The Hedgehog and the Fox

New light has more recently been cast on the possible meaning of the fragment by Ewen Bowie,¹ who suggests that the line may come from a poem in the form of a dialogue between Archilochus and a woman he is trying to seduce. The line would be spoken by the woman, who is saying that the fox (Archilochus) may have many seductive wiles at his disposal, but she (the hedgehog) has one decisive device in her armoury, to curl up into a ball, preventing him from entering her (at any rate frontally). The Greek word for hedgehog may also have been used to refer to the female genitals, which would support this interpretation. Bowie’s hypothesis is based on two papyrus fragments (first published in 1954 and 1974) in which an iambic poem is built around a conversation between Archilochus and a woman he is seducing.¹ That Archilochus is presented as the fox rather than the hedgehog is suggested by his apparent identification of himself with a fox in poems exploiting the fable of the fox and the eagle (fragments 172–181) and that of the fox and the ape (fragments 185–7).

Bowie’s hypothesis is reported in an article by Paula Correa, which concludes sagely: ‘For those who try to read [the fragment] today out of context, it rolls itself up like a hedgehog, and perhaps not even with all cunning may one disclose some of its meaning without doing it violence.’²

¹ Interviewed in February 1993 for Andreas Isenschmid’s ‘Isaiah Berlin: Ein Porträt’, broadcast on 24 September 1993 by Swiss Radio DRS, Studio Zürich, channel DRS2.

¹ Actually Oxford Slavonic Papers.

² Maistre did not in the event appear in the subtitle.

¹ Edmund Wilson, The Fifties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1986), 139.

² Untraced.

¹ See 11 above.

¹ ‘Thoughts on Tolstoy’, New Statesman and Nation, 12 December 1953, 768.

² See Boguslavski, Bogomoff and Bor, Ocherki po izucheniyu prirody zhivotnykh cheloveka (Yogurt Press, Tashkent, 1936). [The spoof Russian title means ‘Essays on the study of the nature of man’s animals’.]

³ [‘Incidentally did you know that in French there is a charming French word ‘life-struggler’? it is a good clear concept, & I am not sure you don’t rather like that.’ IB to Jenifer Hart, 25 February 1936.]

¹ ‘Steaming and perambulating’ in the alternative, but possibly corrupt, text.

² Not to be confused with bears.

³ Discovered in the recesses of the Third Programme by Professor Knout.

¹ Or ‘wring’?

¹Punch, 24 February 1954, 264.

¹ The filmmaker Mike Todd of Todd-AO, ‘The Talk of the Town’, New Yorker, 15 January 1955, 20. A card to IB from Fred(erick) Rau dated 23 January 1955 comments: ‘You should be more careful who you talk to & avoid Mr Todd in future.’

² He died in 2011: see also 15/3.

¹ Sergey Konovalov (1899–1982), Professor of Russian, Oxford, 1945–67.

¹ ‘Berlin in Autumn’, in Michael Ignatieff and others, Berlin in Autumn: The Philosopher in Old Age (Occasional Papers of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 16) ([Berkeley, 2000: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities]), 15. Cf. George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge, 2004), 148.

² Louis MacNeice, ‘Snow’, end of second stanza, which begins: ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural.’

¹ ‘Thoughts of Taj Mahal will leave you as drunk as a fox’, review of Mark Lilla, Ronald Dworkin and Robert B. Silvers (eds), The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York, 2001: New York Review Books), Times Higher Education Supplement, 30 November 2001, 24–5. The quotation from Lukes is on p. 21 of that book, and that from Berlin on pp. 2–3 of this one.

² See x/2 above.

³ ‘A Philosophy for Our Time’, AllLearn (Alliance for Lifelong Learning) online course on IB, 2005.

¹ ‘Isaiah As I Knew Him’, in Henry Hardy (ed.), The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin (Woodbridge, 2009), 53.

¹ Foreword to Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism, ed. Henry Hardy (Washington, 2004), xiii.

² 25 September 1980, 67–8 (Bowman, Lieberson and Morgenbesser); 9 October 1980, 44 (Berlin).

³ Jonathan Lieberson and Sidney Morgenbesser, ‘The Choices of Isaiah Berlin’ (the second part of a two-part review of Against the Current), New York Review of Books, 20 March 1980, 31–6, at 36.