Ιf in Greek tragedy, the Furies pursue human beings who violate the laws of kinship—of family exchanges properly conducted, taboos properly observed—they pursue, in Heraclitus, the potentially transgressive sun. Fragment 94 of this pre-Socratic philosopher (c. 500 BCE) offers an apparent paradox, not so much in its use of mythological personae to formulate a theory of cosmic structure (a practice common to all surviving 6th century natural philosophy) as in its account of the relations among these figures. Throughout early Greek literature, the all-seeing and all-revealing sun bears witness to every action in both the human and the divine domains, functioning as the ultimate monitor of events that even the gods wish to conceal. Here, however, the sun’s own celestial operations are themselves subject to the scrutiny of the shadowy, chthonic Furies, irascible informants whose realm lies deep within the earth. {188|189}

In what way can our collaboration with nature in that long-vanished past be reproduced through the efforts of the farmer, laboring in the here-and-now? What is the relationship between the world measured by days and structured by work, in which Hesiod’s poem plants us, and that golden era of spontaneously flourishing nature and proximity to the divine, in which aging—the passage of time—was not a burden?

Now, however, the defining condition of human existence is not only that men must age, suffer, and die, but that first they must struggle to achieve their bios. Men, moreover, must strive to understand the arrangement by which they and the gods now coexist; no longer is this arrangement self-evident.

Prometheus’ intervention on men’s behalf, whereby he misrepresents the shares to their benefit, prompts Zeus to retaliate by withholding the power of fire from men, reserving it for the gods’ use; whereupon Prometheus in turn steals it for men. As the Works and Days tells us:

The autonomy of mortals as a group, their separateness, thus begins over an asymmetrical apportionment. Because of an unequal division, men must live divided from the gods; men must also begin their vexed relationship with Pandora and her kind. We may understand the Prometheus/Pandora story, in the Hesiodic version, as prompting Zeus to establish not only justice but a new mechanism for relations between gods and men, profoundly far-reaching both in itself and as an example for human relations.

Hesiod tells us that there is not one strife, one eris, but two—namely, the one that produces wars and violence and the one that produces work. He makes it clear {200|201} that in a kind of mise en abîme, the two strifes (or erides) are in contention with each other, bespeaking their primal character: strife was always already there.

In a sense, strife defines both the problem and the solution for the human condition.

As it is, time and timing must be measured—and the seasons and days take on a distinctive character and significance. The farmer performs a precarious balancing act, adjusting to the forces of nature and the rhythm of the year. These adjustments are mirrored by the ceaseless imperative of reciprocal exchanges with his neighbors on the land.

Hesiod’s advice is to make sure that your neighbor needs you more than you need him: {203|204}

Need becomes its own measurable resource, a measurable share: debt. This logic of measurable shares, the ground of Hesiodic economics, presumes finite resources, as Paul Millett has observed:

The line between cooperation and competition is thus constantly blurred and redrawn throughout the account of agricultural work:

The daily, and perennial, effort undertaken by the farmer—an effort that informs all his activities—to achieve a balance between too early and too late, too hot and too cold, too dry and too wet, between too little and too much, is replicated in the necessary effort to equalize exchanges between himself and his neighboring farmers over time. The task of proper calculation and the perception of temporality are what together enable a productive economy of strife:

In his prescriptions, Hesiod repeatedly articulates the essential character of reciprocal exchange, of gift and counter-gift, namely that it is inherently and perpetually in disequilibrium and must be continually rebalanced over time, so that every exchange begets a further exchange: {205|206}

When Hesiod insists that he will no longer help Perses if the latter is in need—

—Hesiod’s “measure” may denote the actual material, the begrudged hand-outs, that he announces he will no longer give Perses. But elsewhere, as in the passage cited above, we see that “measure” functions as a more abstract, mobile counter in Hesiod’s normative economy of good relations:

Or, more pessimistically,

—but that also function as ramifying tropes that figure a system in equilibrium. “Fair measure” then represents not a precise equivalent, but a just amount—an amount that will continue the sequence of exchanges. And the “right season” takes account of those exchanges as part of a cycle, operating with and through the patterns of nature.

“Due measure”—a figure for fair treatment and appropriate interactions—and “seasonability,” a figure for order, first reinforce each other and then function as metonyms of one another; so that in a passage on right conduct and relations, inappropriate, improper behavior (like harming a suppliant or sleeping with your brother’s wife) is called “unseasonable,” “untimely” (parakairia):

Hence the poem’s insistence on acting “in season,” on the importance of the calendar and of observing the proper timing for accomplishing work—this is the Days part of the Works and Days.

For the sign of the last stage of corruption among mortals, when they have become so degenerate that Zeus will destroy them, is a stunning one: the mark of their corruption is that their timing is out of sync. Hesiod says that Zeus will destroy this age when babies are born with grey hair, that is, when the seasons and generations of man have collapsed all together and become confused. When newborns have the features of old men, the seasons of our lives are truly out of joint. So to observe the due sequence of things—to pay attention to the calendar—is not only to bring temporality, that inescapable fact of our lives, in some small way under control, but it is also to resist such moral chaos as is envisaged for the end of the fifth age, the age of iron—our own.

Hesiod’s identification of Justice and seasonality, and his coordination of the right time and the right amount, in a metaphorical discourse of ethical behavior, help us to read Heraclitus’ conjunction of the sun’s measures, the avenging Furies and the Justice that administers their function. Heraclitus invokes the sun’s measures—usually the very trope of regularity, of the predictable, of the obvious—as a problem; he does so, moreover, through a strikingly peculiar, counterfactual rhetoric, as though beginning the trope of the adynaton—the figure of impossibility (of the sort, “when rivers run back to their source, …” “when fish fly, …” etc.). Why is justice concerned with the passage of the day? Are (not) the sun’s measures inviolable? The extended coordination of Justice with the sun’s measures or with—more broadly—that which is seasonable (hôraios), must be seen as a complex, provocative wager: betting on the sun’s regularity, troping norms out of nature, one gains in figurative power what one loses, perhaps, in ethical force. Heraclitus’ imagined transgression, even if offered through a conditional rhetoric of the improbable—invites us to continue our explorations of the thought-experiments conducted through poetry as well as philosophy.