Table Of ContentHeat and Lust
Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches
General Editor: Gregory Nagy, Harvard University
Time, Religion, and Social Experience in Rural Greece
by Laurie Kain Hart, Haverford College
The Scepter and the Spear: Studies on Forms of Repetition in the
Homeric Poems
by Steven Lowenstam, University of Oregon
Hegemony and Greek Historians
by John Wickersham, Ursinus College
Solon the Singer: Politics and Poetics
by Emily Katz Anhalt
Excursions in Epichoric History: Aiginetan Essays
by Thomas J. Figueira, Rutgers University
Heat and Lust: Hesiod’s Midsummer Festival Scene Revisited
by J.C.B. Petropoulos, Democritean University of Thrace
The Origins and Development of Ancient Greek Democracy
by James L. O'Neil, The University of Sydney
On the front cover: A calendar frieze representing the Athenian months,
reused in the Byzantine Church of the Little Metropolis in Athens. The cross
is superimposed, obliterating Taurus of the Zodiac. The choice of this frieze
for books in Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches reflects this series’
emphasis on the blending of the diverse heritages—Near Eastern, Classical,
and Christian—in the Greek tradition. Drawing by Laurie Kain Hart, based
on a photograph.
Heat and Lust
Hesiod’s Midsummer Festival Scene
Revisited
J.C.B. Petropoulos
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Published in the United States of America
by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706
3 Henrietta Street, London WC2E 8LU, England
Copyright © 1994 by Rowm& Laittlnefie ld Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publisher.
British Cataloging in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heat and lust : Hesiod's midsummer festival scene revisited /
J.C.B. Petropoulos.
cm. — (Greek studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1, Hesiod. Works and days. 2. Hesiod—Knowledge—Folklore.
3. Festiin vliaterlatsure . 4. Summerin literature. 5. Sex in
literature. 6. Folklore—Greece. I. Title. II. Series.
PA4009.07P47 1994 881'.0l—dc?0 93-47916 CIP
ISBN 0-8476-7901-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8476-7902(-pb0k. : alk. paper
Printed in the United States of America
τ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 239.48—-1984.
ἄστρων κάτοιδα νυκτέρων ὁμήγυριν,
καὶ τοὺς φέροντας χειμα καὶ θέρος βροτοις
λαμπροὺς δυνάστας, ἐμπρέποντας αἰθέρι
ἀστέρας ...
Aeschylus Agamemnon 4-7
Ραχοῦλες, εἶμαι ὁ πιστικὸς τῆς ἥμερης ἀρνάδας,
ὀργώνω, σπέρνω, ἱδροκοπῶ, Tou κάμπου δουλευτής,
καὶ λούζω τὸ τραγούδι μου otns δροσοπρασινάδϑας
τὰ δάκρυα καὶ στὰ δάκρυα τῆς ϑύσκολης ζωῆς ...
Kostis Palamas, Askraios, vv. 21-24
Jacques Villon (1875-1963). “Works and Days,” copperplate engrav-
ing. Courtesy of the Director and Board of Trustees of the Museum-
Library Tériade (Varia, Mytilini).
Contents
Foreword ix
Preface
Abbreviations
1 The Problem Stated: A Look at Hesiod’s Feast and Beyond
2 The Harvest
3 The Threshing
4 The Village of Avdemi: A Case Study in Wanton Women?
> Enter the Cicada
6 Hesiod’s Festival Reconsidered
? Towards a Conclusion: The Farmer and His Wife
Appendix 1: Commentary on WD 582-596
Appendix 2: On Zephyros (WD 594)
Appendix 3: On the Fountain, Sexual Mischief, and the
Migration of Reapers 91
Appendix 4: Commentary on WD 448-452 93
Vil
Appendix 5: Commentary on WD 486-490 95
Appendix 6: Commentary on Athenaeus 8.360B = carmen
populare 848 (PMG) 97
Appendix 7: Harvest Songs 99
Appendix 8: The Avdemi Songs 101
Table: Canicular Period 103
Bibliography 105
Index 111
About the Author 115
viii
Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Foreword
by Gregory Nagy, General Editor
Building on the foundations of scholarship within the disciplines of
philology, philosophy, history, and archaeology, this series spans the
continuum of Greek traditions extending from the second millennium
B.C.. to the present, not just the Archaic and Classical periods. The aim
is to enhance perspectives by applying various different disciplines to
problems that have in the past been treated as the exlcusive concern of
a single given discipline. Besides the crossing-over of the older disci-
plines, as in the application of history to literature, the series encour-
ages the application of such newer disciplines as linguistics, sociology,
anthropology, and comparative literature. It also encourages encoun-
ters with current trends in methodology, especially in the realm of lit-
erary theory.
Heat and Lust: Hesiod’s Midsummer Festival Scene Revisited, by John
Petropoulos, is an extraordinarily perceptive work of scholarship. This
book compares the description of a festival in Hesiod's Works and Days
with the traditions of songs that were actually sung at such festivals,
ranging from a drinking song of Alcaeus all the way to the folksong
traditions of latter-day Greece. No one before Petropoulos has ever
noticed the interconnectedness of all these traditions. Thanks to the
author's patient piecing-together of the facts, what may seem at first
merely a collection of drab separate details becomes transformed into
a unified picture of breathtaking intensity, with a vibrant beauty of its
OWT.
What Petropoulos has uncovered is a living tradition in all its con-
tinuities and discontinuities, extending from Hesiod to the present. It
is a tradition of songmaking that centers on the potentially comic
theme of male impotence and female hypersexuality at the climactic
1X
x Foreword
seasonal moment of harvesttime, during the Dog Days of summer,
when the scorching heat of Sirius the Dog Star dries out the fluids of
men and fires up the humors of women, at the very moment that the
thistle-plant goes into bloom and the cicada pours forth his song — to
conjure up some of the central images of this lively song tradition. As
Hesiod says, this is a good time to be drinking and making merry.
And all the merriment can be realized in song — a song about men
and women, heat and lust. With its festive sensibilities, the song in-
fuses even the otherwise somber didactic words of Hesiod with a
burst of merriment.
The Heldentenor, as it were, of this comic opera is none other than
that disreputable singer of songs himself, the Cicada, commonly
mistranslated for our times as the Grasshopper in the Aesop fable of
the Ant and the Grasshopper. The Greek story of the Ant and the
Cicada, which became one of the best-known fables of Aesop, was also
a central underlying theme of the harvest songs that Petropoulos
traces from Hesiod to the present. And the role of its protagonist, that
irresponsible singer of songs, is woven into the very fabric of the
Hesiodic Works and Days.
