Hi folks, we're just going to start the episode with a quick reminder about a symposium on Leo Strass being held at the University of Austin in Austin, Texas, January 2nd through 7th. The deadline to apply is November 12th, but they're rolling, so be sure to apply as soon as possible. Greg, who's eligible? Oh man, anyone who's currently enrolled in undergraduate.
So if you're a junior or senior, if you've recently graduated from college, if you're in a master's program, if you're in a PhD program, basically anybody between the ages of 21 and 35 who hasn't yet been in the political philosophy of Leo Strass. Yeah, and there's a great faculty. Mark Blitz, Chris Lynch, Chris Nainon, Lauren Rotner, Kevin Stauffer, and then includes some lectures. Do you know who those lectures are, Greg?
I've heard tell. Yeah, one's you. One's me. One's you.
Yeah. One's me. And then Daniel O'Toole of Hillsdale College and the great Jacob Howlin, former two-time guest on the New Thinkery. So if you want to meet a bunch of New Thinkery folks, you want to meet two thirds of the podcast, the better two thirds of that, come join us in Austin, go apply, go to our Twitter or just Google University of Austin Symposium, Leo Strass, it'll be right there for saying that comes up.
Did you mention that this is free, by the way? It is free. The tuition is free. And there's actually even a $300 travel voucher for folks who don't live in the Austin area to defer the cost of getting there.
It's free. It's free. All right. And now wisdom.
Welcome back to New Thinkery. My name is David Barn with me as Oasis. My good friend Alex Brieu, I'm doing all right David. How are you?
I'm well. How are your children? Are they well? They're doing well school started and I know that this is good.
It's fine. I'll do that. And what about you, Greg? I like your shirt.
I'm just living, baby. Just staying out the way. What is that? Let a young James Taylor?
Samantha McConaughey from Days and Confused. I have a recollection, David, that you actually do not like Matthew McConaughey. Is that memory ring true? Maybe it's something I said.
I don't hold that view now. I don't remember if I, why would I like him? Is that the movie David you were talking about this years ago, right? He's like the older guy who hangs out with high school girls.
Yeah. That's what the shirt is. I remember you telling me that when you saw that movie, I was like, this guy is such a loser. But the older you get, you said, the cooler he seems to you.
I don't remember saying that either. I'll accept it. What are we talking about tonight? Aside from David's sort of equivities?
We're talking about another guy who didn't like to work. He wanted to just hang out and just write just just WRIT, baby. All right. All right.
All right. That's all he wanted to do. Oh, God. Thank you.
That's what you say. David, you laid it for him without even knowing. No, no, no, that was good, Greg. That was good.
It was he's. Greg's one. That was Greg's one per episode. All right.
I'll have to see myself out. We're talking about he's here tonight. We're talking about his work called Work and Days. Work and Days, excuse me.
Yeah. So he sees it. So if I want to ask you some questions, Alex and Greg, there are two poets. So I always read that Homer is the font of Greekness, or at least the beginnings of it.
But then you hear about this other, I don't know if an arrival poet is the way to describe he's here, but you have this other figure. And he does, as he looms large, as Homer, we don't, he's not as red as widely, it seems by young people. So everybody knows about Homer. Fewer people know about he's here, even though his works are comparatively shorter, a little bit easier to digest.
So who is he? What was his influence on the Greek mind, let's say? And he only has two excellent works, is that correct? Yeah, two extant in their entirety, the objecting that works in days.
And then we have a lot of fragments, some shorter, some actually decently long. He's got that one that David wrote a rival to, right? The catalog? Yeah.
I always think of Mitt Romney's binders full of women. Right. Right. That's actually going to go with that joke.
And also the Shield of Hercules. So you know, this is incidental to this, but I remember early in the podcast, I tweeted out a Amit Romney, he's the catalog of women joke. And you guys are like, that's too racy. And it's just that we come up the deep.
And we're just between all sorts of filth. But anyways, yeah, too extant now. But he basically wrote three and the catalog of women is thought to be with justification many times longer. Each of these is about the length of a longer book of Homer's.
So from the elitar, the Odyssey is 700 800 lines, something like that. And so really, I mean, you can read everything he that survives of him pretty quickly in an afternoon, right? It's not a whole lot. You know, whether he see it was as we learn of him from his poems was actually such a guy or a sort of literary invention of the poet is something debated.
Likewise, his brother, they both have kind of literary names, you know, like, willy low man is a low man, like that kind of thing. Like, he said means, whoa, whoa, you just exploded that play for me. The, he sees brother Percy's music. He's the odd is odd.
Yeah. See, yeah, just one in episode, the rest are whole. Sorry, sorry. That I don't know.
It's so disgusting. But he sees something like sweetly singing or sending songs, something like that. And he talks about the singer. Yeah.
So there's, there's something to be said about that. Same thing with relative dating. He, it mainly seems older than Homer because he describes a more simple way of life and like stylism. I did think he's a little bit younger because he seems to be his juices, I think a bit closer to the, to the early Greek philosophers, like the way that he's kind of abstracted to use into a kind of plan.
