The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod (Oxford Handbooks)

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. Cover The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors 1. Introduction Part I Hesiod in Context 2. The Hesiodic Question 3. Seventh-​Century Material Culture in Boiotia 4. In Hesiod’s World 5. The Prehistory and Analogues of Hesiod’s Poetry Part II Hesiod’s Art 6. Hesiodic Poetics 7. Hesiod’s Theogony and the Structures of Poetry 8. Hesiod’s Temporalities 9. Hesiodic Theology 10. Hesiod in Performance 11. Hesiod’s Rhetoric of Exhortation 12. Gender in Hesiod: A Poetics of the Powerless Part III Hesiod in the Greco-​Roman Period 13. Solon’s Reception of Hesiod’s Works and Days 14. The Reception of Hesiod by the Early Pre-​Socratics 15. Deviant Origins: Hesiod’s Theogony and the Orphica 16. Hesiod and the Visual Arts 17. Hesiod and Pindar 18. Hesiod and Tragedy 19. Hesiod and Comedy 20. Plato’s Hesiods 21. Hellenistic Hesiod 22. Hesiod from Aristotle to Posidonius 23. Hesiod, Virgil, and the Georgic Tradition 24. Ovid’s Hesiodic Voices 25. Hesiod Transformed, Parodied, and Assaulted: Hesiod in the Second Sophistic and Early Christian Thought Part IV Hesiod from Byzantium to Modern Times 26. Hesiod in the Byzantine and Early Renaissance Periods 27. Hesiod and Christian Humanism, 1471–​1667 28. Hesiod in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 29. Theorizing with Hesiod: Freudian Constructs and Structuralism 30. The Reception of Hesiod in the Twentieth and Twenty-​first Centuries Index Index Locorum Antiquorum 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 and __and Days____Works and Days__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.