The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod

Edited by Alexander Loney and Stephen Scully

Oxford Handbooks

The most extensive handbook to Hesiod in any language.
This is the first volume to offer an extensive study of the reception of these poems from shortly after their conception to modern times.
Multiple chapters dedicated to his art and two major poems, Theogony and the Works and Days.

The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod

Edited by Alexander Loney and Stephen Scully

Description

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.

The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod

Edited by Alexander Loney and Stephen Scully

Oxford Handbooks

Notes on Contributors

1 Introduction
Stephen Scully and Alexander C. Loney

PART I: Hesiod in Context
2 The Hesiodic Question
Hugo H. Koning

3 Seventh Century Material Culture in Boiotia
Stephanie Larson

4 In Hesiod's World
David W. Tandy

5 The Pre-history and Analogs of Hesiod's Poetry
Joshua T. Katz

PART II: Hesiod's Art
6 Hesiodic Poetics
Stephen Scully

7 Hesiod's Theogony and the Structures of Poetry
Benjamin Sammons

8 Hesiod's Temporalities
Alexander C. Loney

9 Hesiodic Theology
Richard P. Martin

10 Hesiod in Performance
Egbert J. Bakker

11 Hesiod's Rhetoric of Exhortation
José M. González

12 Gender in Hesiod: A Poetics of the Powerless
Suzanne Lye

PART III: Hesiod in the Greco-Roman Period
13 Solon's Reception of Hesiod's Works and Days
J. A. Almeida

14 The Reception of Hesiod by the Early Presocratics
Mitchell Miller

15 Deviant Origins: Hesiod's Theogony and the Orphica
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III

16 Hesiod and the Visual Arts
H. A. Shapiro

17 Hesiod and Pindar
Tom Phillips

18 Hesiod and Tragedy
Alan H. Sommerstein

19 Hesiod and Comedy
Jeffrey Henderson

20 Plato's Hesiod
Marcus Folch

21 Hellenistic Hesiod
Lilah Grace Canevaro

22 Hesiod from Aristotle to Posidonius
David Conan Wolfsdorf

23 Hesiod, Virgil, and the Georgic Tradition
Stephanie Nelson

24 Ovid's Hesiodic Voices
Ioannis Ziogas

25 Hesiod Transformed, Parodied and Assaulted: Hesiod in the Second Sophistic and Early Christian Thought
Helen Van Noorden

PART IV: Hesiod from Byzantinum to Modern Times
26 Hesiod in the Byzantine and Early Renaissance Periods
Niccolò Zorzi

27 Hesiod and Christian Humanism, 1471-1667
Jessica Wolfe

28 Hesiod in the 18th and 19th Centuries
Adam Lecznar

29 Theorizing with Hesiod: Freudian Constructs and Structuralism
Stephen Scully and Charles Stocking

30 The Reception of Hesiod in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Thomas E. Jenkins

Index Locorum
General Index

The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod

Edited by Alexander Loney and Stephen Scully

Oxford Handbooks

Author Information

Alexander C. Loney is Assistant Professor of Classical Languages at Wheaton College. Previously, he was an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow at Yale University. He has written on Homer, Hesiod, and Greek lyric poetry, with a monograph on retributive justice in the Odyssey forthcoming with Oxford.

Stephen Scully is Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University. He has written on Homer, Hesiod, Greek tragedy, Plato, Freud's antiquities, and receptions studies of Homer, Hesiod, and Vergil. Translations include Plato's Phaedrus (2003) and, with Rosanna Warren, Euripides' Suppliant Women (1995).

Contributors:

Notes on the Contributors

Joseph A. Almeida
Egbert Bakker
Lilah Grace Canevaro
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
Marcus Folch
José M. González
Jeffrey Henderson
Thomas E. Jenkins
Joshua T. Katz
Hugo H. Koning
Stephanie Larson
Adam Lecznar
Alexander C. Loney
Suzanne Lye
Richard P. Martin
Mitchell Miller
Stephanie Nelson
Tom Phillips
Benjamin Sammons
Stephen Scully
H. A. Shapiro
Alan Sommerstein
Charles Stocking
David W. Tandy
Helen Van Noorden
Jessica Wolfe
David Conan Wolfsdorf
Ioannis Ziogas
Niccolò Zorzi

The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod

Edited by Alexander Loney and Stephen Scully

Oxford Handbooks

Reviews and Awards

"The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod is a fantastic volume, with chapters all written by accomplished international scholars; a volume that bespeaks the wide range of Hesiodic scholarship and reception from antiquity to today. Consequently, it is an indispensable work of reference relevant to anyone who is interested in Hesiod. Besides, it should also be part of every Homerist's library." -- Silvio Bär, University of Oslo , Classical Journal-Online

"This is a landmark publication, unprecedented in scope and ambition: the editors and contributors are to be congratulated for achieving such comprehensive coverage of the Theogony and Works and Days throughout the ages and across a wide range of genres." -- Gary Vos, Classics for All

"...an exemplarary achievement, comprehensive and diverse, erudite enough to satisfy scholars yet readable enough to be accessibleo ambitious nonspecialists--a companion that will find use mong not only classicists but also those whose interests include comparative literature and poetry." -- F.A. Grabowski, CHOICE

"As one might expect from Oxford, the contributors are some of the finest scholars in the field. Apart from the essays themselves, the text includes a fine introduction by the editors, a standard index of names and subjects, and a robust 'Index Locorum Anitiquorum.' The result is an exemplary achievement, comprehensive and diverse, erudite enough to satisfy scholars yet readable enough to be accessible to ambitious nonspecialists-a companion that will find use among not only classicists but also those whose interests include comparative literature and poetry. Essential." -- CHOICE