The Works of Hesiod (1900s)

S$58.00

The Works of Hesiod (1900s)

S$58.00

Title: Hesiod

Author: Hesiod, C. A. Elton (trans)

Publisher: George Routledge and Sons. Part of Sir John Lubbock’s Hundred Books series. No date, but c. 1890s-1910s

Condition: Hardcover, cloth. No dust jacket. Good. Slight scratches to back cover. Tanned endpapers, foxing to edges and sporadic foxing to a few pages. 192pp.

Contents:

Preface
English translations of Hesiod
Biographical Sketch of Hesiod
Dissertation on the Era, Writings, and Mythology of Hesiod
Lost Works of Hesiod

Works: Mythological and Historical

Works: Georgical

Days: The Calendar

The Theogony

Shield of Hercules

About Hesiod (from Wikipedia):

Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. He is generally regarded as the first written poet in the Western tradition to regard himself as an individual persona with an active role to play in his subject. Ancient authors credited Hesiod and Homer with establishing Greek religious customs. Modern scholars refer to him as a major source on Greek mythology, farming techniques, early economic thought, archaic Greek astronomy and ancient time-keeping.

The Theogony is commonly considered Hesiod’s earliest work.The Theogony concerns the origins of the world (cosmogony) and of the gods (theogony), beginning with Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus and Eros, and shows a special interest in genealogy. Embedded in Greek myth, there remain fragments of quite variant tales, hinting at the rich variety of myth that once existed, city by city; but Hesiod’s retelling of the old stories became, according to Herodotus, the accepted version that linked all Hellenes. It’s the earliest known source for the myths of Pandora, Prometheus and the Golden Age.

The Works and Days is a poem of over 800 lines which revolves around two general truths: labour is the universal lot of Man, but he who is willing to work will get by. Scholars have interpreted this work against a background of agrarian crisis in mainland Greece, which inspired a wave of documented colonisations in search of new land.