Lesches and the Contest between Homer and Hesiod

Here Lesches is presented as one of the contestants: he proposes a riddle that Hesiod solves, thus winning the contest. But the presence of Lesches, indeed that of any poet other than Homer and Hesiod, is not attested elsewhere in the tradition of the contest, and scholars have therefore proceeded to expel Lesches from it. Following one of the variants attested in the manuscript tradition, [2] Allen [3] published a text in which Lesches is not a competitor, but the narrator of the story. According to Allen, Lesches might have written about the contest story either in the Little Iliad, or in a poem that Lesches wrote about Homer’s life. Allen’s text, recently defended by O’ Sullivan, Kivilo and Koning, [4] runs: καὶ προέβαλʹ ὁ μέν, ὥς φησι Λέσχης (“and Homer, as Lesches asserts, proposed the following”). This reading does not seem plausible. To begin with, it is improbable that a poet closely associated with Homer, such as Lesches, would have told a story in which Hesiod won against Homer. Moreover, the poems attributed to Lesches, such as the Little Iliad, are set in the heroic age, in which the story of the contest does not belong. [5] More fundamentally, the very attempt to discover the original author of such a story seems misguided, since most of the biographical episodes related to the life of the archaic poets circulated anonymously at an early stage.

It has been argued that we have no evidence for a contest of singers with three or more contestants competing at the same time, [6] but the last part of Periander’s introductory sentence does, indeed, seem to imply a contest among more than two participants. Furthermore, the Certamen and even Hesiod’s Works and Days 650–659 seem to set no limit on the number of competitors. [7] Even if such a version of the contest did not exist before Plutarch, he may, in any case, have invented further competitors to suit his own rhetorical purposes. Mention of the competition between poets occurs in the context of advising kings. In the Dinner Plutarch suggests a connection between riddle–solving and the ability to rule well, two talents which have σοφία in common. The Sages, who can solve riddles, are also engaged in enlightened political discussions, and a female character in the work, Cleobulina, who improved the government of her father, is also famous for her riddles. Amasis, by contrast, does not excel in either ability. It stands to reason that, when telling of one of the most famous competitions in riddle solving, Plutarch wants to draw as close a parallel as possible between the σοϕοί who took part in that competition and the σοϕοί at his banquet, and that is why he stresses the fact that at the contest more than two wise poets competed. Lesches fits well as an extra competitor for several reasons: he was an epic poet and even shared with Homer the attribution of the Little Iliad. [8] But that work could not compete with the real Iliad in terms of perceived poetic quality; and Lesches was nowhere near as famous as Homer. [9] Unlike the Certamen, where Hesiod wins against Homer only on the basis of Panedes’ verdict, here the poetic skills of Hesiod do not leave room for disagreement over his victory: Plutarch can thus safely use this episode to make his point about the importance of riddle solving. Lesches was also known to have participated in another poetic contest, against Arctinus, and that may have been at the back of Plutarch’s mind when he included him in this story. [10]

A related textual problem in this passage is posed by the words τῶν ἀγωνιστῶν Ὁμήρου καὶ Ἡσιόδου. These have almost unanimously been considered to contradict the presence of Lesches at the contest: some scholars use them as evidence for the fact that Plutarch refers to a contest between Homer and Hesiod only; [11] others, instead, solve this apparent problem by athetizing Ὁμήρου καὶ Ἡσιόδου, and suggesting that it was a marginal gloss that made it into the text at an early stage of transmission. [12] This latter suggestion seems plausible, but the alleged gloss is attested in all our manuscripts, so we should be careful about suggesting an athetesis. [13] In fact, it is possible to make sense of the text as it stands: it says that the quality of Homer’s and Hesiod’s performance made it difficult for the judges to issue a verdict; hence they asked for the competition to go on and Hesiod, able to solve Lesches’ riddle, was eventually awarded the victory. The fact that Hesiod replies ἐκ τοῦ παρατυχόντος may also mean that Hesiod was the first to reply to a riddle proposed to all the contestants. Lesches poses a riddle, and Hesiod solves it first – thus winning the competition.

Two other passages by Plutarch confirm that he allowed himself to deal with the story freely and creatively. In Table Talk (674f–675b) Plutarch says that poetry competitions were ancient, but although many expect him to give as an example the contest between Homer and Hesiod, he “scorns this hackneyed lore of the schoolroom”. [14] In a scholium to Hesiod’s Works and Days, Plutarch is said to have athetized the passage in which Hesiod proclaims his victory as a later interpolation, because it contains “nothing of value”. [15] The different explanations proposed for Plutarch’s athetesis agree on one fundamental point: in Plutarch’s opinion the contest between Homer and Hesiod does not have a historical basis. [16] Plutarch, the scrupulous critic of literature, rejects the authenticity of the contest story; and, precisely because he regards it as essentially fictional, he feels free to adapt it to his own creative purposes, in suitable contexts such as his Dinner of the Seven Sages. [17]

I need now to consider another explanation for the presence of Lesches in Plutarch’s passage. West argues that the name Λέσχης replaced Ὅμηρος in the text: Homer would be the contestant who actually proposes the challenge, but a reader may have been reminded of Lesches by the verses of the question, and his name written in the margin of a copy of Plutarch’s text would then have penetrated the text. [18] But other witnesses of the contest give different verses for the question that matches the answer on the tomb of Zeus:

If the presupposition of West’s statement is right, i.e. these verses were in antiquity (sometimes) attributed to Lesches, Plutarch, too, must have been aware of this connection: there is no need to postulate that he gave Homer verses traditionally attributed to another poet, when we consider that the tradition offered an alternative version for the question, which Plutarch may well have known. [20] It seems to me more probable that Lesches was present in Plutarch’s account from the very beginning. And, in any case, there is no proof that the lines were ever associated with poems attributed to Lesches.

