Plato’s two Hesiods

Friedrich Solmsen’s path-breaking study of Hesiod’s influence on Plato focused on ‘motifs’ common to the two authors. Concerned to bring out the ‘threads of continuity’ in their ethical thought, Solmsen explicitly set aside the evidence of quotation, explaining that ‘[b]y and large, Plato is moving on a level of thought on which direct contact with the Hesiodic legacy could serve little purpose’ (Solmsen 1962: 179). There is no doubt that Plato found Hesiod ‘good to think with’ in a general way, but the evidence of his quotations of the poet is surely worth looking at as well. The present study is one of several in this volume to take up this material, which heretofore has been studied principally for text-critical reasons (Howes 1895). My concern will be to understand a simple pattern in the evidence: of the fifteen occasions on which Plato quotes specific Hesiodic lines or phrases (as against 146 quotations from Homer), fourteen come from the Works and Days; the Theogony is quoted once, though specific genealogies are referred to on a few other occasions. Whether a disproportion of this sort in such a small