Hesiod's Verbal Craft

Hesiod's Verbal Craft
Author: Athanassios Vergados
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2020-06-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192534777

This novel, ground-breaking study aims to define Hesiod's place in early Greek intellectual history by exploring his conception of language and the ways in which it represents reality. Divided into three parts, it addresses a network of issues related to etymology, word-play, and semantics, and examines how these contribute to the development of the argument and the concepts of knowledge and authority in the Theogony and the Works and Days. Part I demonstrates how much we can learn about the poet's craft and his relation to the poetic tradition if we read his etymologies carefully, while Part II takes the discussion of the 'correctness of language' further - this correctness does not amount to a naïvely assumed one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified. Correct names and correct language are 'true' because they reveal something particular about the concept or entity named, as numerous examples show; more importantly, however, correct language is imitative of reality, in that language becomes more opaque, ambiguous, and indeterminate as we delve deeper into the exploration of the condicio humana and the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize it in the Works and Days. Part III addresses three moments of Hesiodic reception, with individual chapters comparing Hesiod's implicit theory of language and cognition with the more explicit statements found in early mythographers and genealogists, demonstrating the importance of Hesiod's poetry for Plato's etymological project in the Cratylus, and discussing the ways in which some ancient philologists treat Hesiod as one of their own. What emerges is a new and invaluable perspective on a hitherto under-explored chapter in early Greek linguistic thought which ascertains more clearly Hesiod's place in Greek intellectual history as a serious thinker who introduced some of the questions that occupied early Greek philosophy.

The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft

The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft
Author: José Miguel González
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Acting
ISBN: 9780674055896

This book argues that oracular utterance, dramatic acting, and rhetorical delivery powerfully elucidate the practice of epic rhapsodes in Homeric performance. Attention to these domains reveals a shifting dynamic of competition and emulation among rhapsodes, actors, and orators that shaped their texts and their crafts.

The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod

The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod
Author: Alexander Loney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 611
Release: 2018-07-26
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0190905360

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.

Teaching Through Images

Teaching Through Images
Author: Jenny Strauss Clay
Publisher: Mnemosyne, Supplements
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2022
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9789004373488

"In ancient didactic poetry, poets frequently make use of imagery - similes, metaphors, acoustic images, models, exempla, fables, allegory, personifications, and other tropes - as a means to elucidate and convey their didactic message. In this volume, which arose from an international conference held at the University of Heidelberg in 2016, we investigate such phenomena and explore how they make the unseen visible, the unheard audible, and the unknown comprehensible. By exploring didactic poets from Hesiod to pseudo-Oppian and from Vergil and Lucretius to Grattius and Ovid, the authors in this collective volume show how imagery can clarify and illuminate, but also complicate and even undermine or obfuscate the overt didactic message. The presence of a real or implied addressee invites our engagement and ultimately our scrutiny of language and meaning"--

Gods and Mortals in Early Greek and Near Eastern Mythology

Gods and Mortals in Early Greek and Near Eastern Mythology
Author: Adrian Kelly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2021-05-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108570240

This volume centres on one of the most important questions in the study of antiquity – the interaction between Greece and the Ancient Near East, from the Mycenaean to the Hellenistic periods. Focusing on the stories that the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean told about the gods and their relationships with humankind, the individual treatments draw together specialists from both fields, creating for the first time a truly interdisciplinary synthesis. Old cases are re-examined, new examples discussed, and the whole range of scholarly opinions, past and present, are analysed, critiqued, and contextualised. While direct textual comparisons still have something to show us, the methodologies advanced here turn their attention to deeper structures and wider dynamics of interaction and influence that respect the cultural autonomy and integrity of all the ancient participants.

Hesiod's Works and days

Hesiod's Works and days
Author: Hesiod
Publisher: Bryn Mawr Commentaries, Incorporated
Total Pages: 70
Release: 1988
Genre: Didactic poetry, Greek
ISBN:

This new, annotated translation of Hesiod's "Works and Days" is a collaboration between David W. Tandy, a classicist, and Walter Neale, an economist and economic historian. Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet whose "Works and Days" discusses agricultural practices and society in general. Classicists and ancient historians have turned to "Works and Days" for its insights on Greek mythology and religion. The poem also sheds light on economic history and ancient agriculture, and is a good resource for social scientists interested in these areas. This translation emphasizes the activities and problems of a practicing agriculturist as well as the larger, changing political and economic institutions of the early archaic period. The authors provide a clear, accurate translation along with notes aimed at a broad audience. The introductory essay discusses the changing economic, political and trading world of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E., while the notes present the range and possible meanings of important Greek terms and references in the poem and highlight areas of ambiguity in our understanding of "Works and Days."

Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns

Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns
Author: Cora Angier Sowa
Publisher: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1984
Genre: Epic poetry, Greek
ISBN: 0865160376

A thorough analysis of the mechanics of the language of Homer as used in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Hesiodic Voices

Hesiodic Voices
Author: Richard Hunter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2014-03-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107729734

This book selects central texts illustrating the literary reception of Hesiod's Works and Days in antiquity and considers how these moments were crucial in fashioning the idea of 'didactic literature'. A central chapter considers the development of ancient ideas about didactic poetry, relying not so much on explicit critical theory as on how Hesiod was read and used from the earliest period of reception onwards. Other chapters consider Hesiodic reception in the archaic poetry of Alcaeus and Simonides, in the classical prose of Plato, Xenophon and Isocrates, in the Aesopic tradition, and in the imperial prose of Dio Chrysostom and Lucian; there is also a groundbreaking study of Plutarch's extensive commentary on the Works and Days and an account of ancient ideas of Hesiod's linguistic style. This is a major and innovative contribution to the study of Hesiod's remarkable poem and to the Greek literary engagement with the past.

The Artistry of the Homeric Simile

The Artistry of the Homeric Simile
Author: William C. Scott
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2012-01-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611682290

An examination of the aesthetic qualities of the Homeric simile