The fact that the name of Lesches is followed immediately by this couplet has led some scholars to think that the verses may come from the Little Iliad, [21] while others have taken more skeptical positions. Among those who accept the couplet’s provenance from the Little Iliad, there is disagreement as to whether the fragment represents the beginning of the poem, or rather comes from another part of it. While the invocation to the Muses suggests that the poem may have started with these verses, the tradition transmits another couplet as its incipit:

Bernabé suggests that Lesches’ Little Iliad started with the couplet transmitted by Plutarch (fr. 1 Bernabé) and argues that the verses from the Vita Herodotea are the beginning of another poem that circulated under the name of Little Iliad (fr. 28 Bernabé). [23] Davies, by contrast, accepts the couplet from the Vita Herodotea as the incipit of the poem (fr. 1 Davies), and puts the verses from Plutarch among the doubtful fragments (fr. 2 dub. Davies). Most radically, West does not include the couplet from Plutarch at all. [24] There are many reasons for thinking that fr. 1 Davies was the incipit of the Little Iliad, and that, consequently, other origins for the couplet from Plutarch should be postulated. Fr. 1 Davies is composed in traditional epic style, with the subject matter of the poem placed as the first word, then extended by a relative clause and a stress on suffering as the theme of the poem. [25] The statement of the subject matter is certainly a standard feature of the very first lines of the poems [26] and if we accept that the Little Iliad started with fr. 1 Bernabé then it follows that the subject was stated only in the third line of the poem. Then, if the poem narrated the whole of the Trojan war, or at least more than what is summarized by Proclus, as has been suggested on independent grounds, [27] fr. 1 Davies with its broad indication of subject would be an appropriate proem for it. Fr. 1 Davies was circulating by the fifth century BC as shown by an inscription found in the Northern Black Sea dating to that period, [28] while there is no evidence for the circulation of fr. 1 Bernabé before Plutarch’s time. This is not to argue that the verses pronounced by Lesches in Moralia 154a are a creation of Plutarch’s: this is rather to suggest that they may well derive from another source, for example a now unknown corpus of hexameters used in poetic contests similar to the collection of verses in the Certamen or indeed fluid oral epic performances and stock phrases used in a witty and provocative way. The fact that the Muses are asked not to sing a particular topic reverses the traditional epic invocation to the Muses, and in itself suggests a riddling or agonistic context for their creation, which is precisely the kind of context in which Plutarch mentions them.

There is one further peculiarity to the lines: the couplet is left incomplete. Lesches is asking his opponent to talk about something that never was and never shall be; the second verse is then abruptly interrupted. Readers may note that the present is not mentioned. Anyone familiar with the formulae of epic will notice this: the couplet recalls the famous epic formula τά τ’ ἐόντα τά τ’ ἐσσόμενα πρό τ’ ἐόντα, [29] which is also used in the corresponding question in the Certamen and in P.Petr. I 25. [30] Most remarkably, because of the absence of the present, the question in Plutarch does not contain an obvious difficulty: if asked not to sing past or future, Hesiod could refer, in his answer, to anything happening in the present. [31] Again it is instructive to see how this fits the context in which the verses appear, in particular by looking at the treatment of time as a philosophical issue in the Dinner. In the passage described at the beginning, Bias solves the riddle posed to Amasis by referring to the present time: Amasis should ask the king of the Ethiopians “to stop the rivers which are now emptying into the ocean depths, while he is engaged in drinking up the ocean that now is; for this is the ocean with which the demand is concerned, and not the one which is to be”; [32] in another passage, time is defined as partaking of past, present and future; [33] in another work, Plutarch criticizes the Stoic doctrine according to which time partakes only of past and future. [34] In Lesches’ question the importance of the present is demonstrated by its very absence: a verse is left incomplete and the couplet contains no difficulty to solve – unless the present is necessarily defined as a mixture of future and past, or an ungraspable line between the two. This further suggests that, whatever Plutarch’s source, he felt quite free to adapt it for his own philosophical purposes. The curtailed couplet suits Plutarch’s philosophical discourse on time better than any corresponding verse transmitted in the rest of the tradition.

In the first part of my paper I argued against the idea that Lesches was ever considered the author of the story of the contest between Homer and Hesiod in antiquity. [35] I then discussed the verses quoted after Lesches’ name and argued that they might have originated independently from the Little Iliad. Plutarch in this passage used material that was flexible and fluid, such as ancient biographies and agonistic hexameters, and adapted it to his own purposes: it is only by keeping this in mind that we may reach a better understanding of this passage and the issues related to it. [36]