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Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Cosmology, Ancient Greek Poetry - Literary Criticism, Greco-Roman Folklore & Mythology, Mythology in Literature
Hesiod's Cosmos by Jenny Strauss Clay β€” book cover

Hesiod's Cosmos

by Jenny Strauss Clay
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Overview

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.

Synopsis

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.

About the Author, Jenny Strauss Clay

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).

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Book Details

Published
July 1, 2009
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Pages
216
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780521117685

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