Playing Hesiod
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Playing Hesiod
Author: Helen Van Noorden
language: en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date: 2015
This book analyzes important ancient responses to Hesiod's five-part narrative of human history as keys to their broader revisions of 'Hesiod'.
Playing Hesiod
Author: Helen Van Noorden
language: en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date: 2019-01-24
This book offers a new description of the significance of Hesiod's 'myth of the races' for ancient Greek and Roman authors, showing how the most detailed responses to this story go far beyond nostalgia for a lost 'Golden' age or hope of its return. Through a series of close readings, it argues that key authors from Plato to Juvenal rewrite the story to reconstruct 'Hesiod' more broadly as predecessor in forming their own intellectual and rhetorical projects; disciplines such as philosophy, didactic poetry and satire all engage in implicit questions about 'Hesiodic' teaching. The first chapter introduces key issues; the second re-evaluates the account in Hesiod's Works and Days. A major chapter outlines Plato's use of Hesiod through close study of the Protagoras, Republic and Statesman. Subsequent chapters focus on Aratus' Phaenomena and Ovid's Metamorphoses; the final chapter, on the Octavia attributed to Seneca and Juvenal's sixth Satire, broadens ideas of Hesiod's reception in Rome.
Hesiod's Works and Days
Greek poet Hesiod's canonical archaic text, the Works and Days, was performed in its entirety, but was also relentlessly excerpted, quoted, and reapplied. In this volume, Lilah Grace Canevaro situates the poem within these two modes of reading and argues that the text itself, through Hesiod's complex mechanism of rendering elements detachable while tethering them to their context for the purposes of the poem, sustains both treatments. One of the poem's difficulties is that Hesiod gives remarkably little advice on how to negotiate these different modes of reading. Canevaro considers the didactic methods employed by Hesiod from two perspectives: in terms of the gaps he leaves, and of how he challenges his audience to fill them. She argues that Hesiod's reticence is linked to the high value he places on self-sufficiency, which creates a productive tension with the didactic thrust of the poem as teaching always involves a relationship of exchange and, at least up to a point, reliance and trust. Hesiod negotiates this potential contradiction by advocating not blind adherence to his teachings but thinking for oneself and working for one's lesson. Exploring key issues such as gender and genre, and persona and performance, this volume places this important poem within a wider context, revealing how it draws on and contributes to a tradition of usefulness.