Surveys the complex landscape of Hesiodic reception in lyric poetry and drama in the fifth century BCE.

"The Theogony is one of the most important mythical texts to survive from antiquity, and we devote the first section to it. It tells of the creation of the present world order under the rule of almighty Zeus. The Works and Days, in the second section, describes a bitter dispute between Hesiod and his brother over the disposition of their father's property, a theme that allows Hesiod to range widely over issues of right and wrong. The Shield of Herakles, whose centerpiece is a long description of a work of art, is not by Hesiod, at least most of it, but it was always attributed to him in antiquity. It is Hesiodic in style and has always formed part of the Hesiodic corpus. It makes up the third section of this book"--Provided by publisher.

This book fills a void in classical scholarship with its treatment of the interplay between farming and poetry in Hesiod's poem and in later Greek poetry. Its accessibility to those unfamiliar with ancient Greek is heightened by the translations of Greek words and phrases, along with an introduction aimed at the non-specialist, yet the book deals masterfully with semantics and parallels within Greek poetics in order to reveal the interconnectedness of Hesiod's Almanac and moral themes. Farming and Poetry in Hesiod's Works and Days will be of interest to classical scholars and the general reader interested in Greek poetics.

Friedrich Solmsen provides a new approach to Hesiod's personality in this book by distinguishing Hesiod's own contributions to Greek mythology and theology from the traditional aspects of his poetry. Hesiod's vision of a better world, expressed in religious language and imagery, pictures the savagery and brutality of the earlier days of Greece giving way to an order of justice. In this new order, however, the good aspects of the past would be preserved, giving an inner continuity and strength to the changing world. Solmsen traces the influence of Hesiod’s ideas on other Athenian poets, Aeschylus in particular. From personal political experience Aeschylus could give a deeper meaning to Hesiod's dream of an organic historical evolution and of a synthesis of old and new powers. For Aeschylus, justice became the crucial problem of the political community as well as of the divine order. Through close readings of Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days and of Aeschylus' Prometheia and Eumenides, Solmsen reinterprets the political ideas of the Greek city state and the relation between divine and human justice as seen by early Greek poets. First published in 1949, this book has long been recognized as the standard work on Hesiod's influence. For the 1995 paperback edition, G. M. Kirkwood has written a new foreword that addresses the book's reception and discusses more recent scholarship on the works Solmsen examines, including the disputed authorship of Prometheia.

"Robert Lamberton's Introduction is an excellent, concise exposition of current scholarly debate: his notes are informative and helpful. . . . Those who want a translation that captures something of the spirit of an ancient Greek poetic voice and its cultural milieu and transmits it in an appealing, lively, and accessible style will now turn to Lombardo." --M. A. Katz, Wesleyan University, in CHOICE

In the last decades the field of research on ancient Greek scholarship has been the object of a remarkable surge of interest, with the publication of handbooks, reference works, and new editions of texts. This partly unexpected revival is very promising and it continues to enhance and modify both our knowledge of ancient scholarship and the way in which we are accustomed to discuss these texts and tackle the editorial and exegetical challenges they pose. This volume deals with some pivotal aspects of this topic, being the outcome of a three-year project funded by the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research (MIUR) on specific aspects of the critical re-appraisal of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Aeschylus in Greek culture throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. It tackles issues such as the material form of the transmission of the exegesis from papyri to codices, the examination of hitherto unexplored branches of the manuscript evidence, the discussion of some important scholia, and the role played by the indirect tradition and the assimilation of the exegetical heritage in grammatical and lexicographical works. Some strands of the ancient and medieval scholarship are here re-evaluated afresh by adopting an interdisciplinary methodology which blends modern editorial techniques developed for ‘problematic’ or ‘non-authorial’ medieval texts with current trends in the history of philology and literary criticism. In their diversity of subject matter and approach the papers collected in the volume give intended readers an excellent overview of the topics of the project.

Hesiod: The Other Poet is a study dealing with the role of Hesiod in the imagination and the collective memory of the ancient Greeks. Its main hypothesis is that Hesiod's image was to a large degree formed by the picture of Homer: Hesiod is decidedly different when presented as allied with, opposed to or simply without Homer. Following this approach, Hesiod is investigated as a moral and philosophical authority, a locus informed with values and qualities, a concept in literary-critical discourse, and more generally as a cultural and panhellenic icon constructed and reconstructed by later Greek authors who employed and so re-created him in their own texts.

Hesiod describes himself as a Boeotian shepherd who heard the Muses call upon him to sing about the gods. His exact dates are unknown, but he has often been considered a younger contemporary of Homer. This volume of the new Loeb Classical Library edition offers a general introduction, a fluid translation facing an improved Greek text of Hesiod's two extant poems, and a generous selection of testimonia from a wide variety of ancient sources regarding Hesiod's life, works, and reception. In Theogony Hesiod charts the history of the divine world, narrating the origin of the universe and the rise of the gods, from first beginnings to the triumph of Zeus, and reporting on the progeny of Zeus and of goddesses in union with mortal men. In Works and Days Hesiod shifts his attention to the world of men, delivering moral precepts and practical advice regarding agriculture, navigation, and many other matters; along the way he gives us the myths of Pandora and of the Golden, Silver, and other Races of Men.

This new, fully-annotated translation by a leading expert on Hesiodic poems combines accuracy with readability and includes an introduction and explanatory notes on these two works by one of the oldest known Greek poets. The Theogony contains a systematic genealogy and account of the struggles of the gods, and the Works and Days offers a compendium of moral and practical advice for a life of honest husbandry.

Hesiod is the first Greek and, therefore, the first European we can know as a real person, for, unlike Homer, he tells us about himself in his poems. Hesiod seems to have been a successful farmer and a rather gloomy though not humorless man. One suspects from his concern for the bachelor's lot and some rather unflattering remarks about women that he was never married. A close study of both poems reveals the same personality -that of a deeply religious man concerned with the problems of justice and fate.