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This volume offers analysis of the narratological structure of the Theogony with the purpose of elucidating a major, unifying theme in this poem: the relationship between the divine and mortal realms. The techniques of narratology are herein employed to support the argument that Hesiod portrays the cosmos as sharply divided between gods and men. The Theogony should therefore be read as a didactic poem explaining primarily the position of man vis-à-vis the gods. The first half of this book discusses relevant scholarship and introduces the theme of relationship of gods to men in the Theogony. The second half of the book discusses how Hesiod employs Character-Text, Attributive Discourse, Embedded Focalization, Anachrony, and Commentary to achieve his didactic purposes.
"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
Widely considered the first poet in the Western tradition to address the matter of his own experience, Hesiod occupies a seminal position in literary history. His Theogony brings together and formalizes many of the narratives of Greek myth, detailing the genealogy of its gods and their violent struggles for power. The Works and Days seems on its face to be a compendium of advice about managing a farm, but it ranges far beyond this scope to meditate on morality, justice, the virtues of a good life, and the place of humans in the universe. These poems are concerned with orderliness and organization, and they proclaim those ideals from small-scale to vast, from a handful of seeds to the story of the cosmos. Presented here in a bilingual edition, Johnson’s translation takes care to preserve the structure of Hesiod’s lines and sentences, achieving a sonic and rhythmic balance that enables us to hear his music across the millennia.
"Theogony" is a historical narration covering a long era which starts with the appearance of the first men in the mountains, and ends with the post-Zeus epoch. "Theogony" was a very important work for the ancient Hellenes because it served them as the touchstone which would enable them to check which of the various beliefs about gods were reliable. It constituted the Religious Canon for Hellenes and it was exactly what Moses' Bible was for Jews. It had a great influence over the Hellenic religion because Hellenes sought for unanimity on religious matters. The great pre-cataclysm lost civilization is unfolded slowly before the reader's eyes through the innumerable references to persons, situations, events, scientific and empirical knowledge as well as historic elements.
Hesiod's straightforward account of family conflict among the gods is the best and earliest evidence of what the ancient Greeks believed about the beginning of the world.
This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In classics, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is just one of many articles from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Classics, a continuously updated and growing online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through the scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of classics. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.
This volume brings together 29 junior and senior scholars to discuss aspects of Hesiod's poetry and its milieu and to explore questions of reception over two and half millennia from shortly after the poems' conception to Twitter hashtags. Rather than an exhaustive study of Hesiodic themes, the Handbook is conceived as a guide through terrain, some familiar, other less charted, examining both Hesiodic craft and later engagements with Hesiod's stories of the gods and moralizing proscriptions of just human behavior. The volume opens with the "Hesiodic Question," to address questions of authorship, historicity, and the nature of composition of Hesiod's two major poems, the Theogony and Works and Days. Subsequent chapters on the archaeology and economic history of archaic Boiotia, Indo-European poetics, and Hesiodic style offer a critical picture of the sorts of questions that have been asked rather than an attempt to resolve debate. Other chapters discuss Hesiod's particular rendering of the supernatural and the performative nature of the Works and Days, as well as competing diachronic and synchronic temporalities and varying portrayals of female in the two poems. The rich story of reception ranges from Solon to comic books. These chapters continue to explore the nature of Hesiod's poetics, as different writers through time single out new aspects of his art less evident to earlier readers. Long before the advent of Christianity, classical writers leveled their criticism at Hesiod's version of polytheism. The relative importance of Hesiod's two major poems across time also tells us a tale of the age receiving the poems. In the past two centuries, artists and writers have come to embrace the Hesiodic stories for themselves for the insight they offer of the human condition but even as old allegory looks quaint to modern eyes new forms of allegory take form.
Hesiod's Theogony is a large-scale synthesis of a vast variety of local Greek traditions concerning the gods, organized as a narrative that tells how they came to be and how they established permanent control over the Cosmos. It is the first Greek mythical cosmogony. The initial state of the universe is chaos, a dark indefinite void considered a divine primordial condition from which everything else appeared. Theogonies are a part of Greek mythology which embodies the desire to articulate reality as a whole; this universalizing impulse was fundamental for the first later projects of speculative theorizing.In many cultures, narratives about the origin of the Cosmos and about the gods that shaped it are a way for society to reaffirm its native cultural traditions. Specifically, theogonies tend to affirm kingship as the natural embodiment of society. What makes the Theogony of Hesiod unique is that it affirms no historical royal line. Such a gesture would have sited the Theogony in one time and place. Rather, the Theogony affirms the kingship of the god Zeus over all the other gods and over the whole Cosmos.Further, in the "Kings and Singers" passage (80-103) Hesiod appropriates to himself the authority usually reserved to sacred kingship. The poet declares that it is he, where we might have expected some king instead, upon whom the Muses have bestowed the two gifts of a scepter and an authoritative voice (Hesiod, Theogony 30-3), which are the visible signs of kingship. It is not that this gesture is meant to make Hesiod a king. Rather, the point is that the authority of kingship now belongs to the poetic voice, the voice that is declaiming the Theogony.