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 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

Edited by Alexander Loney, Assistant Professor of Classical Languages, Wheaton College, and Stephen Scully, Professor of Classical Studies, Boston University

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:

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 accessible to 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