Hesiod, um 700 vor Christus im armlichen Bootien lebend, ist nur wenig junger als Homer. Obwohl er von der hexametrischen Epik der "Ilias" und der "Odyssee" stark beeinflusst ist, bietet er in seinen beiden Werken "Vom Ursprung der Gotter" und "Werke und Tage" etwas vollig Neues: Zum ersten Mal in der europaischen Literaturgeschichte tritt uns ein Autor als Person entgegen. Er selbst erzahlt, wie die Musen ihm beim Schafehuten erschienen und den jungen Menschen zum Dichter beriefen.Ausserdem wird Hesiod zum Vater (...) einer eigenen literarischen Gattung: des Lehrgedichts. Er bringt die gottlichen Machte in verwandtschaftliche Beziehungen; so entsteht eine Deutung des Weltganzen, die bereits auf die philosophischen Entwurfe der vorsokratischen Denker vorausweist. Indem er die Erzahlungen uber die Gotter zusammenfasst und ordnet, wird Hesiod zur wichtigsten Quelle des griechischen Mythos. In den "Werken und Tagen," einer Art Bauernkalender, in den Bruchstucke einer ersten Autobiographie und einige beruhmte Sagen eingestreut sind, wirkt Hesiod mit seiner pessimistischen Beurteilung des eigenen Zeitalters erstaunlich aktuell. Mit Einfuhrung, Erlauterungen und Literaturhinweisen von E.G. Schmidt.". (shrink)

In the proem of the “Theogony” Hesiod describes the conception and birth of the Muses. At ll. 58-60 he specifies that Mnemosyne’s pregnancy lasted one entire year, ένιαντός. This unusual one-year pregnancy puzzles Hesiod’s commentators; West, for example, translates ένιαντός as ‘due time’ rather than ‘year’. The purpose of this article is to argue that Hesiod intended ένιαντός to mean ‘year’.

Catalogues and ringcompositions are common motifs in early Greek epic poetry. In certain cases catalogues are enclosed by ringcompositions or ring-like structures. While the catalogues in “Iliad” and “Odyssey” have been well examined, the different catalogues found in Hesiod’s poems have received less attention. This article provides an analysis of the use of ringcompositions in several catalogues in the “Theogony”. It shows that structure and function of ringcomposition depend on the character of the catalogue: the less digressive and extensive (...) the catalogue, the more complex and elaborate the circle. It is further argued that this interdependence between catalogues and ringcompositions is related to the performance of oral poetry. (shrink)

Les vers 11-21 de la Théogonie d’Hésiode soulèvent de nombreux problèmes d’interprétation. Le catalogue qu’ils proposent prend cependant un sens très cohérent si on le rapproche des deux autres catalogues du prélude de ce poème. Loin d’annoncer un contenu et de servir de sommaire, il énonce l’ordre établi par Zeus, dont le poète se propose ensuite de chanter la toute-puissance en racontant la geste qui l’a conduit à régner sur le monde.Hesiod’s Theogony . From Catalogue to Genealogy. Verses 11-21 (...) in Hesiod’s Theogony are very problematic. However their meaning appears clear if connected with the two other catalogues contained in the prelude to this poem. They are not a summary, but rather the glorification of the cosmic order established by Zeus, whose power the poet sings afterwards, telling how this god definitively conquered the kingdom to rule the world. (shrink)

Stephen Scully both offers a reading of Hesiod's Theogony and traces the reception and shadows of this authoritative Greek creation story in Greek and Roman texts up to Milton's own creation myth, which sought to "soar above th' Aonian Mount [i.e., the Theogony]...and justify the ways of God to men." Scully also considers the poem in light of Near Eastern creation stories, including the Enûma elish and Genesis, as well as the most striking of modern "scientific myths," Freud's (...) Civilization and its Discontents. Scully reads Hesiod's poem as a hymn to Zeus and a city-state creation myth, arguing that Olympus is portrayed as an idealized polity and--with but one exception--a place of communal harmony. This reading informs his study of the Theogony's reception in later writings about polity, discord, and justice. The rich and various story of reception pays particular attention to the long Homeric Hymns, Solon, the Presocratics, Pindar, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Plato in the Archaic and Classical periods; to the Alexandrian scholars, Callimachus, Euhemerus, and the Stoics in the Hellenistic period; to Ovid, Apollodorus, Lucian, a few Church fathers, and the Neoplatonists in the Roman period. Tracing the poem's reception in the Byzantine, medieval, and early Renaissance, including Petrarch and Erasmus, the book ends with a lengthy exploration of Milton's imitations of the poem in Paradise Lost. Scully also compares what he considers Hesiod's artful interplay of narrative, genealogical lists, and keen use of personified abstractions in the Theogony to Homeric narrative techniques and treatment of epic verse. (shrink)

Hesiod is among the most difficult Greek poets for problems of text. This is especially true in the case of the Theogony. Today we consider an over-scrupulous analysis of the logical consistency of a text a characteristic of nineteenth-century pedantry. Yet such latitude is not always allowed the Theogony. It was only twenty-five years ago that there appeared the most ruthless survey of its contents. This was Jacoby's edition of 1930, when only a mutilated remnant of the surviving (...) text was left the original poet; the rest was added by a whole series of subsequent rhapsodes. Hesiod received very much the same treatment four years later from Schwenn. Recently, however, two developments have gone a long way towards the defence of passages excluded by scholars from what they think the authentic text of Hesiod's Theogony. Many single lines or groups of verses have been bracketed by the editors of Hesiod, since they reproduce some other part of the poem in a similar or even identical form. The researches of the Dutch scholar Otterlo have now revealed that the fault is rather that of these editors. When they stigmatize the passages with the description of aimless repetition, they fail to appreciate what Otterlo claims as an inherent principle of oral recitation, or literature derived from an oral prototype. Otterlo's term for what would be an essential feature of this literature is ring-composition. A rhapsode provides a loose unity for his poem by repeating at the conclusion to the sections of the poem the verses which also introduced them. These repetitive verses announce the beginning and then the end of each section. We are wrong if we think that they have only been transferred from their original place in the poem to some later passage because there has been a lack of proper care in the process of transmission. Certainly this repetition is no adequate reason for us to suppose their occurence a second time in our text spurious. (shrink)

The essay considers synthetically the passages of Hesiod’s Theogony concerning Khaos, Gaia, Uranòs, and Tàrtaros as describing the cosmic structure at its very beginning and at its present state. The final result of the cosmogenetic process consists of three solid parallel disks of equal size separated from one another by the space of Khaos/Aèr. The whole structure is conceived of as an ideal cylinder, whose superior base is Uranòs, the inferior one is Tàrtaros and the median section is Gaia, (...) dividing the whole cylinder into two high semicylinders full of Khaos/Aèr. From this Khaos/Aèr, the primal Four Elements derive, as plants do from their roots, from which all other substances of the universe originate in turn. Thus, Khaos is arkhè not only in the chronological-historical sense, but also in the sense of an eternal generative substance of all things. We may conclude that the Hesiodic word khaos is a lexical ancestor of the later physical and philosophical term hyle because it conveys the primeval notion of ‘matter’. (shrink)

A close reading of Theogony 116-133, showing the logic of opposites and of whole/part relations that governs Hesiod's account of cosmogenesis, refuting the traditional interpretation of the birth of Chaos as the split between heaven and earth, and providing evidence that Hesiod considered and decided against making Tartaros the parent of the cosmos.