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Hesiod and his world*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Paul Millett
Paul Millett
Affiliation:
Downing College, Cambridge
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Extract

Recent interest in Hesiod has tended to concentrate on three broad aspects of his poems: their language, structure and myth. By contrast, their value as historical documents has been persistently underrated. This is a striking omission, as by general consent we have in the Works & Days a written source, giving detailed information about life in the early archaic period, for which virtually no other documentary evidence exists. Yet by comparison with the repeated and painstaking investigation of Homer as history, or even the poetry of Solon, Hesiod has been largely ignored.

Although it would be unrealistic to pretend that historians have never shown any interest in the Works & Days (see section VI), the use they have made of the poem has generally been either perfunctory and descriptive, or selective and focussing on isolated points. Typical of the former category is the treatment of Hesiod in the textbook on geometric Greece by Coldstream (1977). In his introduction, Coldstream warns the reader that the evidence for the ninth and eighth centuries is predominantly archaeological, but he does add a qualification (18): ‘On the other hand, Hesiod's Works & Days offers an authentic picture of a farmer's life in Boeotia at the close of the eighth century’, and in a later chapter (313): ‘The hard life of a geometric farmer is vividly described by the poet Hesiod.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 30 , 1984 , pp. 84 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1984

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Footnotes

*

What follows is an extended version of a paper read to the Cambridge Philological Society on 26 April 1984. I am grateful to the members present for its kindly if not uncritical reception, and in particular to Prof. M. I. Finley for his subsequent comments. I am also indebted to the editors of the Proceedings for allowing me the space to develop my views. All passages in Greek are translated in the hope that this will make the study more easily accessible to non-specialists. For the same reason, detailed argumentation is relegated to the footnotes. By gathering all references to secondary literature in a separate section following the footnotes, I have tried to provide a select bibliography of recent work on Hesiod.

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