- 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
This chapter introduces some key moments from Hesiod’s reception during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and offers a starting point for future scholarship in this new field of research. It explores examples of Hesiod’s reception by French, English, and German figures, including Voltaire, John Flaxman, and Friedrich Nietzsche, to demonstrate the European scope of the ancient author’s appeal while also drawing attention to some of the recurring concerns that animated turns to Hesiod during this period. Hesiod offers an alternative vision of Greece to the one that had gained currency during the Enlightenment; his focus on ancient Greek religious belief and rural life provided an important counterpoint to narratives of Greece as the birthplace of modern European civilization, while his poetry offered readers a personal connection with a distant cultural and historical context.
Keywords: Hesiod, classical reception, Enlightenment, Romanticism, Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy, literature
Adam Lecznar teaches modules in Greek language and literature at University College London and Royal Holloway and works on the reception of ancient Greek literature and philosophy in the modern period. His research focuses primarily on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and his influence on later visions of the classical world. He has published on classical themes in the work of Nietzsche and Joyce and recently completed work on his first monograph project, Dionysus after Nietzsche: Five Studies in Tragedy, Philosophy and Modernity, for Cambridge University Press.
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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