Potter Is Angry with Potter
Hesiod says there are two kinds of Strife, one of them good for us, and then describes the good one in terms that sound suspiciously like the envy I was hoping to be excused from.
Orientation
At a Glance
- There Are Two StrifesHesiod separates destructive quarrel from a kinder rivalry that can move people toward useful work.
- Rivalry Wakes the IdleSeeing a prosperous neighbour plough, plant, and order his household can stir even a shiftless person to act.
- The Feeling Is Not the TestThe good Strife may still feel like anger or jealousy; the article judges it by whether it leads to labour or distraction.
- The Ledger Can Become a TrapComparison helps only when it sends the narrator to the desk instead of keeping him absorbed in other people’s progress.
I keep an eye on how other people my age are getting on. I would like to call this "taking an interest," and sometimes it is. More often it is a kind of bookkeeping: who has finished something, who has been noticed, who seems to have worked out how to live while I am still reading the instructions. When the ledger comes out badly I feel a small sour pinch, and then, often enough, I go and do some work. I have never known what to make of that sequence. The pinch seems shabby. The work seems fine. Can the one really be the parent of the other?
Hesiod thinks so, and says it almost at once. Near the start of Works and Days, speaking in his own voice to a man named Perses, he corrects what he takes to be a common mistake: "So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two." Strife here is Eris, a goddess, quarrel and rivalry given a name and a family. One Strife "fosters evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves." The other is "the elder daughter of dark Night," and the son of Cronos, which is to say Zeus, "set her in the roots of the earth: and she is far kinder to men."12
What does the kinder one do? "She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order." Then the verdict: "This Strife is wholesome for men."12 So far this is very welcome. My bookkeeping has a divine patron, and she lives in the roots of the earth, which sounds respectable. But the next sentence is where I stopped. "And potter is angry with potter, and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar is jealous of beggar, and minstrel of minstrel." Angry. Jealous. In the translation I read, this comes directly after "wholesome," with no change of subject, as though it were simply more of the same. I had expected the good Strife to be the clean version: admiration, a sporting wish to do as well. Hesiod's good Strife, if I am reading him rightly, includes the pinch. The potter does not admire the other potter's jars. He is cross about them, and then he goes back to his wheel.12
I am not sure I am reading him rightly. I have one English translation and no Greek, and it is possible that the potter line is a proverb set down beside the argument rather than part of it, or that its edge is softer or sharper in the original than "angry" suggests. I notice, too, that I have a motive: a reading in which my envy turns out to be wholesome is one I ought to check twice. And Hesiod himself does not leave it there. His very next words tell Perses not to let "that Strife who delights in mischief hold your heart back from work" while he hangs about to "peep and peer and listen to the wrangles of the court-house." The bad Strife, on this showing, is not the one that feels worse. It is the one that keeps you watching instead of working.12
That shifts the question I had been asking. I wanted to know whether the pinch was a good feeling or a bad one, and Hesiod does not seem interested in sorting it that way. His test is what happens next: the plough or the courthouse. By that test my record is mixed. Some days the ledger sends me to the desk; some days it just sends me back to the ledger. I can't yet tell in advance which kind of day it is going to be, and I suspect the potter couldn't either.12