Hesiod's Cosmos

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Hesiod's Cosmos by Jenny Strauss Clay

Review
"...an excellent scholarly book abounding in insights and informed by a vast scholarship. Highly recommended." Choice

"Clay's valuable book should become essential reading on Hesiod and archaic Greek poetry." New England Classical Journal

"This is a virtuoso performance by a scholar whose knowledge of Hesiod few can match. It is a book that first-time readers of Hesiod, including students, can profit from, while it challenges recent critical and scholaraly perspectives." Classical World, Robert Lamberton, Washington University in St. Louis

"passionate, well-argued, deeply researched, driven by fresh perspectives which will challenge, provoke and excite" - Stephen Scully, Department of Classical Studies, Boston University

Product Description
This study reveals the unity of Hesiod's vision of the Cosmos by reading both his poems as two complementary halves of a whole embracing the human and divine cosmos. In the Theogony and Works and Days, Hesiod, roughly contemporary with Homer, does not describe the deeds of the heroes. He provides instead the earliest comprehensive account of the genesis of the Greek gods and the nature of human life that became the foundation for later Greek literature and philosophy.

Book Description
In his two poems, the Theogony and the Works and Days, Hesiod, who was roughly contemporary with Homer, does not describe the deeds of the heroes but provides the earliest systematic and comprehensive account of the genesis of the Greek gods and the nature of human life that became the foundation for all later Greek literature and philosophy. Hesiod's Cosmos reveals the unity of his vision by reading the two poems as complementary halves of a whole embracing the divine and human cosmos.

Download Description
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.

About the Author
Jenny Strauss Clay is Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Wrath of Athena (1983; 0691065748) and The Politics of Olympus (1989; 0691067759).