That's like a kind of tension guiding the whole. It seems like almost like a sort of natural theology that prefigures some of the critiques of the early Greek philosophers. So whereas, you know, the Homeric suits is way more involved, though more reluctantly, some of the oddest in the Iliad. So, so there's a lot of question marks.
We don't really know anything about Hesiod except what he tells us in his poems and his poems are obviously as poems. We can't take that any of it is, is going to be factual rather than a sort of literary adventure. I have a big point to some point first. What do we know about him?
You just said we only know about him from his own text. And what do we know? And it was a shepherd that he's a stinger that he has a brother, his brother may have swindled him out of some inheritance money, strong, all that kind of stuff. That's about it, right?
He's from some mountain area. Yeah. But one thing David's today was going, Well, one other thing is he wanted a word on a sailing trip. He tells us towards the end of the works and days.
Right. But that's about it. Yeah. Today was a question about how influential were these guys, you know, when I teach this, I'll tell students, you know, obviously need to be revised.
But I'll say, really Homer and Hesiod are kind of like the Bible for the Greeks. And so far as it is really a thing that shapes their mind, now you'd have to rethink that. And it's obviously limited, but it's a good starting point to begin to think about this stuff. But with one really important difference, I would say, and I'm teaching, I'm teaching the Theodgyny right now, I'll be teaching works and days here in a couple weeks, it became clear to me then before it's always been clear to me that this is the case in Homer, but with Hesiod, I sort of thought it was less clear, but it was clear to me this last reading that they're working with preexisting material.
They don't seem to be, I think the common misconception, one common misconception can be, while Homer and Hesiod kind of invented these gods. And they may have, if you if you understand invented to mean, you take that very loosely, like it seems like there already was this pantheon that these work names that the Greeks already commonly associated with different divinities, but that they get refined or have their sort of authoritative stamp put on the by Homer, Hesiod. And when you read the Theodgyny, it's like he's telling you about gods you already know about that seems very clear in the text. I don't know what to do with that, but it's sort of fascinating that they're working with source material that's already there.
Yeah, I mean, Herodotus, in a way backs this up, right, that he invented it, but they they brought it to the gods from Egypt, he says, right, which interestingly must mean that instead of them having animal heads, they have human heads, therefore they were going human based or like human ideals, you could say. So, yeah, it's not that we don't really know much about him. And it's, and as far as what he is, is an authority, he, I think David, what you were suggesting is that he's not as much of an authority as Homer, but still an authority. And I think that's right.
I mean, one thing he has, especially in the works of days is it seems to be an example of ancient wisdom literature as it sometimes put where there's all sort of quotable bits of advice and the evidence that it's quotable is that you see all over Plato and to a lesser degree Aristotle, you see these remarks about what he what he says, but yeah, it's very hard to know what if any of this stuff is true about him. And so, when I read him, I kind of just accept his world as his world is created and names a significant of things like that. Now, the tragedy ends are famous for picking up threads from Homer, I guess he's a much older stories than just Homer and running with them. Do they do the same for any of the stories we find in the Theodia or works and days?
Prometheus? Yeah, for sure. And then the he's like some of the stuff about Hercules, probably as well. Yeah, the virtue thing is pretty common trope in other like the path which path to juice is that that's a big thing in a lot of other literature.
Yeah, I mean, there's there was at the time this it's called the epic cycle and it's basically a series of epic poems that told all the stories on which the tragedies are based. So, there was one about Oedipus and going way back earlier through his life and, you know, his children and you know, all the way and that was called the, I forget the name of it, but then around the Trojan war, you know, the the elite only covers 51 days or 53 days in the war. And I think it's 51 days and then, you know, the rest of it, like how they got there, the Trojan horse, they're going back what happens each other. There's one called the returns, there's one called the little elia, there's one called the cupriach, there's all these different epics and he see it fits in that epic cycle cycle.
For example, in the catalog of women, one of the biggest fragments we have, which is just found in like a, you know, a hole in oxerinkus and Egypt, one of the biggest fragments we have, it tells the story of the contest of suitors and specifically how that fit into Zeus's plan. So, if you if you want to read about that, what the ancient Greeks would have thought is the authority of the stories, we have like 100 lines, something like that from that. That's it's really actually quite fascinating and remarkable. But and yeah, so the Pandora stuff is in there.
In fact, he told it looks like three versions, one in each in each work, the catalog of women that which we don't have. They're not the same. No, they're not the same. Yeah, they're they're quite different parts of it with different implications depending on content.
Yeah. I have one other question about, you know, I like it, he's he did a Bible or something like this for the Greeks, but there's a pretty significant difference. I mean, I mean, he is invoking them uses to sting, but he's not I mean, he's a shepherd, this is kind of strange, right? He's not a priest is not is a prophet.
He's not a prophet, right? I mean, he's not claiming that God speaks through him. I mean, I don't know, it's just odd. It doesn't quite fit what we would imagine somebody who's bringing the word of God would be, I don't think.
