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For Helen, John, and Marilyn
And in memory of Colin Barker, Joyce and Ken Ferguson, and Ellen Meiksins Wood
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The poor were in a state of bondage to the rich, both themselves, their wives, and their children, and were called Pelatæ [bond-slaves for hire], and Hektemori [paying a sixth of the produce as rent]; for at this rate of hire they used to work the lands of the rich. Now, the whole of the land was in the hands of a few, and if the cultivators did not pay their rents, they became subject to bondage, both they and their children, and were bound to their creditors on the security of their persons, up to the time of Solon.63
It is this historical situation that haunts Hesiod’s Works and Days. In its treatment of market practices and the crisis confronting the poor, this work contrasts mightily with the Homeric epics. In Homer, remarks critic James Redfield, “the heroes do not buy and sell”—though he quickly adds, “except perhaps to purchase a slave,” a vital exception to which we shall return. Odysseus does proclaim that “most men risk the seas to trade with other men” (Odyssey, 9.141). But as a general rule, the epics do not portray the aristoi buying and selling, practices that are frequently treated as unheroic. King Nestor, for instance, scorns both traders and pirates, even though, incongruously, he recounts the fortune he attained through plunder (Odyssey, 3.80–83, 117–18, 170). Yet, we know that buying and selling, along with raiding and slaving, were well-established noble undertakings by the time Homer’s epic poems were written down, around 650 BCE. If, as a growing scholarly consensus has it, Homer largely projected the relations of his society onto a glorious past in ways meant to heroize aristocratic warriors,64 then his near silence about noble involvement in market transactions would seem symptomatic. It suggests that the poet suppressed evidence of a practice of which he was well aware, but whose effects troubled him or his listeners; it suggests that trade was considered unheroic. Redfield proposes that Homer’s avoidance of trade in the epics is “a specific literary strategy—which, paradoxically, implies the importance of trade in the world of the poet.”65 After all, one does not deliberately conceal an inconsequential feature of one’s world when recasting it in heroic guise. One suppresses something significant that provokes anxiety. And trade, joined to new forms of wealth and the erosion of reciprocity, was just such a troubling phenomenon. To be sure, the epics do interrogate the clash of greedy individualism or hubris (Agamemnon) versus proper noble generosity of the sort that Achilles recommends. But the conflict is portrayed in largely personal terms, as behaviors pursued by individual noble figures, disconnected from social practices of accumulation associated with warrior-trading. Yet if Homer shies away from these realities, Hesiod does not. For this peasant poet, the new social dynamics—and the crisis they wrought on the small producer—are on full display.
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