The interpretation of Hesiod, ‘Theogony’ 736ff

Abstract

Gregory Vlastos, in his interesting review of Cornford's Principium Sapientiae , in Gnomon , XXVII (1955), pp. 65ff., gives a particularly bald statement (p. 74 and n. 2) of a theory advanced in an article by Friedrich Solmsen, ‘Chaos and Apeiron’, Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica , n.s. XXIV (1950), pp. 235ff., and by Hermann Frankel in his Dichtung und Philosophie des fruhen Griechentums (New York, 1951), pp. 148–9. The theory is that Theogony 736–45 has a profound cosmogonical significance, and that it was probably from there that Anaximander derived and developed his idea of an originative ἄπeιρον. Now the Hesiodic passage is one of a group of variant descriptions of Tartaros that extend, as an appendix to the Titanomachy, from 726 to 819. Many of these descriptions are mutually inconsistent, and, although I would not go quite so far as Jacoby ( Hesiodi Carmina: pars I, Theogonia (Berlin, 1930), pp. 22 ff.) in asserting that they are certainly all later additions, most of them by different authors, it seems manifest that they cannot all be by the author of the Theogony as a whole—even accepting that this poem is to some extent a synthesis, not always elegant or consistent, of previous accounts. At all events no other part of the poem, including the cosmogony and theogony of 116 ff., manifests the piecemeal, repetitive and contradictory qualities of this series of descriptions of Tartaros. For example, 726–45 describes the underworld, and it is there that the halls of Night are located; but at 746 ff. there is a sudden transition to the far west, the region where Atlas stands and where Night exchanges with Day. Solmsen ( op. cit. p. 243, n. 2) tries to defend this unaccountable and irrelevant switch by showing that Night, earlier in the poem, is associated with the western parts of the earth, but is also a product of Chaos in the cosmogony of 116 ff. Yet this consideration, although it provides a sufficient motive for an irrelevant rhapsodic elaboration of the kind that Jacoby posited, really does nothing to support unity of authorship for the two adjacent passages. I agree with Jacoby, then, that what we are presented with in this part of the Theogony is a farrago of rhapsodic variants, juxtaposed inconsistently (for the most part) by the most mechanical principles, on the central theme of Tartaros.