7. Towards a Conclusion: The Farmer and His Wife

Perhaps the most important fact to arise out of this examination of the Hesiodic festival (WD 582-596) is that this passage integrates seasonal themes that may be linked to local agricultural observances. The plentiful evidence of seasonal/functional songs in the demotic tradition—the song of the cicada, the khelidonisma, and the harvest songs of the women of Avdemi—suggests a continuity in the function and, consequently, in large part, in the content of these songs. This is a point worth stressing, since oral transmission will, so long as is necessary, preserve themes essential to a seasonal/functional context to create "new" songs of comparable or very similar content. [1] A glance at representative specimens of the khelidonismata, for instance, suffices to show how new variants can be engendered out of the same thematic ingredients; what is more, the very usefulness of these songs in certain seasonal rites of passage will guarantee the replication of specific themes or even words. The widely disseminated songs of the cicada—attested in such diverse locales as Cyprus, Chios, Thrace, Macedonia, and Corinth—also show signs of conservative transmission, and because they seem also to be bound up with the harvest primitiae, these songs may ultimately be attributed to the same tradition as the well-known khelidonisma. The swallow-tradition, it should be remembered, can be retrojected at the latest to Athenaeus' time and surely reaches back to the fifth century B.C. or even Sappho's day—or still earlier. Further, the similarities in content of the Hesiodic passages dealing with the cuckoo, the crane, and the cicada—all of them seasonal harbingers—may suggest a parallel ancient tradition of seasonal/functional songs memorializing a given creature and the social events associated with its appearance. It is anyway significant that the cicada in the WD undoubtedly has a seasonal function, as has been shown in the preceding chapter; and the evidence, ancient and modern, previously examined, collectively suggests that Hesiod was using a creature whose seasonal and even ethical associations were a matter of public record.

We can in fact safely assume that the cicada has borne enormous symbolic weight in the folklore of the Greek world and that the lore has been rich, and ancient, and widespread. We should not be too surprised if a special type of cicada-song existed in antiquity. Among other types of functional song, including the khelidonisma, seasonal songs relevant to the harvest must have existed; the harvest very probably also entailed a cicada-song, and indeed the demonstrable link to this resilient popular tradition are the swallow-songs. (We may also recall the affinity, in terms of function, between the εἰρεσιώνη [eiresionê], which is itself related to the ancient swallow-song, and the modem cicada-song.)

It would doubtless be inept to claim too confidently that one might reconstruct the ancient song of the cicada; we never shall know its exact form and content. The modem Greek conferenda reviewed earlier may even so possess considerable analogical value and enable us to guess intelligently at (among others) two possibilities.

Towards the end of the harvest an ancient farmer [2] would have been apt to perform a song that treated of the cicada, an obvious harbinger and, moreover, a creature known to be profoundly unmoved by the work ethic. [3] The hypothetical song also included references to the rising Dog Star, to thirst and exhaustion as well as the ill-timed rise in female libido. The song attached to some ritual or other observance and had an inherent didactic function besides: it reinforced the social rule that men had to work hard so as to secure for themselves provisions for the year ahead; while women had to desist from τέττιξ-like conduct, a behavioral residue from their fallen nature which they could never fully discharge. The alternative possibility is this: the women, separated for some while from the men, sang of the cicada, perhaps in the first instance as an ally or witness, [4] and referred, inter alia, to the harshness of the season, to thirst and the men's exhaustion, and registered their own frustration in the face of their husbands' absence.

If we may now suppose that different songs stemming from the same stock of thematic material have always coexisted in ancient tradition, as indeed they do in demotic tradition, then the relation of WD 582-585 to Alcaeus fr. 347a (LP) becomes clear. Each poet rendered the "song of the cicada," a harvest-time favorite. If the song in question at all resembled the second reconstruction, both poets naturally must have replaced the adjective the women used of themselves with one that appealed to a misogynist audience. If, on the other hand, they were following the first reconstruction, μαχλόταται ('most wanton') and μιαρώταται ('most lustful,' or 'polluted in the extreme') may be the actual words of this version. [5] As evidence of the important common territory between the WD and Alcaeus, we might cite Plutarch's observation that Alcaeus' song was current even in his day: The Alcaic incipit is described as πρόχειρον ἅπασιν, that is, “available to everybody:” was the verse πρόχειρον to a Greek audience simply because it belonged to a well-known poem by Alcaeus, or was it πρόχειρον in the sense of "widely diffused/ a possibility likely in view of our discussion? The song—and presumably other songs of similar content—was not only current in Plutarch's day, but certifiably functional, as ὥρᾳ θέρους ("at summer-time") may imply.

However that may be, the crucial point to bear in mind is that WD 582-596 can only properly be appreciated in the light of its seasonal context. And an account of the context, amplified and thereby refined considerably with the help of ethnographic data, would seem to cast some doubt on the communis opinio that Alcaeus' poem is an imitation, in a different dialect and meter, of Hesiod. It seems now more reasonable to examine alleged cases of imitation individually on their own merits, and to make due allowance for the distinct possibility that two poets may in certain cases have drawn independently from a diffuse third source, namely the sub-literary or popular realm. [6] The fact that Aristophanes, and possibly Sappho, drew upon the ancient swallow- song fortifies this possibility/the question whether Alcaeus was a Ἡσιόδου ζηλωτής cannot quite so easily be decided. The Works and Days and the Alcaeus fragment are closely enough related to be regarded as the "same song," but perhaps not in the sense of imitation or plagiarism. They may well be independent manifestations derived from the same stock of thematic material.