarcity posited as the cause of conflict in the Theogony reflects a similar framework in which one party can only gain by taking from another. Thus, Hesiod’s destructive, Theogonic eris signifies a zero-sum game wherein one party can only gain if another loses, a game central to violence, conflicts, and civil strife. Some

false). For their disambiguation as programmatic for the poem, see Hamilton 1989: 64; cf. Nagler 1992: 79. For ancient responses, see Hunter 2014: 1–6. For Hesiod’s correcting the Muses (and his prior assertion), see Most 1993: 76–80; contra Nagler 1992: 87; Haubold 2010: 21. For the doubling of eris as an innovation, see West 1978: 142; Gagarin 1990: 173; Zarecki 2007: 10. 15 Hunter sees the bad eris as war and strife between cities and population groups, whereas the good eris exists within communities and between individuals (2014: 7). Nagler argues that the distinction is between the “what is simplex and complex” (1992: 88). 16 For the roots of the earth and agriculture, see West 1978: 144; cf. Zarecki 2007: 9–10; Thal- mann 2004: 364. 17 Cf. “Hesiod’s description of the two Erides thus makes explicit the multiple potentialities in competition, conflict, and violence that are implicit elsewhere in hexameter poetry and in the narrative and formulaic traditions that underlie it” (Thalmann 2004: 376). 18 For an overview of zero-sum as a concept from the perspective of game theory, see Bin- more 2007a. Cf. Binmore 2007b: 27–29 for a history of the theory in economics and game theory.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access 8 christensen have seen Agamemnon and Achilles’s bickering over emblems of honor in the Iliad in this way too.19 Modern economics, however, has posited that competition can be productive and mutually beneficial—although such views have often been dependent upon mysterious and unexplained forces, such as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”20 From this perspective, a positive-sum game is one in which both parties stand to benefit. To provide a simple example, a shepherd might profitably trade the product of his labor to a farmer, and both parties end up with richer households.21 While the Theogonic eris signifies a zero-sum game wherein one party can only gain if another loses, the earth-bound eris possibly increases the material and social position of its participants in general.22 Therefore, one apparent paradox is that a competitive system can be cooperative in net benefits to the group. So far, this descriptive framework aligning the Theogonic eris with zero-sum perspectives and the other eris with positive-sum is simple (perhaps overly) and probably uncontroversial. As a thought experiment, I would like to complicate matters by suggesting that Greek epic reflects structural and aesthetic features of the same contrasts. First, it is clear that Greek song culture is positioned by the Works and Days as part of what I just called the positive-sum game: Hesiod declares in the same line that “even a beggar rivals a beggar, and a singer another singer” (καὶ πτωχὸς πτωχῷ φθονέει καὶ ἀοιδὸς ἀοιδῷ, Op. 26), and the Hesiodic narrator claims authority from his own victory in competition in the same poem (646–662). This articulation of poetic competition within the framework of redefining strife is significant. So, a second point I would like to make is that Hesiodic poetry engages in poetic rivalry even as it profits from it. On a compositional level, it has been useful for me to see a poetic corollary in what Bernard Fenik has described as “the anticipatory doublet”. Fenik uses this term to explain the common feature of

19 Griffith identifies Greek cultural competition as “zero-sum” (1990: 188) but later proposes that the ambiguity of tales of judgment offers multiple possibilities for victory (191). For zero-sum in Homer, see Wilson 2002: 36–39; Scodel 2008: 16–24; Elmer 2013: 188–189. 20 See Adam Smith’s Wealth of the Nations (1776) for the fundamental articulation of this. Cf. Hardin 1968 for a now classic critique of Smith’s assumption that “decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society” (1244). 21 More often referred to in economic literature as a non-zero sum or win-win. For connec- tions between Hesiod’s good strife and Greek agonistic culture, see Hogan 1981: 35, 57–58; Kühn 1947: 292; Thalmann 2004: 367. For strife’s social functions in heroic poetry, see Nagy 1979: 213–242, 309–312. 22 For the use of zero-sum terminology to describe cultural change and the perception of it (in this case, racism), see Norton and Sommers 2011.

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Homeric poetry where an idea is expressed and then repeated in expanded or altered form.23 Such a pairing can both implicitly signal the greater importance of the second element and facilitate the advancement of themes from one instantiation to another (cf. Kakridis 1949: 43–49).24 In this compositional feature, the second element surpasses the first in significance but capitalizes on its antecedent for meaning and form. In the contextual moment of that specific poetic utterance, the new idea takes precedence over the old: it appears, briefly, to surpass it. But from a broader perspective, each element is a building block in the same larger structure. For the audience—and the performance tradition as a whole—the net gain is a positive sum. A system of poetic rivalry in which one poem responds to and builds on another is, I suggest, not merely similar to Fenik’s anticipatory doublet ana- logically but an extension of such a compositional phenomenon. Even if the relationship between the structural element and the poetic rivalry is taken as merely metaphorical, the former is an instructive poetic example of how what appears specifically competitive produces something of a positive gain. The proposals I have presented so far inform the rest of this article. The first proposal is that the various definitions of strife found in Hesiod’s poems hail from and then reflect a developmental process. The competition for resources that is an inescapable part of nature becomes almost necessarily a confusing and destabilizing component of human communities.The development of discourse on strife, as I have sketched out, likely happened over time and among many different poetic traditions; within the tradition we have received, the two basic and responsive takes on strife have been codified as part of a cosmic history that explains the natural state of eris as emerging from scarcity and bifurcating within potential human relations. The second proposal, more metapoetic in nature, is that Greek poetry is itself a product of shifting and developing strife—or competitive forces. This suggestion has been inspired in part by work done on Greek agonistic culture in general, but I have proposed as well that Fenik’s anticipatory doublet functions as a compositional feature of Greek poetry that is also an index for larger structural forces. Just as in the doublet the second entry builds upon and putatively improves upon the first, so too are poetic debates and separate poems responsive to prior performances. Thus, Hesiod’s imagined second strife is never truly divided from the first, and the Theogony is a necessary antecedent for understanding the developments

23 See Fenik 1974: 142–207; Scodel 1982: 55–58; Kelly 2007; Sammons 2014: 302; Tsagalis 2014: 357 for a fuller bibliography. Cf. Griffith 1990: 198. 24 For the doublet’s cooperative nature, see Sammons 2014: 310.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access 10 christensen of the Works and Days. Eris is domesticated through this transformation.25 To explore in more depth the implications of the competitive forces that influenced the development of the two Erides, I will flesh out the implications of calling eris a theme in Early Greek poetry, provide a fuller reading of its function in the Theogony, and then turn to its functions in Homer.

Competition by Theme: Eris in the Archaic Tradition

To understand what happens in Hesiod’s definitions of eris I have offered the framework of cosmic history and suggested that the poems function in a positive-sum game in which the second element depends upon the first for meaning even as it surpasses it—a macro-level compositional aesthetic analo- gous to the anticipatory doublet. The function of eris as a compositional theme from the perspective of oral poetics makes this possible through the repetition of a group of ideas and their effect on the shaping of poetic performances (Lord 1960: 68–98; cf. Muellner 1996: 15; Ebbott 2014: 320). As Albert Lord argued, conventional formulae are intricately, and sometimes exclusively, connected to given themes—so much so that their meanings are felt even in their absence (1960: 94–97). A compositional theme embodies a pattern subject to com- pression, expansion, rearrangement, and contrasting narrative outcomes (Lord 1960: 81–82; cf. Ebbott 2014: 322).26 The deployment of themes is competitive: the use of common discourse creates a tension between the song being sung and the expectations established by those that have come before (Ebbott 2014: 334–335). Thus, an audience familiar with the theme of wrath (mēnis) might expect a certain type of story pattern from the first line of the Iliad, one involving divine anger, cosmic conflict, and mortal suffering. In this way, mēnis is both a title— a precis—and a poetic frame. Of course, eris appears in the Iliad’s proem too alongside the invocation of rage.27 In combination with other themes, then, eris

25 Munding suggests that the Homeric epics influenced Hesiod’s representation of eris (1955); Havelock argues that the roots of the eris passage in the Works and Days lie in the Iliad (1966: 66–69); cf. Thalmann 2004: 364–367. See Hogan 1981: 57 for an “implicit” relationship (although he maintains that the Homeric eris must be analyzed on its own). 26 Cf. Lord 1992 for performance and tradition and, in general, Foley 1990. 27 For the mēnis theme in Homer, see Muellner 1996. Edmunds explains, “Eris is conflict between two parties, whereas menis ‘anger’ is one-sided” (2016: 13). Cf. “the Iliad’s atten- tion to eris may be exceptional in the larger tradition and the personification in Hesiod might be new” (Mureddu 1983: 62–63).