Yeah, I mean, he claims to have met with the muses who told him all the story of the generations of gods and stories and then they said, Oh, we also might be lying. So it is very strange. He also does curious things. Like he says, and they gave me this staff.
So you have to assume, yeah, performance, they gave me this staff, this is the oddity. And it's like, you're just looking like, it's just a stick. Like, it's like me saying, you know, God gave me this candle here. Like, oh, you can say, and he does this all the time.
He's really funny about this. There's a large rock, apparently, somewhere in Greece and they said, Oh, that's the rock that Cronus spit up, thinking it was Zeus. And he does this continuously where a otherwise mundane or sort of everyday object is somehow endowed with divine significance. And that includes things like when the cranes are flying, what's going on with the crickets or what are the stars doing?
These are all signals about the gods. And that in a way, I think, is to go back to the question of whether he's a prophet, I think he's often playing with this fact that a lot of human life is trying, is being frustrated with the lack of guidance you have, and looking around for tiny details that might give you a sense of what the overall plan is. And if it all fits together, the hope that this is some sort of God's play, right? So it's not ordinary prophecy.
It's very much a kind of wrestling with the divine. Right. Right. What would be helpful to give a kind of outline generic summary of the texts for the folks at home?
And what are we doing today? We support work. Yeah, works and days. Works and days.
Franky means what is it? Sorry. Ergo works. We don't know.
That's the original title. Basically, there's like this whole section of all the deeds you do, which only starts about halfway through like 360 or so. And then at the end, there's the days of Zeus, like what day means what? So it doesn't seem like an adequate title because there's all this other stuff that comes before it.
But that's how it's known. But if it, I mean, one neat way, not neat is and cool, neat is sort of simple way to think about the division of the text is ones about gods and ones about man. That's over-simplifying because obviously the other poem, The Ogine about the gods, clearly has great bearing on this. And the works and days seem to be sort of final working out of what the world looks like now that man is there and Zeus is in charge.
But Grosalmodo, The Ogine is about the gods and works and days is about man. If that makes sense. And it seems we're doing works and days tonight, but The Ogine is clearly within the text, The Ogine is the one that comes first. It's identified as coming first internally.
Yeah, so we're doing works and days. I've read in the past Bartlett's, he's got this great introduction to this work and I also looked at better Denny's writings on it. And so there's kind of two ways to outline it. Both Bartlett and Denny agree that he begins with the pro-embersome, this kind of introduction.
And then it's just the first ten lines. And according to Bartlett, there's the political theological foundations of the poem, which are lines 11 to 380. And then there's a long discussion of the works, which we mentioned Alex just mentioned, which is line 380 to 764. And then the days, so 765 to 828.
So after this initial problem, three main parts, sort of political theology works and days. And those are the three main parts of the poem. Better Denny divides it into nine parts, the pro-emium, the lines one through ten. And then this discussion of two kinds of heiress or strife.
And then that's lines 11 through 41. And then two accounts of man's misery, lines 42 to 201, part three, part four, justice in the city, lines 202 to 208. Part five, he sees its council, his direct council to his brother. It begins around line 209, I think.
And then the sixth part is the household or the things of the household, next line's 343, 380. Then there's a count of the seasons, which lines up somewhat with the days, lines 383 to 75. There's a list of prohibitions, things you should not do, 766 to 764. And then finally, days again, so coming back to what part of it says, 765 to 828.
So you can kind of see what's going on here. And in general, I would say that the poem, and maybe this will get us into the poem itself, I mentioned that the first poem is about the gods and the second poem is about man. And it would seem like the second poem is almost about that thing that men or individual man needs most of all. And that's justice.
Should you be just what is justice, what is justice to man, and is their divine support for justice? Something like that? Does that seem right to you, Alex? Yeah, I mean, in a way, the theology tells you about Zeus's rise to power, then you get the story of the heroes and the caliber of women, then you get the actual exhibition of Zeus's rule.
And the, and so one thing I'll add is that the way I sort of characterized lines 202 to 341, so you get two ex-reactions. And that's not to disagree with the division, but just to add a point, you get an exer, exhortation to justice, thought of by an exeration to work. And so a lot of this, and the call, and those connected by the way, justice seems to be bound up with working. Yes, which you wouldn't do it an exeration to work before justice, because there are evil works.
Right. And I didn't go through this, but in the vision that Parle did, like there are subdivisions in part two, which currently just said there's this exeration to adjust and an exeration to work. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, the divisions you gave seem like Parle looks a bit more bird's eye and better days just breaking down to further parts. It seems to all go here. Yeah, but then the culmination of just uses exeration to justice is this articulation of Zeus's law. Now, I think it wasn't a helpful thing to understanding what's going on with the works and days.
It was the helpful thing we could do is connect what we've just said to this dramatic and see, which is that he said it up as him talking to his brother, Percy's, and to her people, Greg was saying before, right? Their father's died. They divide their inheritance. Percy seems to have blown through it all.
