I introduced the fable of the hawk and the nightingale in my previous post. Today, I will ask, What is the moral of Hesiod’s beautiful bird fable? Alas, there is no holy grail, no single meaning or interpretation that everyone agrees on. The problem here is not just the multiplicity of possible meanings; rather, it is that even the best or most plausible interpretations of Hesiod’s fable operate at different levels of generality.

By way of example, one possible “micro” interpretation of the fable casts Hesiod as the nightingale and his brother Perses as the hawk. In the third verse of Works and Days (lines 37-44), for example, Hesiod refers to some legal troubles he had with his brother Perses, to whom the poem is dedicated. Although they had agreed to split their disputed property in half (line 39), Hesiod implies that Perses was able to “grab[] the larger part” (line 40) by bribing the “lords” who heard their case (lines 41-42), so on this view, the fable is an allegory of the corrupt legal system where judges put their private interests over justice (Hubbard 1995, pp. 161-162), while Hesiod’s act of composing his poem is like the nightingale’s song or “minstrel’s lovely voice” (line 210), while Perses act of grabbing the larger part of the family estate is like the hawk clutching its prey.

The “macro” interpretation, by contrast, is that the fable is an iron age allegory to illustrate the fate of the fifth race of man, the race of iron. (lines 176-202) After all, the fable immediately follows Hesiod’s description of this fifth age and race, and Hesiod tells us that “Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men.” (line 184) On this fatalistic view of the fable, Zeus is the hawk and man is the nightingale. Yet another possible “macro” interpretation is that the fable is an allegory for divine justice: the hawk is “far-seeing Zeus” (line 176), while the metaphorical nightingale stands for corrupt public officials “who judge dishonestly and swallow bribes” (line 220). (Cf. Nelson 1997, p. 235, footnote omitted: “There is another possibility. As M. Skafte Jensen and others have suggested, Hesiod may mean us to see the helpless party not as himself in the clutch of the kings, but as the kings in the clutch of Zeus.”)

So, how should we decide among these competing “micro” and “macro” interpretations of Hesiod’s hawk-nightingale fable? I will share my preferred interpretation in my next post …