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access eris and epos 11 and its associates (neikos, dasmos) communicate general narrative patterns in the context of archaic poetry and also stand as metonymic titles for known narrative traditions. When Hesiod redefines eris in the Works and Days, therefore, he draws on these narrative patterns but also repositions their cosmic traditions. For its full meaning, the new genealogy of eris assumes a latent, even if imperfect, understanding of its other status. Hesiod’s doublet in the Works and Days does not so much replace the first eris as juxtapose the two. This coexistence ultimately resolves in acts of judgment where one definition or tale occludes another without replacing it completely. As a first step in appreciating the way the Iliad and the Odyssey, in exploring eris, engage with Hesiod’s poems, we should consider the theme’s compositional concomitants in early Greek poetry. Eris appears to pervade early Greek epic, a fact that, given the content of war and successions, should come as no surprise. But the lexical items highlighted earlier (eris,dasmos,krisis) are clearly connected to compositional themes.28 A few examples illustrate the titular and thematic function of eris in early poetry.29 The Cypria retitles the Trojan War itself as eris writ large: “the great strife of the Trojan War” (μεγάλην ἔριν Ἰλιακοῖο, fr. 5). In the Iliad the war (neikos) is said to have arisen because of Paris (Ἀλε- ξάνδροιο, τοῦ εἵνεκα νεῖκος ὄρωρεν, 3.87; cf. 7.374, 388) but is also referred to as an eris by Menelaus (εἵνεκ’ ἐμῆς ἔριδος καὶ Ἀλεξάνδρου ἕνεκ’ ἀρχῆς, 3.100).30 Within the epics, other story traditions are also referred to in shorthand using neikos or eris. Nestor calls a conflict from his youth a neikos (ὡς ὁπότ’ Ἠλείοισι καὶ ἡμῖν νεῖ- κος ἐτύχθη, Il. 11.671) and recalls how Athena gave strife to the Atreidai (ἥ τ’ ἔριν Ἀτρεΐδῃσι μετ’ ἀμφοτέροισιν ἔθηκε, Od. 3.136). The Odyssey’s narrator also uses neikos to describe the conflict between Achilles and Odysseus: “the Muse then urged the singer to sing a song of the famous tales of men, / one whose fame reached to the wide sky, / the strife [neikos] between Odysseus and Peleus’s son Achilles, / how they once fought at the great banquet of the gods” (Μοῦσ’ ἄρ’ ἀοιδὸν ἀνῆκεν ἀειδέμεναι κλέα ἀνδρῶν,/ οἴμης, τῆς τότ’ ἄρα κλέος οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἵκανε,/ νεῖκος Ὀδυσσῆος καὶ Πηλεΐδεω Ἀχιλῆος,/ ὥς ποτε δηρίσαντο θεῶν ἐν δαιτὶ θαλείῃ, 8.73–76). The terms eris and neikos correspond as well to the plot of the

28 Generic or performance-context features may be at play here. Anacreon (fr. 2) expresses disdain for the singer of “conflicts and tearful war” (νείκεα καὶ πόλεμον δακρυόεντα λέγει, 2) while drinking. Similarly, Theognis advises that those “who tell stories well around the mixing bowl / restrain one another from strife” (ὑμεῖς δ’ εὖ μυθεῖσθε παρὰ κρητῆρι μένοντες, / ἀλλήλων ἔριδος δὴν ἀπερυκόμενοι). Cf. Xenophanes (fr. B1 21–23). 29 For epos as poetic discourse, see Nagy 1979: 265–275. For a similar tour through instances of eris, see Thalmann 2004: 360–374. 30 For neikos as a synonym of eris, see Hogan 1981.

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Iliad, a correspondence which Achilles confirms when he says, “I think that the Achaeans will remember our strife for a long time” (αὐτὰρ Ἀχαιοὺς / δηρὸν ἐμῆς καὶ σῆς ἔριδος μνήσεσθαι ὀΐω, 19.63–64).31 A fragment from the Hesiodic tradition offers some variations on eris as a theme (fr. 43a M-W = 69 Most):

ὡς ῥ' ἑτέ]ρ̣η τε γέ[ν]οιτο καὶ ἐκ[δύσειε]ν̣ ἑωυτῆς μορφ]ήν· ἣ δὲ λυθ[εῖ]σα φίλου μ[ετὰ δώμα]τα πατρὸς ὤιχετ’] ἀπαΐξασα, γυνὴ δ’ ἄφαρ α[ὖτις ἔγεντο πατρὸς ἐ]νὶ μεγάροισι· μετῆλθ̣[ε δὲ ]δη παρὰ μητρὶ ἐπο̣[ιχομένην μέγαν ἱστόν· ἀ]μφ̣[ὶς] δ’ ἤθελ’ ἄγειν κούρη̣ν̣[ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣]υ̣[ αἶ]ψα [δ’ ἄ]ρ̣’ ἀ[λλ]ήλοισ[ι]ν ἔρις καὶ ν[εῖκος] ἐτ[ύχθη Σισύφωι ἠδ’ Αἴθωνι τανισφύρο[υ εἵ]νεκα [κούρης, ο]ὐδ̣’ ἄρα τις δικάσαι [δύ]νατο βροτός· ἀλλ’ ἄρ’ Ἀθ̣[ήνηι νεῖκος ἐπ]έτρεψαν καὶ ἐπήινεσαν· ἣ δ’ ἄρα τοῖ̣[σιν ἀ]τρεκέως διέθηκ[ε] δίκην δ ̣[ “ε]ὖτέ τις ἀντ’ ὤνοιο̣ χατίζηι χ̣[ρῆ]μ̣’ ἀνελ[έσθαι, ἀ]μφὶ μάλα χρῆν ὦν̣[ον ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣ ̣] ̣τῖμον̣ [ οὐ γ]ὰρ δὴ μεταμειπ[τόν, ἐπὴν τὸ] πρῶτ[ον ἕληται.”32

[Mestra] would become something else and shed her own Form. But after she was released, she went rushing To the home of her dear father and she was a woman again In her father’s halls. And [Sisyphus] went after her [ ]; near her mother […] the girl who was using the great loom [whom] he wished to lead away. And soon strife and conflict arose for them both, Sisyphus and Aithon, over the fair-ankled girl. No mortal was able to make a judgment for them. But they entrusted the conflict to Athena and made an agreement. And she truly settled the case for them […] “When someone wants to take something in exchange for a price, It is necessary to honor the price [which was agreed upon] It cannot be taken back again once it is given.”

31 Hogan relates Achilles’s words at 18.107–108 to the eris of the proem (1.6–8) and to Athena’s request: “Come, leave off the strife” (ἀλλ’ ἄγε λῆγ’ ἔριδος, 1.210) (1981: 21). 32 This text uses the readings and emendations provided by Most 2007.

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This fragment, in which Mestra’s shape-shifting creates a conflict between father and husband, frames the conflict with the formulaically matched pair eris and neikos (ἔρις καὶ ν[εῖκος]). The conflict festers for lack of resolution through judgment, until Athena intervenes with proverbial wisdom about the importance of honoring agreed upon prices.33Though it may belabor the point, note the familiar elements from Proclus’s summary of the Epic Cycle in the Chrestomathia cited earlier: a marriage is an occasion for strife; judgment is required to resolve it. This pattern is essential to our Iliad, which begins as an instance of strife over a girl during a war fought over a different girl.34The major difference in the Mestra fragment is that the plaintiffs in the case have recourse to a judge (Athena) who can resolve the case with gnomic statements on the rightness of honoring an agreed-upon exchange (here, a redistribution— dasmos). In response to such a resolution, the Trojan War tradition makes this judge (Athena) one of the disputants over a limited resource (the honor of being the most beautiful). Even in so brief a comparison, we can see how Greek poetry and myth deploy the basic pattern and language of eris only to change the stakes with a reexamination of the pattern set chronologically after the resolution of the first conflict (here, the issue of Mestra). But the fragment also anticipates issues pertinent to its audience but subsequent to its narrative: as a reader of this article suggested, line 38’s declaration that “No mortal was able to make a judgment for them” (ο]ὐδ̣’ ἄρα τις δικάσαι [δύ]νατο βροτός) looks forward to Paris’s failure to resolve a conflict among the goddesses.