He's really down on his luck there for it, including what apparently was owed to Hesiod. Well, now he's trying to bribe the kings to get Hesiod stuff. That's what it seems like. But maybe he's in the past, it might be ambiguous.
And it's in this context that Hesiod crafts to this song that's meant to, I think, instill a bit of fear of God in him. And I think the dramatic conceit here is that, look, if you live, and this is sort of the audience for whom this poem really is written, when you live in a time, a difficult time, and people start to act unjustly to get ahead because life is so hard, and they don't necessarily get everything they would like, or they're not as well-off as they would like, these people are susceptible to something like a sort of theological account of their plight. And so Hesiod basically tells his brother the reason your life is so bad is because you're unjust, an unjust, successful person would not be receptive to this poem. That's another way of putting it right, you have to be someone.
Say it again, say it again. An unjust but successful person would not be receptive to this poem. Okay, so of course he's on just, he's unjust. Yeah, he's unjust.
Yeah, he seems to be bribing these kings. And so this really comes out in this passage where he has, where he sees in dialogue with his brother and these kings at the same time. And he basically argues that the reason, you know, their city is so corrupt and so destitute is because they're not just this is just punished. And so he's, you know, Percy's is inclined, I think therefore to blame these kings and to turn away from them and to take Hesiod's guidance.
Now, whether that argument is true and the extent to which you can convince something that I think is part of Hesiod's intention is, okay, I'm going to try to sing him back to morality, you could say, but can that work? And if I can, how far can it go? Yeah, so be clear, like the conceit as you're calling it, I'm sorry, at its most superficial level, this is a letter of song that Hesiod wrote to his brother to encourage him to stop being such a good for nothing, lousy, starving, just to get a job. Yes.
All right, good. I think that's right, obviously. But then as you mentioned, conceit. And so that leads me to think is the poem does not lead me to believe that Hesiod believes that the poem will have its desired effect on the purses.
Maybe I mean, like the ending is pretty bleak. So if it works, it's not a very happy resolution. I mean, I mean, ends with superstitious superstitious stuff about where to pass, for example, it's not exactly the way that's not superstitious. That's not superstitious.
No, no, no, no, no, no. It's all the advice. I'll point to lines. This is not page.
I don't know if you're using what what translation you guys using. I'm using the ladder more translation. That's right. Just in your own translation.
Okay. I read my own ideas, you competing translation of Hesiod docs. I just don't know. There actually there are some, no, but it's not it's not a cottage industry like Homer, right?
Pretty bad to. I gotta say. That's why I run it's really you can get one because I was in grad school and I just write out whatever I'm translating and I keep it. But Yeah, they're pretty bad.
I mean, the ones that are out there. I know it's I was having to make a lot of correction. I mean, if you're trying to go for I think in terms of that, I was finding some corrections. But so I'm on page 53, this is line 293 and so, and I'm just going to read it out loud.
And this bears on this question of like Perseus' excuse me, Perseus' suitability as the audience or addressing him as poem. Thank you. Hesiod says that man is all best who himself works out every problem. And that verb there I would say is actually intellects.
It's from the Greek word for the Greek noun for intellect if it's the verb. So that man is all best who sort of works things out intellectually for himself. Every problem solves it. Seeing what will be best late and in the end.
That's the first type of man. Second, that man too is also admirable, who follows one who speaks well. So the first, the best man is the guy who can figure stuff out for himself with his own intellect, nusst. Second best is someone who actually listens to someone who speaks well.
Third, this third type. He who cannot see the truth for himself nor hearing it from others, stored away in his mind, that man is utterly useless. And I couldn't help but think that Perseus falls into this latter camp before it's worth. So I mean, there's a question of who the audience of this text is.
If it's for people who can figure things out for themselves, that's not who this poem would be for it seems to me. Maybe it's only for this middle type, the man who can follow one who speaks well. And then you'd hope that Perseus falls into your camp. By the way, this is the same quote that Aristotle gives in discussing his own audience and the kind of kin of ethics as well.
Just as small as the digression. Yeah, I mean, there's, I think one way to read He's yet is that you're always teetering between a barely maintained just society, right? That's always on the hinge and then oblivion, right? And this duality persists from the two types of strife.
One strife is the kind of strife that leads to injustice. One is why that leads to healthy competition, let's say, right? It carries through to the fact that we're in the sort of iron age and after us will be the destruction of everything. There are two types of sub-heasied people, right?
One listens, the other ignores and just leads themselves. Right, so there's always this kind of teetering aspect between this duality that I think operates there. I mean, one thing I'll say about like sort of my general sort of working hypothesis for this poem, and this might be entirely wrong. I think you're pushing me on this.
So this is helpful is that I just assume that if He's going in a direction, His brother is following Him as he's going. That because it isn't strictly speaking. And I think there are internal reasons for why one episode works and then you get the next right sort of serious. But I think it's worth asking, perhaps maybe His brother goes along with him a certain way and then at the end is kind of disappointed.
