‘look’ at it carefully (688). The kradie has the metaphier of a person more than a container, and can be gracious (340), vexed (451), or can like and dislike things (681). But psyche (686) and etor (360, 593) are undeveloped and are simply life and belly respectively.
Noos in the Works and Days is interesting because, in all four
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of its instances, it is like a person relating to moral conduct. In two instances (67, 714) it has shame or not, and in another, it is adikon, without good direction (260). A proper study of the matter would point out in detail the particular development of the term dike. Its original meaning was to point (from which comes the original meaning of digit, as a finger), and in the Iliad its most parsimonious translation is as “direction,” in the sense of pointing out what to do. Sarpedon guarded Lycia by his dike (Iliad 16:542). But in the Works and Days, it has come to mean god-given right directions or justice, perhaps as a replacement for the god's voice.12 It is a silent Zeus, son of a now spatialized time, who here for the first time dispenses dike or justice more or less as we know it in later Greek literature. (See for example 267ff.). How absolutely alien to the amoral world of the Iliad, that a whole city can suffer for one evil man (240)!
Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence. And this is possible only in a spatial metaphor of time. Instances of this increased spatialization are common. Committing violence at one time begets a punishment at some time to follow (245f.). Long and steep is the path to goodness (290). A good man is he who sees what will be better afterward (294). Add little to little and it will become great (362). Work with work upon work to gain wealth (382). These notions are impossible unless the before and after of time are metaphored into a spatial succession. This basic ingredient of consciousness, which began in Assyrian building inscriptions in 1300 B.C. (see the previous chapter), has indeed come a long way.
It is important here to understand how closely coupled this 12 But that the origin of this new sense of god-sent justice is possibly in an hallucinated messenger from Zeus is suggested where Dike is said to moan and weep when men take bribes and do evil (22of). My derivation here of dike is not the usual one.
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new sense of time and justice is to what can be called the secularization of attention. By this I mean the shift in attention toward the everyday problems of making a living, something that is totally foreign to the mighty god-devised epics which preceded it.
Whether the poem itself is divinely inspired, or, as the majority of scholars think, the sulky exhortations of Perses' brother Hesiod, it is a dramatic turning point in the direction of human concern. Instead of grand impersonal narrative, we have a detailed personal expression. Instead of an ageless past, we have a vivid expression of a present wedged in between a past and a future. And it is a present of grim harshness that described the post-Dorian rural reality, full of petty strife and the struggle of wresting a living from the land, while around its edges hovers the nostalgia for the mighty golden world of bicameral Mycaenae, whose people were a race
. . . which was more lawful and more righteous, a god-like race of hero-men who are called half-gods, the race before our own, throughout the boundless earth. ( 1 5 8 5 . ) .
L Y R I C A N D E L E G Y F R O M 7 0 0
T O 6 0 0 B . C .
I was about to write that Greek consciousness is nearing completion in the Works and Days. But that is a very misleading metaphor, that consciousness is a thing that is built, formed, shaped into something that has a completion. There is no such thing as a complete consciousness.
What I would have been indicating was that the basic metaphors of time with space, of internal hypostases as persons in a mental space have begun to work themselves into the guides and guardians of everyday life.
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Against this development, the Greek poetry of the seventh century B.C., which follows chronologically, is something of an anticlimax. But this is because so little of these elegiac and lyric poets has escaped the eager ravages of time. If we take only those who have at least a dozen lines extant, there are only seven poets to be considered.
The first thing to say about them is that they are not simply poets, as we regard the term. As a group, they are something like their contemporaries, the prophets of Israel, holy teachers of men, called by kings to settle disputes and to lead armies, resembling in some of their functions the shamans of contemporary tribal cultures. At the beginning of the century, they were probably still associated with holy dancing. But gradually the dance and its religious aura are lost in a secularity that is chanted to the lyre or the sounds of flutes. These artistic changes, however, are merely coincident to changes of a much more important kind.
The Works and Days expressed the present. The new poetry expresses the person in that present, the particular individual and how he is different from others. And celebrates that difference. And as it does so, we can trace a progressive filling out and stretching of the earlier preconscious hypostases into the mind-space of consciousness.
In the first part of the century is Terpander, the inventor of drinking songs, according to Pindar, one of whose thirteen extant lines cries out over the centuries:
Of the Far-flinging Lord come sing to me, O Phrenes!13
This is interesting. The Lord here is Apollo. But note that while the poem itself is to be a nostalgic poem to a lost god, it is not a 13 Fragment 2 in the Loeb edition, Lyra Graeca, edited by J. M. Edmonds (London: Heinemann, 1928). All references in this section are to this volume or to the companion Loeb volumes, Elegy and Iambus, Vols. 1 and 2, also edited by Edmonds (London: Heinemann, 1931).
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god or a muse who is invoked to compose it. In the Odyssey, a god puts songs into the phrenes which the minstrel then sings as if he were reading the music (22:347). But for Terpander, who hears no gods, it is his own phrenes that are begged to compose a song just as if they were a god. And this implicit comparison, I suggest, with its associated paraphrands of a space in which the deiform phrenes could exist, is well on the way to creating the mind-space with its Analog 'I' of consciousness.
It is not just in such word usages that this transition in the seventh century is apparent, but also in the subject matter. For the secularization and personalization of content begun in the Works and Days fairly explodes in midcentury in the angry iambics of Archilochus, the wandering soldier-poet of Paros. According to the inscription of his tomb, it was he who "first dipt a bitter Muse in snake-venom and stained gentle Helicon with blood," a reference to the story that he could provoke suicides with the power of his iambic abuse.14 Even using poetry this way, to engage in personal vendettas and state personal preferences, is a new thing to the world. And so close to modern reflective consciousness do some of these fragments come, that the loss of most of Archilochus' work opens one of the greatest gaps in ancient literature.
But the gods, though never heard by Archilochus, still control the world. "The ends of victory are among the gods" (Fragment 55). And the hypostases remain. The bad effects of drink (Fragment 77) or of old age (Fragment 94) occur in the phrenes; and when he is troubled, it is his thumos which is thrown down like a weak warrior and is told to "look up and defend yourself against your enemies" (Fragment 66). Archilochus talks to his thumos as to another person, the implicit comparison and its paraphrands of space and self-'observed' 'self'