Setting the Table: Strife in Hesiod’s Theogony

As a compositional theme, eris brings with it expected plot-turns (causes, solutions, means for adjudication) expressed in permutations of repeated lexical items (dasmos and krisis). These concomitants are structural both in poetic lines and part-lines that accompany them and in the way they create common story patterns. In the Hesiodic fragment, like in the summary of the Cypria, the theme of eris is closely presented with its cause—aborted or transgressed dasmos—and a solution: an act of judgment.This pattern continues if the judgment is rejected, and judgment itself, both within myth and other scenes of competition, is positioned as ambiguous if not problematic and generative

33 For extensive discussions of this fragment, see Irwin 2005: 82–83 (especially on Athenian political ramifications); Ormand 2014: 85–110. For a discussion of this fragment’s engagement with Panhellenic traditions, see Rutherford 2005. 34 For women and social instability in Greek myth, see Bergren 1983; cf. Ormand 2014: 85–87.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access 14 christensen of strife.35 Thus, a new eris emerges from a dasmos proposed in a krisis for an old one. These elements are critical to the political narrative of Hesiod’s Theogony.36 Although the basic plot of the Theogony is the genealogical succession from Ouranus and Gaea to Zeus, political questions are deeply embedded in the poem.37 And the story that the narrator requests from the Muses is essentially political, “how the gods divided the wealth and chose out their honors” (ὥς τ’ ἄφενος δάσσαντο καὶ ὡς τιμὰς διέλοντο, 112).38 The divine division of wealth is fixed and permanent: the conflict of the Theogony is zero-sum, as I will suggest. And the type of eris described corresponds to the nature of this conflict. As I mentioned earlier, the Theogony provides the genealogy for the destructive eris. The narrative of the creation of the universe is largely one of genera- tional replacement rather than cooperation or coexistence.The plot of Hesiod’s poem, however, hinges on Zeus’s ending the cycle of replacement. At several junctures, this new stability invokes the eris theme. After Zeus has overthrown his father and the Titanomachy is completed, we find this distribution of goods (881–885):

αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥα πόνον μάκαρες θεοὶ ἐξετέλεσσαν, Τιτήνεσσι δὲ τιμάων κρίναντο βίηφι, δή ῥα τότ’ ὤτρυνον βασιλευέμεν ἠδὲ ἀνάσσειν Γαίης φραδμοσύνῃσιν Ὀλύμπιον εὐρύοπα Ζῆν ἀθανάτων· ὁ δὲ τοῖσιν ἐὺ διεδάσσατο τιμάς.

Then, when the blessed gods accomplished their toil And achieved a judgment of honors with the Titans by means of strength, They went and urged wide-browed Zeus to be king And to rule the immortals on the advice of Gaia. Then he divided the portions of honor among them well.

In general, one obstacle to my overall argument is the absence of thematic titling using eris and/or neikos in the Theogony. Although the lexical items eris and neikos are absent from this passage, the theme is not: the gods have toiled

35 For judgment as a problem in Greek poetry and myth, see Griffith 1990: 188–191. 36 Cf. Hesiod’s “discourse … stakes out political positions” (Rose 2012: 170, emphasis in origi- nal). 37 On the poetics of the succession myth as connected to the Iliad’s mēnis theme, see Muell- ner 1996. Cf. Clay 2003; Stamatopoulou 2017: 138–150. 38 Harden and Kelly show that part of the topic of the poem is “the division of timai” (2014: 9).

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access eris and epos 15 in war and achieved a kind of judgment (κρίναντο) over honors (τιμάων). The thematic relationships constitutive of the eris theme are operative. Indeed, by this point in the Theogonic narrative, a direct invocation of eris may be inap- propriate insofar as we are witnessing the creation of divine stability. In that effort, the gods look to a new order near the end of the poem.39 Zeus, as king in this Theogony, makes his first act the distributions of “portions of honor” (διε- δάσσατο τιμάς). But Zeus has already presided over a redistribution of portions in the story time of the Theogony. Hesiod anticipates his method of rule when mentioning Hecate (421–425):

ὅσσοι γὰρ Γαίης τε καὶ Οὐρανοῦ ἐξεγένοντο καὶ τιμὴν ἔλαχον, τούτων ἔχει αἶσαν ἁπάντων· οὐδέ τί μιν Κρονίδης ἐβιήσατο οὐδέ τ’ ἀπηύρα, ὅσσ’ ἔλαχεν Τιτῆσι μέτα προτέροισι θεοῖσιν, ἀλλ’ ἔχει, ὡς τὸ πρῶτον ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς ἔπλετο δασμός.

However so many [gods] were born from Gaea and Ouranus And the honor they received, she has a portion of all of this. Cronus’s son did no violence to her and did not deprive her of the rights She earned among the Titans who were the earlier gods, But she possesses what she did from the beginning at the first division.

Zeus is marked out as not disturbing a prior distribution (dasmos) by depriving (ἀπηύρα) Hecate of her established rights.40 The exceptional nature of this moment is contingent on the thematic association between strife, division, and judgment. Latent in the possibility that Zeus might deprive Hecate of her timē is a threat of eris.41

39 Zeus is in effect “elected” thanks to his “distribution of powers and privileges” (Rose 2012: 173–174). For a darker reading, see Thalmann 2004: 386. 40 For a biographical Hesiod’s devotion to the goddess Hecate, see Stoddard 2004: 8–15. Griffith concludes that this scene illustrates Zeus’s “cooperative and diplomatic talents” (1983: 54). 41 Elsewhere, Hesiod describes Prometheus releasing his anger “because he did not want to strive with overawing Zeus in counsels” (καί περ χωόμενος παύθη χόλου, ὃν πρὶν ἔχεσκεν,/ οὕνεκ’ ἐρίζετο βουλὰς ὑπερμενέι, Κρονίωνι, 533–534). While Prometheus divides the sacrifice deceptively, “trying to deceive the mind of Zeus” (Διὸς νόον ἐξαπαφίσκων, 537), when mortals and gods gather and “are separated for judgment” (ἐκρίνοντο) at Mecone, his trick does not result in a new open conflict; see Stamatopoulou 2017: 122–159 for Prometheus in the succession myth.

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Indeed, the Theogony we possess emphasizes how the cosmos is spared a state of permanent conflict through continued succession. In part, this is due to Zeus’s actions, but the gods also have institutions that allow them to manage conflict. “Whenever conflict and strife arises among the gods” (ὁππότ’ ἔρις καὶ νεῖκος ἐν ἀθανάτοισιν ὄρηται, 782), Zeus has established the oath of the river Styx as the binding measure to ensure honesty and the fulfillment of promises.42 By the end of the Theogony, then, the cosmogonic eris achieves frightening manifestation in wars and violence but is also mediated through re-division (dasmos) of honors and rights (timai and gera) and forestalled through mech- anisms of judgment (krisis) and the divine-social institution of the oath on the River Styx. That the poem is ultimately interested in addressing strife is clear before the creation story (80–93):

ἡ γὰρ καὶ βασιλεῦσιν ἅμ’ αἰδοίοισιν ὀπηδεῖ. ὅντινα τιμήσουσι Διὸς κοῦραι μεγάλοιο γεινόμενόν τε ἴδωσι διοτρεφέων βασιλήων, τῷ μὲν ἐπὶ γλώσσῃ γλυκερὴν χείουσιν ἐέρσην, τοῦ δ’ ἔπε’ ἐκ στόματος ῥεῖ μείλιχα· οἱ δέ νυ λαοὶ πάντες ἐς αὐτὸν ὁρῶσι διακρίνοντα θέμιστας ἰθείῃσι δίκῃσιν· ὁ δ’ ἀσφαλέως ἀγορεύων αἶψά τι καὶ μέγα νεῖκος ἐπισταμένως κατέπαυσε· τούνεκα γὰρ βασιλῆες ἐχέφρονες, οὕνεκα λαοῖς βλαπτομένοις ἀγορῆφι μετάτροπα ἔργα τελεῦσι ῥηιδίως, μαλακοῖσι παραιφάμενοι ἐπέεσσιν· ἐρχόμενον δ’ ἀν’ ἀγῶνα θεὸν ὣς ἱλάσκονται αἰδοῖ μειλιχίῃ, μετὰ δὲ πρέπει ἀγρομένοισι. τοίη Μουσάων ἱερὴ δόσις ἀνθρώποισιν.

42 For the structural and thematic importance of Styx in Hesiod, see Lye 2009. See Hamil- ton 1989: 18 for how the Styx scene anticipates the distribution of timai. The Homeric Hymns cover similar ground. In the Hymn to Demeter, Demeter’s anger is destabilizing in threatening the sacrifices that are a part of each god’s timē. Zeus resolves this danger by compensating Demeter by increasing both her and Persephone’s timai. Hermes is especially concerned about being a son of Zeus without honor (h. Herm. 166–172), but his potential strife to secure his absent rights is with Apollo—“lest anyone learn why this conflict arose” (μή τις τοῦτο πύθοιτο πόθεν τόδε νεῖκος ἐτύχθη, 269)—and it is judged (322–396) by Zeus at Hermes’s request—“give [me] a trial and put it before Zeus, Cronus’s son” (δὸς δὲ δίκην καὶ δέξο παρὰ Ζηνὶ Κρονίωνι, 312).

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[Calliope] is the Muse who attends to kings and singers. Whomever of the god-raised Kings the daughters of great Zeus Honor and look upon when he is born, On his tongue they pour sweet dew, And gentle words flow out of his mouth. Then the people All look upon him as he judges [diakrinonta] the laws With straight decisions. He speaks confidently And quickly resolves a conflict [neikos] with skill. For this reason, kings are intelligent, so that they May effect retributive actions in the assembly when men are harmed, And with ease as they persuade everyone with gentle words. When he walks into the contest ground people propitiate him Like a god with gentle reverence, and he stands out among the assembled. Such is the gift of the Muses for men.