But that would still be a sign of the limits of song or poetry to shore up justice by invocation of the gods, if that makes sense. Well, let me just a little bit of, I'll try to give you some evidence against me that this might actually be somewhat persuasive or workable. I mean, you know that I've been doing that work on the first book of the Republic where I think Keflas, for those who may not remember Keflas as the old guy in the Republic, he seems to have been as, he's very successful. He's very wealthy.
He seems to have been a shady businessman, seems to have done a lot of unjust things in his life. And he says, shoot, go ahead this quickly. He says, this is Keflas in book one of the Republic talking to Socrates and Socrates that says, hey, what's old age like? And he says, well, look, the tales about what is in Hades, that the ones, the one who was done unjust deeds here must pay the penalty there, which he laughed up to them.
Now make his soul twist and turn because he fears that they might be true. Whether it's due to the debility of old age, or whether he discerned something more of the things in that place because he's already nears them as it were. He has an angry, an awful suspicion and terror, terror. And he reckons up his accounts and considers whether he's done anything unjust to anyone.
Now the man who finds many unjust deeds in his life often he wakes from his sleep on fright as children do and lives in anticipation of evil. Now I've done a little bit of the sort of looking into it, and I don't have it in hand, but some of the language that Keflas uses there is directly from Hesiod's works and days. And what seems to be clear is that Keflas is definitely afraid that not only he but his entire household would be annihilated on account of his injustice. And so while I'm having a hard time seeing that this would persuade a Perseus, I can see how Perseus later in life, this song that might be hit in his ears might come back to him and he might become very deathly afraid of the injustice that he's done.
And so I don't know, it does seem like there is something here that's going on that it's sort of like the song part about it, right? Like, imagine that it's like seeing song you like, all this in or go to hell, all this. Like, okay, you've heard that song your whole life, you might sort of start to believe it. So I don't know.
Speaking of annihilation, we just lost David Barr. He just died. I think he has. Zeus is.
Yeah, so let me throw out another passage from what we're discussing. I took you too far, but no, I think it's just great that these songs have. So for me, the pivotal section is the exhortation to justice, which is lines two over to 85, which I really love. Just instantly is directly to Perseus, right?
In part, it actually goes back and forth. It's, I think a kind of dialogue, because it starts with, let me just point out a couple of details. In line two or two, he says, but now I will tell a tale to the kings. And they keep it in mind also for them.
So he goes, he's directing, talking to the kings, and he's speaking. A favorable by the way, sorry, another like the famous. Hocking the netting out. But then in line two, 13, he says, but you, Perseus, right?
He speaks Dan for a long time. And then at line two, 48, he says. But they don't imply he's not, so they don't imply that he's not among the class of kings. He's not.
And if I'm right, the kings are that first category of people who really understand by themselves. Anyway, so go ahead. Well, yeah, he may be more susceptible to understanding. I think it was.
So he talks to them. He tells them to pair up. Well, we'll go into this, I think. Go ahead.
Then he talks to Perseus at line two, 13. Then at two, 48, he says, oh kings, right? Right. And then again, at two, 74, he goes, oh, Perseus, right?
And so I take it and then it ends at two, 85, right? And then he goes into the discussion of work. And so I take this to be a kind of dialogue. And let me suggest the following sort of general interpretation.
I think there's more to it. But he gives the story of the Hawk and the Nightingale. The Hawks are ostensibly the kings. And the Nightingale who sings beautifully is Hesiod.
And the Hawk is cynical. It's the same word, in fact, right? The Nightingale word is the same word that's used to describe Hesiod. Or am I wrong?
Maybe elsewhere. I don't know. Yeah, check please. So that's.
So and they sink their claws. The Nightingale starts singing. And my friend Travis Moer was pulling it out there. It's really singing because it's at pain.
It's not really the way that most people sing. So it's out of necessity. I think maybe it's when we do it. But then and then this Hawk is like, what are you doing?
What does that matter? And then he then he says, OK, or you want to hear me sing? I'm going to sing to Percy's. And he basically tells Percy's.
You want to know why your life is so bad? It's because you live with unjust people, right? And and Zeus punishes people. And he says specifically, this is, I think, a crucial line in 240.
Many times too, an entire city is taken away because of an evil man, right? One individual who transgresses and devises we can we can think and then Zeus punishes them for it. When he then turns back to the kings, he says he did a 261. And he says that Zeus gets the people to punish the kings, right?
So it's strange, right? So he said he spoke to the kings, oh, you want to you want to destroy me? Like I'm just a weak singer. He sings to the people, blames the kings for their suffering.
He tells the kings, hey, the people are going to come get you. And then he comes back to Percy's and says, you need to obey this law, right? And so now there's there's a fundamental contradiction here, right? Which is that he tells the kings that people will punish you.
Zeus punishes you via the people. But then he tells Percy's. Zeus has just punished you in kind of abstraction somehow, right? So one is the kings are convinced by political necessity, right?
