Hesiod's Cosmos

Reads Hesiod's poems as complementary halves of a whole embracing the divine and human cosmos.

Jenny Strauss Clay (Author)

9780521117685, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 July 2009

216 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.32 kg

Review of the hardback: '… this book constitutes an estimable and valuable contribution to scholarly debate on Hesiod, which leads me to strongly recommend it. It is informative, accurate, challenging and, so to speak, a 'fertilizer' both for new reflections on the several topics discussed and for promoting increased interest in trying to better understand a poet traditionally neglected and obscured by comparison with Homer. And both these results are, in my opinion, the most precious values an essay can have.' Rosanna Lauriola, University of Texas, San Antonio

Hesiod's Cosmos offers a comprehensive interpretation of both the Theogony and the Works and Days and demonstrates how the two Hesiodic poems must be read together as two halves of an integrated whole embracing both the divine and the human cosmos. After first offering a survey of the structure of both poems, Professor Clay reveals their mutually illuminating unity by offering detailed analyses of their respective poems, their teachings on the origins of the human race and the two versions of the Prometheus myth. She then examines the role of human beings in the Theogony and the role of the gods in the Works and Days, as well as the position of the hybrid figures of monsters and heroes within the Hesiodic cosmos and in relation to the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women.

Introduction
1. Orientations: the Theogony
2. Orientations: the Works and Days
3. Overtures
4. The origins of mankind
5. The two Prometheuses
6. Perspectives on gods and men
7. Hybrids
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]