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Posted: Monday May 28, 2012

Hesiod

Hesiod, one of the earliest Greek poets, is generally thought by scholars to have been active in the eighth century BCE, at about the same time as Homer. Hesiod’s two complete extant works are Works and Days, which instructs on farming techniques and early economic theory, and Theogony, on the origin of the world and the genealogies of the gods. As author of some of the first autobiographical poems, Hesiod wrote in Works and Days that he lived in the village of Ascra in Boeotia in central Greece and that he won a tripod in a bardic competition at the funeral games of King Amphidamas.

LATEST Hesiod NEWS

March 2013 : Hesiod at the Hellenic Community Centre

August 2012 : Glossed in Translation

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QUOTES OF NOTE

Theogony / Works and Days

“C.S. Morrissey places a very modern sensibility under the light of these precious verses, and his translations remind us at every point that Hesiod’s gods are still with us, not as subjects to be worshipped and appeased through sacrifice, but as enduring motives that govern and disrupt our lives.”
– Roger Scruton, from the foreword

“Morrissey has brought fire and light to Hesiod’s work, and offered it to us with clarity and good humour, in the darkening air of our time.”
– vallum

“We may look back to Hesiod’s poetry as representative of a cultural Golden Age when it was possible for a single work of literature to encompass the whole of traditional ‘wisdom’: high and low, ancient and modern, philosophical and poetic, practical and metaphysical.”
– New Republic

Theogony / Works and Days
Hesiod
Translated by C.S. Morrissey
Introduction by Roger Scruton
Poetry

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