Whereas Percy's is in a way using Zeus as a scapegoat. So in that passage, I see a very kind of tightly written dialogue where he sees the uses of a part of song to persuade the people to restrain the kings who so that they leave he stayed alone, basically, right? That's kind of I think the sort of dramatic conceit of that passage. So that tells me that the fact that he feels comfortable falling up with this law after this sort of dialogic trick, that tells or that suggests to me, I should say that he sees the tactic has been successful, at least so far, 285.
OK, it's that you're pointing us there. Yeah. Yeah, I think it does, for sure. Yeah.
I mean, but one thing that you pointed to there was a connection between Zeus's rule and why I want not to be Justin. Since you pointed this passage, I thought I'd read line 270 and falling. And this is him addressing the kings. Or is it still?
Yeah, this is the kings, right? As he doesn't call out pursues. He'll switch back to Percy's. I'll fill lines later.
Yeah, so here's he's he's he's he's he's done why he is just he's he says. Now, otherwise I would not myself be just among men nor have my son be so. Whereas a hard thing for a man to be just if the unjust man is to have the greater right. But I believe that Zeus with the councils will not let it end thus.
I mean, you often hear religious people say this like, why would anybody who's not religious be moral? And here's he's saying that exactly. He's like, you know, look, if there weren't if Zeus weren't meeting out justice, I wouldn't be just. So I mean, I don't know if this, I don't know how much we want to press the interpretation of this poem at this point.
But like this at the very least I could say, I was going to say what's crazy about that is and I look forward to the Orange Storm episode on Homer. Orange Storm, some of what he talks about is that Homer is going to as a radical and Homer's view of the gods is a radical radically different from, I think, what people take his view to be. And it kind of builds on itself. And I think by the end of the of the of the Iliad in the Odyssey, you're left kind of not believing in the gods in some sort of fashion.
But it's hidden in a way. You're saying here he's here as much more open. Well, what I'm saying is here, he seems to be saying at the very least justice does not fall into the category of things that are good in themselves. And that one would not be just like in a Republic one, you know, he would see me saying, yeah, there's no reason to be just if you're, you know, if you have the reputation of injustice, like no, like the reason to be just is because God will punish you if you're unjust and absent that punishment, there's no reason to not be unjust.
And it sounds like as Alex already amplified, especially nowadays when the unjust seem to be prospering and Kings can be bribed and my brother can get away with this kind of shenanigans. Yeah, I mean, it's remarkably similar to the Republic and that way, right? Yeah, it seems like citizen. So on the heels of something, let me add to that.
I think that's right. On the heels of what you just read, he turns to Percy saying articulates Zeus's law. And I think I make a lot of this when I see it, when I teach it, because I mean, it's a divine law, it's going to be important, right? It's Zeus is one law he said to have, it's a normal.
He says, he says, the crony in the crony big zoos ordained this law for human beings. You know, so fish animals and wings burns are he ordains to eat one another, since there is no justice among them, but the human beings he gave justice, which is best for them, right? So there's now this is this idea. It's human beings should not commit cannibalism, less level.
Now they're talking about eating up each other's inheritance, the kings who eat up gifts. There's a lot of language of consumption, right? And there's also the Hawking Nightingale image, right? Of eating one another, but you know, there's a kind of metaphorical cannibalism that's going on here, cannibalizing another human beings substance there, their wealth.
This law seems to suggest that if you don't have justice, you're going to devolve into mutual cannibalism, right? But I think also if you don't have justice, you're not aware of this distinction between man and animal. Does that make sense, right? Like when man descends into this kind of animalistic cannibalization, they lose a sense of what is still a distinction, which is this distinction in terms of justice that human beings are capable at least, even if they're not living that way now are capable of justice.
And therefore also capable of some acknowledgement of the gods or susceptible, you could say, if you want to be more skeptical about susceptible to the gods. And so I think a secondary reason why you might want to encourage people to be just is to be more aware of this distinction between the political animals and the cosmic or natural animals. So Greg, you're just like, sorry, the cynical way to read this is like, okay, the animals can do whatever they want. But you people, I mean, just don't eat each other.
Right? Like, this is not exactly lofty justice, right? I mean, I actually quite serious about that is that what he's saying is like, I mean, the only thing we really have going for us is that the only way that we're more just than the other animals is we don't eat each other. Or what is the law simply be just and justice includes, for example, not eating one.
Another. Yeah, I mean, there's obviously a literal prohibition against cannabis. Of course. And then the medical usually usually usually.
No, I mean, in the poem, you know, I mean, right, right, right. But I was going to get joke about the south, but that's not what they do with their family. They don't eat them. But the, the, they're called empty or they want to, they're much much nicer to their family.
But I, but I think I mean, I'll just go out to this and force. I think it is largely metaphor. There's a cynical side, but I think it's also, yeah, this idea of consuming one another. But yeah, I don't know.
