THEOGNIS THE PRE-SOCRATIC OF MEGARA

All educated people know the name of Homer. A fraction of them is familiar with the name of Hesiod. But as for the third name in our pre-Socratic poetic triad, it remains virtually unknown, except for a few stanch perusers of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who, having encountered the name of Theognis in their writings, might have wondered: Theognis who?!

I confess that my interest in Theognis was of such indirect nature. I would not have paid too much attention to his name as found in references to him by Plato and Aristotle who have made similar references to scores of names without stirring up a particular curiosity about them, but Nietzsche and Schopenhauer become an entirely different matter especially when a rather obscure personality receives a certain prominence on their pages. Here is an excerpt from Schopenhauer’s Introduction to what has been commonly known under the title Counsels and Maxims, from his great later-life comprehensive opus Parerga und Paralipomena :

If my object in these pages were to present a complete scheme of counsels and maxims for the guidance of life, I should have to repeat the numerous rules, some of them excellent, drawn up by thinkers of all ages, from Theognis and Solomon (I refer to the proverbs and the maxims ascribed, in the Old Testament, to the king of that name) down to La Rochefoucauld; and, in so doing, I shall inevitably entail upon the reader a vast amount of well-worn commonplace. But the fact is that in this work I make still less claim to exhaust my subject than in any other of my writings.

The fact is that in all biographical sources Theognis is described only as a Greek elegiac poet of Megara of 6^th century BC, one of the chief gnomic poets. Yes, another antediluvian Greek poet; yet Schopenhauer is representing him as a seminal thinker of all ages, here sharing the spotlight with Solomon and the French moralist François de La Rochefoucauld, the author of the famous book Reflexions ou Sentences et Maxims Morales which has established his reputation as a philosopher on a par with Montaigne. The question can be legitimately asked, as to why do we know so little of Theognis, when some 1400 lines ascribed to him are extant, which allow us to make a judgment about his stature, which judgment first Schopenhauer, and then Nietzsche after him, had glowingly pronounced? Nietzsche’s special interest in Theognis goes back to 1867, when he was still a student at the University of Leipzig, and published an article on his maxims in a prestigious classical journal. In his much later work Zur Genealogie der Moral we find a sizeable reference to Theognis in the First Essay: #5:

With regard to our problem (for the larger context of this excerpt, read the first four sections of this Essay), it is of no small interest to ascertain that through the words and roots which designate “good” there often still shines the most important nuance, by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank. Granted that, in the majority cases, they designate themselves simply by their superiority in power, or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority. But they also do it by a typical character trait, and this is the case that concerns us here. They call themselves for instance “the truthful”; this is so above all of the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is (take a note of Nietzsche’s meaningful use of the present tense!) the Megarian poet Theognis. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos, signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true; then, with a subjective turn, the true as the truthful: in this phase of the conceptual transformation it becomes a slogan and catchword of the nobility and passes over completely into the sense of “noble,” as distinct from the “lying” common man, which is what Theognis takes him to be and how he describes him… (etc.)

Aside from such authoritative credentials as a philosopher from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Theognis can stand on his own in his remarkable extant fragments of which the first one, quoted below, has been noted as an influence on Nietzsche’s etymological theory in his Genealogie:

We struggle onward, ignorant and blind,

For a result unknown and undesigned;

Avoiding seeming ills, misunderstood,

Embracing evil as a seeming good.

Here are two more of his philosophical verses of some considerable merit:

The noblest thing is justice; the most advantageous, health;

But what gives greatest delight is to gain the object of one’s desire. (Lines 0255 - 0256.)

Not to be born is the best of all things for those who live on earth,

And not to gaze on the radiance of the keen-burning sun.

Once born, however, it is best to pass with all possible speed through Hades’ gates

And to lie beneath a great heap of earth. (Lines 0425 - 0428.)

And, finally, earlier in this entry I quoted from Webster’s Biographical Dictionary Theognis’s description as “one of the chief gnomic poets.” These gnomic poets are considered “the precursors of the philosophers and the sophists, who, indeed, often made their discourse turn on points raised by Theognis and his fellow-moralists.” Quod erat demonstrandum.