This passage is proleptic both for the type of ruler Zeus could be by the end of the Theogony and for the failures of later kings who take bribes and fail to make fair judgments.43 While no specific cause of a conflict is mentioned, such as a woman or spoils, we find here a fully expressed interrelation between eris/neikos, judgment (krisis; here, dikē) and distribution (dasmos). When a conflict (μέγα νεῖκος) arises and results in harm (βλαπτομένοις), the king who is blessed by the Muses and Zeus (and therefore a king with attributes like Zeus) may resolve the conflict and complete remunerative acts (μετάτροπα ἔργα) or, perhaps, redistributive acts without allowing the negative features of the eris to be born in the Theogony. The king’s ability to use speech for this is matched with his capacity to make fair judgments (διακρίνοντα), perhaps with reference to earlier precedents and decisions (θέμιστας / ἰθείῃσι δίκῃσιν).44 This implies another potentially eristic feature: not all men will judge the same, and the judgment must be expressed persuasively. Such difference may lead to future

43 For this passage as a proleptic commentary, see Stoddard 2004: 176–188; on the kings’ functions in the assembly, see Edwards 2004: 65–67. For possible echoes of this passage in Bacch. Ode 5.191–195, see Stamatopoulou 2017: 30–33. 44 For themistes as precedents, see Gagarin 1992: 70–75; Walker 1996: 248–249. West concludes that variance in the treatment of kings between Hesiod’s Theogony and his Works and Days is the result of different target audiences: the former was composed for a performance before kings and the latter for a performance before “the people” (1966: 44).

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access 18 christensen conflict or competing judgments. In part, this will be Homer’s tale.45 Neverthe- less, when the king utters epea (ἔπε’)—the form and content of epic poetry—he instrumentalizes poetic speech as a tool for coping with eris (Walker 1996: 250– 251). In making the management of strife without violence contingent on the effective use of words, Hesiod makes how you speak matter.46 What matters in the power of speech that redounds upon poet and king alike is its impact on audiences. The unspoken implication is that not all speech will be similarly effective. Poetry, song, and authoritative speech thus potentially become issues of judgment for audiences.47 The singer has eris as both subject and context for performance; epic song becomes not just a vessel and product of strife, but in turn is also a producer.

The Evolution of Eris in the Homeric Epics

Hesiod’s Theogony deploys and defines eris in a way that illustrates how it motivates divine conflict, resulting in a resolution (krisis) through a stable, fundamentally zero-sum, redistribution of rights and honors. This solution, however, is ill suited to the challenges of the race of heroes whose interests and claims overlap at times with the gods but who are distinct because of their nature as mortals: by definition, they cannot have stable rights and honors. Hence, the Homeric epics revisit the thematic pattern of eris from increasingly human-focused perspectives. The Iliad in particular explores the implication of the Theogonic/destructive eris. Again, just to clarify, I am not proposing that our Iliad is directly responding to the Theogony we possess, but rather that both poems emerge from converging poetic traditions which deploy the eris theme in competitive and complementary iterations. Such repetition appropri- ates from linguistic and narrative traditions and adds something different—an inverted context, an extended narrative, a theme or motif transferred to a sur- prising place. Objections to this framework are easy to make: we know little certain about the priority of one poem over another. We know less about which

45 For this passage and Nestor’s introduction in the Iliad (1.247–253), see Havelock 1966: 71– 73; Gagarin 1992: 64; Walker 1996: 246–248. Cf. Martin 1984: 43; Nagy 1979: 311–312. 46 On the poet’s ability in speech and the king’s, see Gagarin 1992: 65–66. For “technical skill” as a category for judging poetry (in addition to “knowledge and factual accuracy” and “moral and educational integrity”), see Griffith 1990: 189. 47 The traditionality of this passage is buttressed in part by very similar lines in Homer’s Odyssey (8.165–177). For the relationship between the Hesiodic and Homeric passages, see Solmsen 1954; West 1966: 183; Edwards 1971: 166–189; Janko 1982; Martin 1984; Rosen 1997.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access eris and epos 19 audiences would have had the full range of poetic experiences to appreciate these trends. Yet what is competitive on the synchronic plane may be cooperative from a diachronic perspective as each iteration encourages adaptation and change in those around it. The Homeric use of the eris theme seeks to sup- plement and then supplant other (possible) uses.48 By incorporating the eris theme with added complexities and confusions, the Iliad performs for its audience an interrogation of a Theogonic presentation and offers its incomplete resolutions for their adjudication. Like the Theogony’s, the Iliad’s exploration of strife interweaves with other parts of its plot, emerging most clearly in books 1, 9, 18, and 23. The Iliad starts by invoking the eris theme when the narrator begins “from when those two men stood apart in strife” (ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε, 1.6) and then seeks out the strife’s divine author, “but who of the gods set these two to struggle in strife” (Τίς τάρ σφωε θεῶν ἔριδι ξυνέηκε μάχεσθαι, 1.8). The strife that ensues is one over distribution: Agamemnon must lose his geras (and accordingly his timē) to save the host from destruction, so he demands a replacement. The conflict over honor that unfolds operates in the arena of Hesiod’s destructive eris: it is a zero-sum game in which for one hero to gain in possessions or honor, another must lose.49 This is clear when Achilles explains that “everything from the sacked cities has been distributed” (ἀλλὰ τὰ μὲν πολίων ἐξεπράθομεν, τὰ δέδα- σται, 1.124).50 The drama of this epic has been framed as a search for institutional structures to keep any kind of strife from becoming the Strife that results in violence and war, culminating in experiments in redistribution outside of the zero-sum game that initiates this epic’s conflict(s).51 The epic revisits the eris theme through the withdrawal and return of Achil- les. When, during the embassy of book 9, Achilles returns to problems with the

48 For an extensive analysis of eris in the Homeric epics exclusively, see Hogan 1981. My analysis relies on his in several places, but he is not explicit about the compositional theme (and he also denies any need to go outside of Homer to understand Homeric uses of eris). 49 See note 19 for Wilson 2002. Cf. “The [Iliad’s] disjunction’s disastrous consequences are first manifested in a conflict over the dasmos, the division of the wealth and associated honors (timai) acquired through military success” (Rose 2012: 170). 50 Achilles insists further that “it is not proper that the people gather these things together again” (λαοὺς δ’ οὐκ ἐπέοικε παλίλλογα ταῦτ’ ἐπαγείρειν, 1.126) and later that his prize is smaller “whenever the distribution happens” (ἀτὰρ ἤν ποτε δασμὸς ἵκηται / σοὶ τὸ γέρας πολὺ μεῖζον, ἐγὼ δ’ ὀλίγον τε φίλον τε, 1.166–167). 51 Agamemnon reads Achilles’s resistance as an indication of strife: “strife, war and battle are always dear to you” (αἰεὶ γάρ τοι ἔρις τε φίλη πόλεμοί τε μάχαι τε, 1.177). For the Iliad’s interest in exploring and institutionalizing eris in the form of dissent, see Barker 2009: 41–80.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access 20 christensen distribution of public material in the Achaean camp—“after he received it, he distributed out a little bit, but he was keeping a lot” (δεξάμενος διὰ παῦρα δασά- σκετο, πολλὰ δ’ ἔχεσκεν, 9.333)—he and by extension the epic has made what some have seen as a conceptual break.52 When Achilles muses that the man who works hard and the one who does not still die the same (κάτθαν’ ὁμῶς ὅ τ’ ἀεργὸς ἀνὴρ ὅ τε πολλὰ ἐοργώς, 9.320)—and adds that he has no need of the material distributed by the Greeks—he skirts a dangerous irony in the eris theme’s applicability to the Iliad: conflict (eris and neikos) develops as a result of dasmos (distribution) over things tangible (gera) and not (timē) even when these heroes do not suffer material scarcity. Achilles’s conclusion here and vis- ited again in book 23 is that there is enough to go around. Part of the dissonance introduced during conversations in Iliad 9 derives, I suggest, from different models of competition, individual (zero-sum) versus community (positive-sum). In responding to Achilles’s speech by furnishing the example of some other man who might accept a blood price for the death of a child or brother (9.632–638), Ajax juxtaposes a community-preserving model to Achilles’s destructive one. But like the father and son-in-law in the Mes- tra fragment discussed earlier, the audience is left with a question of juridical agency. The initial Iliadic conflict fails to fit Ajax’s model because it presents multiple kings in a political unit whose structures do not seem equal to medi- ation. The question that the Iliad brings to the eris theme is who will judge and ensure a fair dasmos.This question responds, in part, to the king who appears at the beginning of Hesiod’s Theogony. That king addresses a conflict in his community; he has a certain ability, but it is clear he also has assumed authority to resolve conflicts among his subordinates. This Theogonic model is explored in part through Nestor’s introduction during the conflict in book 1 as the “sweet- spoken, clear-voiced orator / whose words flow more sweetly than honey from his tongue” (ἡδυεπὴς ἀνόρουσε λιγὺς Πυλίων ἀγορητής / τοῦ καὶ ἀπὸ γλώσσης μέλι- τος γλυκίων ῥέεν αὐδή, 1.248–249), verses that recall the Zeus-blessed king whose tongue the Muses grace with honeyed words.53 The contexts are similar too: both stride into a public space beset by conflict where the people are threat- ened; both hold forth with epea. By acknowledging the assembly as a venue for the problem of strife and forcing us to consider the results of multiple claims to authority, the Iliad invites its audiences to consider the conditions necessary for the Theogony’s response to strife.