There's, and then when you see on the heels of this, he gives the expectation of to work and he goes into the farming instructions and the advice, you start seeing all these mysteries pop up like, why did the birds migrate when they do? And why did the crops come about when there's this, you know, the seriousness over here and, you know, this, this, you know, constellations over there? And you look at that and you realize there are these larger questions about the cause of the strange way in which things are one explanation of being the gods. And I think without justice, you don't actually entertain that possibility.
Right. And it is a possibility, at least until you've confronted it, right? It is a possibility that you need to take seriously. Right.
Alex, you know, since we're doing two episodes, maybe you can just speak for a little bit about a couple of major parts and in the poem that we haven't talked about yet, like the Prometheus Pandora myth. And then we've put that there's time let's talk about the generations of men as well. Yeah. So the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the root that in my lab.
Well, let me throw out something that I learned for this. Excellent. Very simply like people know the Pandora myth, right? Like, can you just give the superficial like, what happens?
Yeah. So Pandora, we, you know, as like Pandora's this woman, she has this box. And, and, and okay, there's a joke there, but the joke is actually true, I think, which is in the story, she is the box. She's a jar.
It's called right. And she's actually decorated jar. And there's a fantastic essay by the French classes, as very long it's called at Man's table or dining at Man's table or anyways, it's fantastic essay. And one of the things he points out is there is this motif of inside and outside throughout all of he sees, right?
So there's, there's a tale of this ox partition of the ox and there's a stomach hiding useless bones. And there's, you know, a little bit of something like that there's just inside outside. You know, the farmers are referred to as just a belly. So empty bellies.
Fire is, is hidden by Prometheus in a fennel stock, all this stuff. And one of the most powerful versions of this, and there's others, but one of the most powerful versions of Pandora, who's a jar, a woman is a jar containing all of these evils. So the God's maker, she takes the lid off the jar, which has a veil on it. So there's a symbol of a wedding, right?
And then also the opening of women, all these evils around the world, but hope stays within the jar is closed. So if you have to think about how a woman might be a sort of empty vessel filled with hope, I think would have to be because of reproduction, right? So, yeah, I think so. Return to the return to the end is born out later by other things he says.
So, but this just goes to show that, you know, so make that clear. Like this is like, yeah, even the vulgar sling that is correct. Yeah. But make that clear.
Lay that out for folks at home. Like what way is this woman? How is Rupert? I mean, this is obvious.
Maybe for people who listen to the show, they listen to our 27 part series on Plato's symposium, but how is a woman is a vessel, an empty vessel with hope? How is that bound up the reproduction? How's it bound up with divine? How's it bound up with human beings fundamentally changing our nature?
And how is it an evil? I mean, in the phiogenes call, she's called she's not called Pandora there. It's called woman and she's called a beautiful evil, right? And she's in Greek as callos kakon or something.
Like it's like, it's, yeah, literally. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
It's like such a cry. Like the beautiful can be bad. Go on. I know it, brother.
But yeah, the context here is that, and I think it's slightly different from the supposed to be as all the reasons that I think he sees that goes to degree. But here it's actually like, if you're a farmer and you have no money and you're just struggling to get by having a kid is a huge responsibility. First of all, your wife can't do anything. Then you have the kid has to be fed.
And so he's urges also, he says, just have one son. That's it. Now, maybe he's talking for personal experience. Like you don't want your kids fighting over their inheritance.
That's even worse. But just having one kid is also a recipe for destroying the human race. But it looks like the evil is that you fall in love. And then you, and so later the works and days, we'll talk about this maybe in the next episode, he makes this comment about how finally at the end of the year after all this work, you can sit back, have some wine, enjoy the wind, eat some food, and maybe satisfy a lusty woman.
But then he suggests you might be too tired to actually actually. So life is tough. And this seems to be what you're working towards. But and so the hope is you hope to have somebody like you left behind with your stuff.
That's the mode of symposium. But also the evil is that this could put you out of business if you're really not doing well. And this is again, this is a very, very archaic time, very difficult. But this is why you need to marry a woman who can push a plow, right?
That's right. Yeah. Good, strong. Ox-like woman.
Yeah. Maybe a little facial hair. She's going to do it. That way you can't have kids.
That's great. Anything else? Should we talk about the generations of man? Yeah, of course.
That seems really important. Yeah. Does, um, uh, hey, does anybody pick up, um, like, what do you other philosophers do with, with, with Hesiod? Does Nietzsche take him up at all?
He has an early work on, um, there's eight, there's a, um, forgetting now, I should have looked at his, uh, there's an early work, but it's, I think it's post-botonic, but it's on like the, it's called the contest between Homer and Hesiod. And I believe he published and wrote some things on that. Okay. But I try to think of anything else.
I mean, on the generations of man, I mean Plato obviously makes a lot of use of race. Right. Right. Three, they'll, they'll, they'll lie.
So I mean, the race of man, the only thing I can come, take away from it is, you know, I'm reading it and I'm thinking of myself. This seems to be about the emergence, I mean, it's quite a size, but it seems to be out the emergence of human beings as we know them from human beings are ancient human ancestors, right? So there were these races of our ancestors who didn't know death. Now why didn't they know death?
