<b> <i>Prooimia</i> </b> to Order: Pre-Cosmic Reality in Hesiod and Early Pythagoreanism

Abstract This paper aims to provide a reflective understanding of what proems are, and what they can achieve, by advancing beyond the literary and agonistic elements of proems, often understood to reflect the social or cultural aspects of literary form. Instead, it seeks to expand the possibilities for understanding proems as distinct avenues for new ways of talking about the content of reality. It does so chiefly through analysis of two major cosmogonic works from Ancient Greece: Hesiod’s Theogony , and the treatise On Nature by the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus of Croton. This paper argues that both Hesiod and Philolaus designate the proems of their works as places to outline the primordium of reality, and that their cosmogonic accounts have much more in common than scholars have typically recognized. These ‘biomorphic’ accounts of the birth of the ordered universe stand especially in contrast to accounts based on other cosmogonic modes, such as the ‘stochazomorphic’ and ‘technomorphic’ modes (the latter of which is deployed in the proem to Ovid’s Metamorphoses , which stands in contrast especially to Hesiod’s account of the generation of reality).