52 For the limits of Achilles’s language and the extent to which he breaks from tradition, see Parry 1956, 1972; Friedrich and Redfield 1978; Scully 1984; Martin 1989. 53 For Nestor as the epic’s ideal speaker, see Martin 1989: 81; Dickson 1995; Mackie 1996: 132. For his rhetorical skill, see Knudsen 2014: 77–79. Cf. Roisman 2005; Christensen 2009.

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The resolution of this strife is strung throughout the epic’s second half. Although Achilles returns to the Achaeans and accepts Agamemnon’s recom- pense in book 19, the problem of strife and distribution surfaces again during the funeral games. When the lesser Ajax and Idomeneus argue during the chariot race in book 23, Achilles intervenes (23.490–494):54

καί νύ κε δὴ προτέρω ἔτ’ ἔρις γένετ’ ἀμφοτέροισιν, εἰ μὴ Ἀχιλλεὺς αὐτὸς ἀνίστατο καὶ φάτο μῦθον· μηκέτι νῦν χαλεποῖσιν ἀμείβεσθον ἐπέεσσιν Αἶαν Ἰδομενεῦ τε κακοῖς, ἐπεὶ οὐδὲ ἔοικε. καὶ δ’ ἄλλῳ νεμεσᾶτον ὅτις τοιαῦτά γε .ῥέζοι

And then first a conflict would have developed for both of them If Achilles had not stood up and delivered a speech: “Don’t set upon each other with harsh and wicked words Any longer, Ajax and Idomeneus, it just isn’t proper. You both would criticize another man who did these kinds of things.”

Beyond indicating that Achilles and Agamemnon were worthy of criticism in book 1, this passage also recalls the resolution of strife in the proem of Hesiod’s Theogony: ἀνίστατο marks Achilles as speaking in a public forum to prevent men from falling into strife. When Ajax and Idomeneus nearly fall into conflict, it is over the honor of who is right about who is in first in the chariot race. Achilles defers the conflict to the race’s completion by indicating the intrinsic dangers of pursuing this type of a quarrel any further. Achilles’s chairmanship of the games represents an attempt to rework the conflict of Iliad 1 from multiple perspectives.55 He emphasizes the dangers of such conflict while also readdressing the problems of distribution. The fantasy world of epic, however, offers solutions not necessarily available in real life. When Eumelus loses, Achilles tries to give him second prize as a consolation

54 For the architecture of the Iliad and book 23’s correspondence to book 1, see Richardson 1993: 164–166. Cf. Whitman 1958: 261–264. On eris in the games, see Hogan 1981: 42–43; for Achilles’s management of this strife and Hesiod’s “good” eris, see Gagarin 1992: 66–69 and Thalmann 2004: 372. For politics and the funeral games, see Donlan 1979: 63; Hammer 1997: 14–16; Wilson 2002: 57; Hammer 2002: 134–138; Beck 2005: 233–241. Cf. “one of the main poetic functions of the funeral games [is] to show Achilles soothing and resolving public strife, instead of provoking and furthering it” (Taplin 1992: 53). 55 For Achilles’s chairmanship of the games as a step in exploring the institutionalization of dissent, see Barker 2009: 83–88; cf. Elmer 2013: 187–195.

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(23.536–540); when Antilochus dissents (23.539–554), Achilles merely provides a new gift from his ample store. The significant difference for the Iliad, never- theless, is that Achilles allows and heeds Antilochus’s complaint without allowing a new eris to arise.56 In a subsequent scene, Menelaus stands enraged— “Then Menelaus stood among them, angry in his heart, / raging at Antilochus” (Τοῖσι δὲ καὶ Μενέλαος ἀνίστατο θυμὸν ἀχεύων / Ἀντιλόχῳ ἄμοτον κεχολωμένος …, 23.566–567)—and objects to Antilochus’s cheating in the race (23.566–585). The two men are described in terms that echo the conflict at the beginning of the epic.57 And then Menelaus invites Antilochus to submit their conflict to the assembly for judgment—“you all judge in the middle for both of us and don’t help either” (ἐς μέσον ἀμφοτέροισι δικάσσατε, μὴ δ’ ἐπ’ ἀρωγῇ, 23.574)—and to swear an oath in public—“swear that you did not willingly harm my chariot with a trick” (ὄμνυθι μὴ μὲν ἑκὼν τὸ ἐμὸν δόλῳ ἅρμα πεδῆσαι, 23.585). Here we have two institutions anticipated by the Theogony emerging in the mortal world: the official krisis and the oath.58 Although the epic thus emphasizes the importance of precedents and institutions in avoiding or mitigating destructive strife, its own resolutions ring somewhat hollow. When Achilles addresses the destructive demands of that Theogonic eris by increasing everyone’s honor, he rewrites the codes of competition in ways that are not adaptable to the world outside the poem since they depend on the largess of a benign leader with seemingly endless resources. The deferred request for judgment in the funeral games is characteristic of the epic’s indirect yet consistent strategy. Though there is implicit judgment throughout the epic from the Achaean acclamation of Chryses’s pleas (1.22) to the admission of fault by Agamemnon (9.115–120),59 it is not until Achilles’s shield that the epic indicates that the strife could have been approached in a different way (18.496–508). There “the people were gathered, crowded, in the assembly where a conflict / had arisen” (λαοὶ δ’ εἰν ἀγορῇ ἔσαν ἀθρόοι· ἔνθα δὲ νεῖκος / ὠρώρει, 18.497–498) and in the middle of the assembly is a prize for “whoever among them uttered the straightest judgment” (τῷ δόμεν ὃς μετὰ τοῖσι δίκην ἰθύντατα εἴποι, 18.508).

56 For Achilles’s recognizing his own words in Antilochus’s, see Martin 1989: 188–189. 57 Agamemnon expresses fear that Achilles is trying to trick him (1.131–132). For Finley, the dispute between Antilochus and Menelaus is a private issue (1979: 80–81). Cf. Hammer 1997: 19. 58 For Trojan inability to come to a krisis as a marker of political instability, see Elmer 2013: 134–135. 59 For the political and poetic implications of collective acclamation (epainos), see Elmer 2013.

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The image of the two sides in conflict over a death and the setting of rec- ompense recalls both Ajax’s comments in book 9 and the actions of the good king in Hesiod’s Theogony. But it also takes us out of the world of the Iliad to something closer to that of Hesiod’s kings in the Works and Days.60 In it we have a conflict arising over a crime and an attempt to render judgment to avoid the development of more destructive strife. Note the double establish- ment of conflict: one had already arisen (νεῖκος / ὠρώρει) but was still ongoing and unresolved (ἐνείκεον). And, more important, the prizes set in the middle for redistribution are for whoever makes the fairest judgment—reflecting a value set on fair judges echoed in some historical documents.61 As I hope has been clear so far, the poems I have discussed develop their takes on eris within their own narratives, but these narratives’ meanings are enhanced by potential engagements with elements outside the poems. In the Theogony, this process is encouraged from the beginning by the comparison between Zeus and the Muse-blessed king and the resolution of strife. In the Iliad, Achilles’s shield offers a variation on the theme of eris that anticipates the world outside of the poem, but, in placing a greater emphasis on krisis and dikē than neikos, it also prepares the audience for the events of the funeral games. At the same time, however, this scene may take a metapoetic turn in empow- ering the audience as critics. In leaving the moment of judgment on the field frozen in bronze, the narrator lets the audience consider what the possible outcomes might be and how they relate to the story in question. Here, the audience is not asked to think about Agamemnon and Achilles in conflict but instead about two unnamed men and the prized efforts of their judges. Strife in this telling is part of a narrative of error, the resolution of which must come from judgment from without. Such a perspective on judgment upends the emphasis presented by the beginning of the epic itself—the emerging concern is not with who started the conflict but who finished it. Further, the erasure of any clear details about the identities of the strivers amounts to something of an