I mean, in a way that simple animals don't know death, right? I mean, there's that, I mean, as you go through the races, you can divide like, okay, which ones know death, which ones don't know death, which ones were like, I mean, he explicitly blessed some of the races and said they had blessed lives and these didn't have blessed lives. It seems to be a decline. Right.
And so one could think about just like the Bible does, right? We begin to paradise and then we have the fall. So man's fate, man, as we see man is now we've moved away from perfect origins and become worse, whereas their alternative accounts of the world Hobbes, for example, where the origins are terrible and things have gotten better. So a very simple dichotomy is a progressive view of human history or a regressive view of human history.
And he seems to fall into the biblical fall category, although it seems like maybe some down and another up, but in any event, there seems to have been like a perfect origins that get changed up. If you put this together with the irony of force, then this all goes to hell because the beginning was not quite so lovely. But yeah, this to me is one of the most difficult parts of all of these. I really don't know.
For the reasons you suggest at one point where it kind of goes down and back up, so you have the gold race, which is great. And then the silver race, which is like the like, petulant children, right, who yeah, taken away from their mother after a hundred years. But then they're still honored after the death. Then you get this weird bronze age where they're all unnamed and they're just violent and everything is bronze and they had no, there's no nobility to them.
And then you get the age of these demigod heroes, which are the heroes of ancient Greek mythology, right, the epics and they of course have names, but they were destroyed by Zeus. So I think one of the first two generations seem to have been born under cronos and then only destroyed later. And so I think you have to try and I just don't know how to do this. You have to try to put and there might be that the catalog of women should more like that, but you got to try to put that together with the theogeny, what's going on there and the catalog of women, which gives all heroes.
But it's really quite strange, like gold, silver, bronze and iron, make sense of them, the demigods are put in there as Greg, you know, it is not linear at all. Though it just seemed like life, one constant or one actual detail that's consistent is life does seem to get worse each time, but the gold ones live in the dire knowingly. The silver ones have a late sort of suffering. The bronze one's life's top of the unknown nobility.
The demigods life seems tougher, but they have an inclination to nobility and then in our age it's even worse. And then after that it will be like a complete show. And this is super poetic, right? So the first generation, he says they lived as if they were gods.
When they died, it was as if they were asleep. So there are all these ways in which he's clearly not being quite literal. And only with the second generation of man are the gods created the second generation, is that right? So it's not where the first generation come from.
And the beginning, the moral side of the home is created gold generation is moral. Okay, so maybe I'm just wrong about that. I think it's from Kros. Okay.
All right. You were forbidden from asking that question, Greg. And then Zeus creates the third generation of man. So I mean, I hate to be too simplistic about this, but does it seem like there's this way in which the gods are reflecting actual developments in humankind so that when you actually get to political man, the gods that they fashion reflect themselves in some way.
So the Zeus is kind of a divine manifestation of how the humans are actually living at that point. Yeah. I mean, but it's, but it's presented in your absolute right, but it's presented in inverse way, right? Because it's presented as the others just came about.
And but it's really, right, right, right. I think he seems examining whether that could be the, we'll talk about this more when we do the theology because there you do get the sort of generations of the gods. And I think there's an implicit account that he seems advancing about why we're knows and in chronos are not adequate as gods specifically because they don't answer prayer. And when you get Zeus, it's on the heels of his discussion of prayer.
So you get the sense that whatever God we have has to be one that that both controls the cosmos and answers our prayers. And that's at once a God who intends everything and a God who, you know, reacts against unintended injustices, you could say, right, or a human deviation. That's probably a good place to stop for now. Unless there are any other questions or thoughts.
I don't know. I mean, maybe we could say something to set up the next one, which is to say that we should have. Yeah, we should absolutely do that. We've made the case, right?
That this is about Zeus's rule. Yeah, what did Bartlett say about those? There's accounts of human suffering. There's a kind of theology that's advanced.
But what we see coming after that is actually a kind of depiction of archaic Greeks human, like life. What was it like? What was the life of a farmer? But it's a peculiar portrayal of it.
But what we'd have to say then, right, if this is a coherent work is that this is somehow examining or at least showing us how the gods will and therefore to the degree to which they will and maybe even worse than that, whether they even are at all, right, if they're actually what happens. So we'll have to tackle that at the next one. Well, thanks for listening folks at home. Don't forget to like, rate, subscribe, send pics.
Wait, that's not what I'm going to say. You guys say that part. That's Greg. Greg is constantly texting us.
Where are the pics? I want the pics. We keep asking. We got one actually on the Twitter.
Somebody sent us a picture of in a state of undress actually. We're very grateful. Okay. Yeah.
That wasn't so grateful, but it was funny. It was too old for you. Yeah. It was beard.
That's right. Don't forget to be just and work card. Yeah. Make sure you're working in the proper seasons.
That's really hard. And play hard. We'll see you next week on New Think