- The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- The Hesiodic Question
- Seventh-Century Material Culture in Boiotia
- In Hesiod’s World
- The Prehistory and Analogues of Hesiod’s Poetry
- Hesiodic Poetics
- Hesiod’s <i>Theogony</i> and the Structures of Poetry
- Hesiod’s Temporalities
- Hesiodic Theology
- Hesiod in Performance
- Hesiod’s Rhetoric of Exhortation
- Gender in Hesiod: A Poetics of the Powerless
- Solon’s Reception of Hesiod’s <i>Works and Days</i>
- The Reception of Hesiod by the Early Pre-Socratics
- Deviant Origins: Hesiod’s <i>Theogony</i> and the Orphica
- Hesiod and the Visual Arts
- Hesiod and Pindar
- Hesiod and Tragedy
- Hesiod and Comedy
- Plato’s Hesiods
- Hellenistic Hesiod
- Hesiod from Aristotle to Posidonius
- Hesiod, Virgil, and the Georgic Tradition
- Ovid’s Hesiodic Voices
- Hesiod Transformed, Parodied, and Assaulted: Hesiod in the Second Sophistic and Early Christian Thought
- Hesiod in the Byzantine and Early Renaissance Periods
- Hesiod and Christian Humanism, 1471–1667
- Hesiod in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- Theorizing with Hesiod: Freudian Constructs and Structuralism
- The Reception of Hesiod in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
- Index
- Index Locorum Antiquorum
Abstract and Keywords
The Theogony displays a preoccupation with poetic structure that reflects the cosmic and political structures that are its subject. Consequently the structures that support the poem change with the changing world it describes. In the earlier part of the poem the dominant poetic structure is the catalogue, and Hesiod goes far in showing what he can express with this form alone, particularly through juxtaposition, anachrony, allegory, and paradigmatic patterning. Narrative appears first as free elaboration on the genealogical framework but becomes a dominant poetic form in parallel with the emerging tale of Zeus’s rise to power. These observations buttress existing views on the meaning of the poem’s overall arrangement, and can also shed light on debates about its exact end-point.
Keywords: catalogue poetry, allegory, paradigmatic patterning, anachrony, genealogy
Benjamin Sammons has published numerous articles on early Greek literature, as well as two books, The Art and Rhetoric of the Homeric Catalogue (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Device and Composition in the Greek Epic Cycle (Oxford University Press, 2017). He has taught at Penn State University, New York University, and Queens College in the City University of New York.
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- The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- The Hesiodic Question
- Seventh-Century Material Culture in Boiotia
- In Hesiod’s World
- The Prehistory and Analogues of Hesiod’s Poetry
- Hesiodic Poetics
- Hesiod’s <i>Theogony</i> and the Structures of Poetry
- Hesiod’s Temporalities
- Hesiodic Theology
- Hesiod in Performance
- Hesiod’s Rhetoric of Exhortation
- Gender in Hesiod: A Poetics of the Powerless
- Solon’s Reception of Hesiod’s <i>Works and Days</i>
- The Reception of Hesiod by the Early Pre-Socratics
- Deviant Origins: Hesiod’s <i>Theogony</i> and the Orphica
- Hesiod and the Visual Arts
- Hesiod and Pindar
- Hesiod and Tragedy
- Hesiod and Comedy
- Plato’s Hesiods
- Hellenistic Hesiod
- Hesiod from Aristotle to Posidonius
- Hesiod, Virgil, and the Georgic Tradition
- Ovid’s Hesiodic Voices
- Hesiod Transformed, Parodied, and Assaulted: Hesiod in the Second Sophistic and Early Christian Thought
- Hesiod in the Byzantine and Early Renaissance Periods
- Hesiod and Christian Humanism, 1471–1667
- Hesiod in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- Theorizing with Hesiod: Freudian Constructs and Structuralism
- The Reception of Hesiod in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
- Index
- Index Locorum Antiquorum