60 For Achilles’s shield, see Edwards 1991: 200–204: Becker 1995: 5; Hammer 2002: 107–109. For the juridical scene in particular, see Westbrook 1992. Cf. Muellner 1976: 105–106; Nagy 2003: 72–87. For this scene and the development of civic institutions, see Barker 2009: 85–87. For the shield as marking the importance of a collective will, see Elmer 2013: 182– 187. 61 Historical evidence prizes the performance of the judges. A law from Locris in the fifth century B.C.E. ordered disenfranchisement for an archon who did not pursue a case; an earlier inscription from Chios sets fines for poor execution of judicial duties. For these decrees from Locris (IG ix.12 718: 41–45 = Nomima 1, 43 = IGT 61) and Chios (ML 8 = Nomima I, 62 = IGT 61), see Papakonstantinou 2004: 14.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access 24 christensen anti-epic aesthetic. There is no fame for these two unnamed men; we need not worry about their genealogies or cities or their honor; and the issue is reduced to the simplest narrative frame. The stark, frozen nature of the moment only reinforces its status as a commentary on this epic and the conflicts that came before. The resolution of a conflict on the shield challenges the epic frame that con- tains it but fails to remake it. The epic returns to strife, lingers in the fantasy redistributions of the games, and returns to eternal, even Theogonic models by the final book. In the strife of battle, Achilles dramatizes the savagery of a man free of all institutions, one whose distribution is that of human bodies to birds and dogs (22.354) and whose meat sacrifice is Hector’s body (23.21). Achilles’s last moment of redistribution is when he shares a meal with Priam and makes an exchange of Hektor’s body for possessions (24.595). Burial rites, as the Iliad insists on multiple occasions, are the “right of those who have died” (τὸ γὰρ γέρας ἐστὶ θανόντων, 16.675). Such a geras is the eternal signifier of a social order crafted and preserved among the living; it is a geras whose possession requires the loss of honor from no one else; and its communal status in part signifies its participation in that younger, cooperative eris. Yet its resulting from violence and an unresolved strife attenuates its force. Achilles accepts ransom where Agamemnon did not, but the divine agency with Zeus as enforcing judge and king seems to be the cause. In the Iliad, then, characters encounter a destructive eris and experiment with kriseis and dasmoi to face it. On various occasions, these responses produce additional erides, but the resolution of the epic’s themes bring resolutions to some of the conflicts, and not others. At times, these resolutions might be classed as unsatisfactory or impossible, but the impulse towards institutionalization and cooperation—the good Strife—appears strong. In a way, this builds upon the plot of Hesiod’s Theogony, which starts with instability and ends with greater stability: the Iliad responds to some of the same potential solutions but implies that what works among the immortals cannot work among men.

Eris from the Odyssey to the Works and Days

In isolation, the deployment of the eris theme and its variations in theTheogony and the Iliad would be interesting, but perhaps not remarkable. When taken with the Odyssey and the Works and Days, the theme’s development becomes clearer. It would be simplistic to claim that the Odyssey picks up where the Iliad leaves off, but it is clear that the homecoming poem responds to Iliadic

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access eris and epos 25 themes.62 Martial strife is not as clearly prominent in the Odyssey. At times, eris seems deceptively consigned to a prior world as when Demodocus sings of the “conflict of Achilles and Odysseus” (νεῖκος Ὀδυσσῆος καὶ Πηλεΐδεω Ἀχι- λῆος, 8.75), Odysseus describes the Trojan War to Penelope as “the great strife of destructive war” (μέγα νεῖκος ὁμοιΐου πτολέμοιο, 18.264), or there is a tale of “a conflict between centaurs and men” (ἐξ οὗ Κενταύροισι καὶ ἀνδράσι νεῖκος ἐτύ- χθη, 21.303). There is an important dovetailing in the Odyssey’s use of strife. It returns it from an international stage back to the core plot of conflict over an attempt to win a woman’s hand: “they wanted to woo the good wife and daugh- ter of a rich man / and they were striving with one another” (οἵ τ’ ἀγαθήν τε γυναῖκα καὶ ἀφνειοῖο θύγατρα / μνηστεύειν ἐθέλωσι καὶ ἀλλήλοισ’ ἐρίσωσιν, 18.276– 277). In a way, this is another revision of the marriage conflict from the Mestra fragment (or the wooing of Helen) where the epic takes us back to the dangers of the destructive eris: when men do not observe the social order (xenia, political institutions), they end up engaging in dangerous competition and the zero-sum game. The Odyssey advances the Iliad’s contemplation of the theme of eris not by reinforcing it blindly but by showing that Ithaca, far from a world of endless plenty, is a place where who has what matters. It is both an unraveling of Achilles’s redistributive fantasy in Iliad 23 and a re-evaluation of the stakes and causes of human strife. The Odyssey’s story advances these themes by including aspects of krisis, dasmos, and renewed eris before ending abruptly with a dea ex machina. First, the epic takes pains to show that its world offers models of proper and socially constructive distribution. Nestor arranges an orderly feast in Pylos: “they dined on a bounteous feast after dividing up the portions” (μοίρας δασσάμενοι δαίνυντ’ ἐρικυδέα δαῖτα, 3.66). King Nausithous equitably distributed the lands of Scheria among men and gods: “he built temples for the gods and divided up the farm- lands” (καὶ νηοὺς ποίησε θεῶν καὶ ἐδάσσατ’ ἀρούρας, 6.10). Odysseus emphasizes that he and his men divided things up correctly after attacking the Ciconians: “once we took the women and many possessions from the city / we divided it all up so that no one left deprived of a share equal to mine” (ἐκ πόλιος δ’ ἀλόχους καὶ κτήματα πολλὰ λαβόντες / δασσάμεθ’, ὡς μή τίς μοι ἀτεμβόμενος κίοι ἴσης, 9.41– 42). They did likewise upon securing departure from Polyphemus’s cave: “once we took the Cyclops’s flocks from the gray ship / we divided it all up so that no one left deprived of a share equal to mine” (μῆλα δὲ Κύκλωπος γλαφυρῆς ἐκ νηὸς ἑλόντες / δασσάμεθ’, ὡς μή τίς μοι ἀτεμβόμενος κίοι ἴσης, 9.548–549). Indeed, even

62 For the continuity of eris in the Greek epics, see Hogan 1981: 45; for a similar succession in dikē, see Slatkin 2011: 161.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access 26 christensen in the troubled house on Ithaca, feasts are managed by the servants, and the portions are distributed all around: “They roasted it skillfully and divided up the portions” (ὤπτησάν τε περιφραδέως δάσσαντό τε μοίρας, 19.423).63 Of course, the appearance of plenty is misleading. The equitable sharing out among Odysseus and his companions cannot prevent them from coming to ruin. Indeed, it is tempting to see the crisis initiated by the mortal consumption of Helius’s cattle as a clash between zero-sum and positive-sum systems. The cattle on Thrinacia are immortal and non-renewable: they are meant to be a stable representation of Helius’s position in the cosmos.When Odysseus’s companions kill, consume, and redistribute the cattle in a sacrifice, they disrupt the system. Such disruption of a fixed system of honor stands in comparison to the suitors’ transgressive and excessive feasts in Odysseus’s home where they “create an illusion of a paradise, a misguided fantasy of plentitude and unlimited abundance” (Bakker 2013: 52).64 Telemachus expresses this when he complains that the arrogant men “eat up my household / and divide all my possessions” (οὕτω ὑπερφιάλους, μή τοι κατὰ πάντα φάγωσι / κτήματα δασσάμενοι, 3.315–316; cf. 15.12–13, 20.215–216). The theme of strife is latent in the epic where the characters are keenly aware that objects of dasmos—goods and social position— are not fixed in perpetuity. When Odysseus first supplicates Arete, he prays for her guests to keep always their “possessions in their homes and the geras which the demos grants them” (κτήματ’ ἐνὶ μεγάροισι γέρας θ’, ὅ τι δῆμος ἔδωκεν, 7.150). Later in book 11, he asks whether his father or son or some other person “has his geras already” (ἢ ἔτι πὰρ κείνοισιν ἐμὸν γέρας, ἦέ τις ἤδη / ἀνδρῶν ἄλλος ἔχει, 11.175–176) and Telemachus imagines that it will be Eurymachus who “marries [his] mother and receives the geras of Odysseus” (μητέρ’ ἐμὴν γαμέειν καὶ Ὀδυσ- σῆος γέρας ἕξειν, 15.522). Under the surface of the nostos tale, therefore, are familiar concerns about improper or unjust redistribution. The suitors enjoy a life of leisure and antic- ipate an increase in their own position and honor by taking it from Odysseus and his family. A question unanswered in the Iliad is what happens to a dispute over distribution when one of the disputants is the judge or when there is no extant authority to make a fair judgment. In the Odyssey, before he meets the assembled Ithacans and makes his case for the impropriety of the suitors’

63 Cf. “So insofar as the Odyssey is concerned with exploring the nature of being human— its potentialities, limitations, and rough edges—it is concerned with δίκη as distinctive” (Slatkin 2011: 162). 64 For Helius’s cattle as possible analogues for Odysseus’s consumed herds on Ithaca, see Newton 2015: 270. For the feasting of the suitors as a perversion of the heroic system of plunder and distribution, see Bakker 2013: 45.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access eris and epos 27 behavior (2.40–79), Telemachus asserts that if other men behaved in such a fashion the Ithacans would criticize and shame them (2.64–65) and that they should fear the wrath of the gods who might pay them back for such wicked deeds (2.66); then he appeals to Zeus and Themis “who dissolve and establish the assemblies of men” (2.69) to punish the Ithacans for failing to enforce proper behavior. Here, the institution dreamed of by the Iliad—an assembly that admits dissent—fails to resolve a conflict. Without recourse to a social institution that will resolve his conflict, Telemachus has no choice but to hunt for vengeance (tisis, 2.76), which can only be a zero-sum game. The Odyssey, as a result, can be read straightforwardly as a prolonged rumi- nation on the conditions necessary to obtain fair judgment and maintain a stable state.65 It is, in effect, an act of judgment probing the limits of the positive eris developed in the Iliad and described in Hesiod’s Works and Days. Odysseus gives voice to questions about Telemachus’s struggles when they meet in the Odyssey (16.95–98; cf. Nestor’s similar questions at 3.214–215):

εἰπέ μοι, ἠὲ ἑκὼν ὑποδάμνασαι, ἦ σέ γε λαοὶ ἐχθαίρουσ’ ἀνὰ δῆμον ἐπισπόμενοι θεοῦ ὀμφῇ· ἦ τι κασιγνήτοισ’ ἐπιμέμφεαι, οἷσί περ ἀνὴρ μαρναμένοισι πέποιθε, καὶ εἰ μέγα νεῖκος ὄρηται;

Tell me, are you subdued so easily, or do the people Throughout the land hate you because they are obeying some divine word? Have you any cause to blame your relatives, the men whom a man Can trust when there are struggles and a great conflict arises?

Odysseus here explains how a man might lose his portion in a state: he could give it up willingly or the people could reject him due to divine judgment. And, further, in askingTelemachusabout his relatives, he emphasizes the critical role of community and family in preserving political place.Without the institutions to facilitate a positive-sum game, such as an effective assembly and juridical procedures, the bad eris seems to rule Ithaca: as such, Odysseus and his people must continue to follow the logic of vengeance. In his return to his palace, Odysseus actively seeks conflict as redress to the unlawful redistribution that has occured in his absence. The first conflicts he finds are somewhat deferred.

65 For the political order in the Odyssey, see Silvermintz 2004; see Rose 2012: 157–165 for a discussion of ideology and earlier bibliography.

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The beggar Irus threatens him to fight for the position of palace mendicant: “but rise, so we might not soon have a conflict even with hands” (ἀλλ’ ἄνα, μὴ τάχα νῶϊν ἔρις καὶ χερσὶ γένηται, 18.13). Later, Odysseus declares that given the opportunity he would best the suitors in a competition of work—“Eurymachus, I wish we could have a work contest” (Εὐρύμαχ’, εἰ γὰρ νῶϊν ἔρις ἔργοιο γένοιτο, 18.366)—echoing, even if in brief, themes from Hesiod’s Works and Days.66 As the suitors’ behavior grows more extreme,Telemachus warns them not to touch Odysseus if they want to avoid strife: “so that strife and a conflict might not arise” (ἵνα μή τις ἔρις καὶ νεῖκος ὄρηται, 20.267). But they touch him. And bloody strife ensues. This conflict over distribution is left as an open rupture on the community and leads to Homeric epic’s final assembly (24.412–466) where the act of judgment essentially fails: half of the people choose to arm themselves over the death of the suitors whose bodies, in an echo of the Iliad, remain unburied. As the conflict arises anew, however, it is suddenly prevented and the epic ends. Athena declares (Od. 24.543–545),

διογενὲς Λαερτιάδη, πολυμήχαν’ Ὀδυσσεῦ, ἴσχεο, παῦε δὲ νεῖκος ὁμοιΐου πτολέμοιο, μή πώς τοι Κρονίδης κεχολώσεται εὐρύοπα Ζεύς.

Godly son of Laertes, many-deviced Odysseus, Hold back, stop the conflict of communal war, Lest Zeus, the wide-browed son of Cronus, get angry in some way.

The Odyssey terminates with a dea ex machina, but this artificially closes the theme of strife.67 How the Odyssey ends has troubled scholars since at least the Hellenistic period. Here, where strife led to new judgment over rights and distribution, the cycle of conflict would continue, unrelenting. Note that Athena does not say Zeus will get angry at any kind of strife but instead at the “strife of communal conflict” (νεῖκος ὁμοιΐου πτολέμοιο), the same phrase used earlier to refer to the entire Trojan War.68 With no mortal solution, Athena intervenes to offer a judgment over a distribution. This returns us, to an extent, to the Mestra fragment cited earlier. And through Athena, the poem offers two

66 On this speech’s anti-aristocratic tone, see Rose 2012: 161–164. 67 For an overview of the epic’s end, see Moulton 1974; Wender 1978; Marks 2008. For the Odyssey’s final closure as “lame, hasty, awkward, abrupt” (Wender 1978: 63). 68 See Odysseus’s description of the conflict between the Trojans and Achaeans at 18.264: ἔκριναν μέγα νεῖκος ὁμοιΐου πτολέμοιο. Cf. LfGrE s.v. ὁμοίιος for the meaning “gemeinschaft- lich”: the formulae seems to imply necessarily a difficulty of judgment.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access eris and epos 29 options to communities in conflict: continual war that results in the absolute destruction of one side or “mutual attachment” (24.476, trans. Marks 2008: 74).69 Just as Hesiod’s opening assembly with the king blessed by the Muses in the Theogony and the scene of deliberation on Achilles’s shield in the Iliad present moments of strife as opportunities for resolution and judgment, so too does the Odyssey’s abrupt resolution invite reflection and debate. The poem’s final move does not merely indicate that there is no natural end to the theme of strife and therein imply that any end is necessarily artificial, but it also enacts and engages in poetic rivalry through such abrupt closure. In dramatizing the resolution of strife in this way, the epic is taking part in an interpoetic debate. Homeric epic has already integrated the epic theme of strife into its own fabric for the purpose of testing and unraveling it. At the same time, it both engages in the very type of strife Hesiod describes in the Works and Days and details the terrible deprivations of the Theogony’s destructive eris. Such complementarity, a performance of the promise of Hesiod’s second Strife, asks its audiences finally to be the distributors of judgments. The Odyssey’s neikos ends with a divinely imposed krisis amid the chaos of transgressed institutions; the divine judgment is a placeholder for the krisis to come as audiences absorb and respond to the epics’ attempted domestication of eris. One lesson is that the second eris is hard work and its demands are unrelenting: the promised ease of simply taking from another hangs for- ever in contrast. But, an additional threat hangs over this, namely that the domestication of strife is a failed enterprise, given the conditions present in the Odyssey’s world. To revisit a comparison of Helius’s Thrinacia and Odysseus’s Ithaca: Odysseus assumes for himself a consistent social place marked by com- mensurate possessions. A challenge to the social order in Ithaca disrupts the reigning dasmos and results in an eris decided only by violence.

Rivalry and Unity: Domesticating a Wild Animal

While the Iliad and the Odyssey certainly advance a poetic conversation about strife, the homecoming epic leaves the question unresolved. The mortals in the Odyssey lie, steal, cheat, and kill one another, and the poem ends with a king reasserting himself with divine backing. The Works and Days sets its narrative of unrighteous kings in a world materially akin to the Odyssey’s. Between the

69 Cf. Marks 2008: 76 for Zeus’s language echoing that of historical treaties between warring communities.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access 30 christensen two genealogies of Strife, Hesiod leaves human behavior and decision making as critical both in evaluating when to strive with another and how to do it. In the epic traditions I have discussed, tales of strife explore their danger and pro- pose some responses. In focusing on human judgment and the articulation of that judgment both implicitly and explicitly, the Homeric and Hesiodic poems become both purveyors of strife and opportunities for engaging in strife over their interpretation. In part, this is about the need to domesticate a dangerous facet of human nature especially prominent in Greek culture. But the story is also about the limits of its own effectiveness.This is the lament to which Hesiod proceeds after he has described the beneficial Strife when he turns to address Perses (WD 27–41):70

Ὦ Πέρση, σὺ δὲ ταῦτα τεῷ ἐνικάτθεο θυμῷ, μηδέ σ’ Ἔρις κακόχαρτος ἀπ’ ἔργου θυμὸν ἐρύκοι νείκε’ ὀπιπεύοντ’ ἀγορῆς ἐπακουὸν ἐόντα. ὤρη γάρ τ’ ὀλίγη πέλεται νεικέων τ’ ἀγορέων τε ᾧτινι μὴ βίος ἔνδον ἐπηετανὸς κατάκειται ὡραῖος, τὸν γαῖα φέρει, Δημήτερος ἀκτήν. τοῦ κε κορεσσάμενος νείκεα καὶ δῆριν ὀφέλλοις κτήμασ’ ἐπ’ ἀλλοτρίοις. σοὶ δ’ οὐκέτι δεύτερον ἔσται ὧδ’ ἔρδειν· ἀλλ’ αὖθι διακρινώμεθα νεῖκος ἰθείῃσι δίκῃς, αἵ τ’ ἐκ Διός εἰσιν ἄρισται. ἤδη μὲν γὰρ κλῆρον ἐδασσάμεθ’, ἄλλα τε πολλὰ ἁρπάζων ἐφόρεις μέγα κυδαίνων βασιλῆας δωροφάγους, οἳ τήνδε δίκην ἐθέλουσι δικάσσαι. νήπιοι, οὐδὲ ἴσασιν ὅσῳ πλέον ἥμισυ παντὸς οὐδ’ ὅσον ἐν μαλάχῃ τε καὶ ἀσφοδέλῳ μέγ’ ὄνειαρ.

O Perses, keep these things in your mind And don’t let the evil-hearted strife [eris] keep your heart from work While you lurk about observing conflict in the assembly. For the season of conflicts and assemblies is a short one For any man whose life is not abundantly stocked at home In time, when the earth produces Demeter’s bounty. After you have made your fill of that, you can reap conflicts and strife Over another’s possessions. It will not be possible for you a second time

70 See Edwards 2004: 30–44 for a detailed discussion of the dispute between Hesiod and Perses.

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To act like this. But let us bring our conflict to a resolution With straight judgements, whichever ones are best from Zeus. For we have already divided up our inheritance, but you Made off with much more as you kowtowed to bribe-taking Kings, the men who long have judged this kind of case. The fools, they do not know how much half is more than everything Nor how much wealth is in mallow and asphodel.

This passage deploys the critical themes I have mentioned: there are conflicts (eris and neikos) over a division (dasmos) that has already been made but whose status and stability is imperiled because of a newly sought krisis (οἳ τήνδε δίκην ἐθέλουσι δικάσσαι).71 By implication, a man attended by the better strife works hard to put up his own food and does not have time to be sated by conflict over someone else’s possessions. Only after establishing these principles does Hes- iod turn back to their personal conflict: they have already divided their inheritance (ἤδη μὲν γὰρ κλῆρον ἐδασσάμεθ’) but his brother has engaged bribe-taking officials to make a judgment against him. Hesiod’s take on eris in this address to Perses is possibly also antagonistic toward epic: he warns his brother that it is the evil, non-productive eris that keeps men away from work and reduces them to audience members to someone else’s strife (νείκε’ ὀπιπεύοντ’ ἀγορῆς ἐπακουὸν ἐόντα).72 The warning seems at odds even with the Theogony where we hear that kings resolve conflicts in the agora through their language. There- fore, if we accept the assertion that the kings’ epea convey content similar to epic (if not the form as well), we may choose to read the warning to Perses as meta-epic commentary. Even dismissing this turn, the exhortative force of the Works and Days militates against the competitive, Theogonic strife to encour- age a more cooperative one. In the Works and Days the neikos is damaging not just for the strife that can result over its judgment but also from its status as a distraction from the work inspired by that better eris. Rather than just being an update on the Theogonic king, this move is also a response to the emphasis on audiences and interpretation in the Iliad.Whereas in the Iliad the prizes are stored up for the man who makes the best judgment, in Hesiod there is insufficient store for the combatants, and the judges are cor-

71 Stoddard argues that Hesiod begins the Works and Days with a neikos because epic poetry begins this way (2004: 17). 72 For a biographical interpretation of Hesiod’s poetry and the extra-textual reality of the quarrel, see Griffith 1983; Stoddard 2004: 2–23; Rose 2012: 164–170. See also Edwards 2004: 19–25; Stamatopoulou 2017: 2–4.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access 32 christensen rupted by gifts (δωροφάγους).73 Hesiod’s prolonged emphasis on an aesthetic of self-reflection and hard work throws into relief the material abundance that makes the heroic lives in Homer possible.74 Achilles and Agamemnon work at war, but their bios comes from depriving others of their substance (κτήμασ’ ἐπ’ ἀλλοτρίοις). The political fantasy at the end of the Iliad made possible by the separation from the zero-sum game unravels when faced with the material reality of Hesiod’s Ascra: it is easier for Perses to increase his wealth by taking his brother’s than it is for him to plow and sow an extra acre. The poem’s structure advances a stance against violent strife: several scholars have shown how the poem structurally splits into parts that emphasize the results of the positive and negative strife.75 At the same time, this dovetails with the Odyssey in which, although Odys- seus possesses new wealth upon his return home, the suitors threaten his position in society, both his rule of the island and his place with his wife. He does not return to a world where he can just work harder; he must seize his rightful position back from lesser men. The Odyssey echoes and advances the Hesiodic world (and vice versa) in another way too. Hesiod’s narrator longs to have his conflict judged with straight justice (ἀλλ’ αὖθι διακρινώμεθα νεῖκος / ἰθείῃσι δίκῃς) but cannot because of the power of corrupt kings. Odysseus’s conflict, too, ends up halted but not truly resolved. In both cases, the conflicts are left to be adjudicated—and likely complicated yet again—by the audiences who receive them and by the next singers who will add to these tales. Homer’s audience departs mulling over the end of the Odyssey and weighing the guilt assigned to each party; Hesiod’s audience is presented with the case of the striving broth- ers followed by traditional advice on good living and with the task of figuring out how to achieve a better life in the world outside of the poem. Taken together, the Homeric and Hesiodic poems offer nuanced and complex presentations of the theme of eris and prepare us for equally sophisticated evaluations of its character. Part of their overlap is certainly competitive as the poems expropriate from their common traditions. Both the good and the bad eris remain operative by the end of the movement because the two are linked

73 See Rose 2012: 180–181 for the poems as “two sides of the same coin.” 74 Hesiod’s focus on the scarcity one confronts in the real world contrasts with the abundance reflected in his depiction of the Golden Age and in the general utopia of abundance evoked by the Odyssey’s Phaeacians. See Stamatopoulou 2017: 221–224 for this motif and its manipulation in Athenian comedy. 75 See Edwards 2004: 182, following Hamilton 1989: 57–60. Edwards shows that when Hesiod moves from the first section of the poem to the last, he uses far fewer of the words that mark “litigation, justice, and the city.” Cf. Griffith 1983: 57–60.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access eris and epos 33 and without careful judgment the good one can always become the other. Just as Hesiod’s good strife enables neighbors to compete with each other and create greater wealth than they might have in isolation, the competitive aesthetic of Greek poetry facilitated repeated and repeatedly more complex explorations of similar themes. In this article, I have been exploring the deployment of the epic theme of eris and its attendant features of division (dasmos) and judgment (krisis). I focused on the presentation of Strife in Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days because the contrast in their descriptions indicates different ways of conceiv- ing of rivalry and the potential for the poetic aesthetic of rivalry to be differ- entiated within the Greek Epic tradition. I introduced the terms zero-sum and positive-sum to help characterize these types of strife and their relationship to depictions of stable and changing communities. In order to illustrate the extent to which reflections on strife are endemic in early Greek poetry, my subsequent aim was to show that eris functions as a theme in early epic poetry with clear metonymic and compositional aspects. My second aim was to outline the development in both Hesiod and Homer that domesticates eris by disambiguating violence and destruction from competition and showing that, in addition to the zero-sum game that exists in the Theogony and the Iliad, there is another additive positive-sum aesthetic that can be useful for communities. In making this argument, I have also highlighted that the progression is not a simple or necessarily optimistic one. Hesiod and Homer approach a central feature of their culture and, arguably, human nature. Together their poems explore it and attempt to show how it can be a productive part of human society. This conclusion—one which is dominant in our own era as well—is a response to overlapping cultural discourses—what scholars like Ian Morris and Leslie Kurke have called a “middling ideology.”76 The progression moves us from a state of nature where all conflict is violent to a compromise that is necessarily reflective of the character of epic poetry itself— an integration of the found world of nature into something man-made, almost orderly. Both the Odyssey and the Works and Days depict worlds in which conflict still reigns and within which human communities struggle to realize the value of the cooperative eris over the negative one. My third, and most speculative, goal in this article was to illustrate by means of sketching out this debate the metapoetic result of the competitive aesthetic

76 See Morris 1996, 2000: 171–176 (for elite ideology); Kurke 1999: 29–32. For a critique, see Rose 2012: 206–208 (cf. Rose 1992: 89–92 for the integration of counter-ideologies into the Homeric epics). For ideological progression in Hesiod’s poems, see Ormand 2014: 14–37.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:57:08PM via free access 34 christensen on the formation of extant poems in the epic tradition. The four epic poems I have briefly surveyed occupy ranges in a notional timeline that moves from the creation of the universe to the day-to-day lives of their audiences. In their turns at depicting strife, they exist on a macrocosmic scale in relation to one another analogously to the two elements Fenik describes in his anticipatory doublet. While they do not tell the whole story of strife or provide any kind of a final resolution, they do generalize reflections on eris to particular moments in mythical history and invite comparison between those moments and the audiences’ present. In this, I believe that the epics too should be understood as participating in a positive-sum game. My brief treatment of each poem certainly leaves plenty of room for continued investigation of the depiction and function of eris. Further work on the eris theme remains to be done in the fragments of other epic traditions to test some of these assertions; the eris theme is also present in other genres— namely, lyric, tragedy, and epinician. A comparison of the theme’s deployment elsewhere may help to illustrate the pervasiveness of the compositional theme, the development of Archaic debates on eris, and the importance of eristics in the evolution of Greek poetics.

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