Hesiod's Cosmos by Jenny Strauss Clay

Hesiod's Cosmos by Jenny Strauss Clay

By Jenny Strauss Clay

This learn unearths the solidarity of Hesiod's imaginative and prescient of the Cosmos by way of analyzing either his poems as complementary halves of an entire embracing the human and divine cosmos. within the Theogony and Works and Days, Hesiod, approximately modern with Homer, doesn't describe the deeds of the heroes. He presents in its place the earliest entire account of the genesis of the Greek gods and the character of human lifestyles that grew to become the basis for later Greek literature and philosophy.

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Note the adjectives, “lovely” and “desirable” (8, 65, 67, 70), to describe the Muses and their song, as well as the name Erato (78) of one of them. For an overview, see West (1985). chapter 2 Orientations: the Works and Days The preceding pages have offered a rough sketch of the Theogony’s contents, highlighting those points where Hesiod makes significant organizational choices in the arrangement of his genealogies and in the placement of his digressions, choices that underline certain fundamental conceptions concerning the articulation of the cosmos.

Moreover, although Perses may have undertaken dishonest litigation (which, however, had not succeeded in enriching him), there is no clear evidence that such litigation ever involved Hesiod. At any rate, Perses is now nearly destitute; as we only learn later, he has recently come a-begging to Hesiod, evidently not for the first time (396). But now Hesiod refuses to bail his brother out. It is this refusal, I suggest, rather than property loss, that triggers the dispute between the two brothers and provides the occasion for the poem, lending a tone of immediacy and urgency to the situation.

Alternately addressed to the kings and to Perses, the following sections set out the argument for just behavior and, equally forcefully, exhort against 23 Cf. Rousseau (1993) 70–71. 24 Cf. Millett (1984) 95–96. Orientations: the Works and Days 39 injustice. Hesiod proceeds hysteron proteron to launch his great protreptic toward justice. His discourse is what I would call triangular, directed in turn to the kings and to Perses. Hesiod’s discourse, then, is twofold, as is his strategy, which has aptly been likened to the so-called Prisoner’s Dilemma in modern game theory, which has aptly been summarized as follows: Each of two agents, A and B, who are unable to communicate with each other, has to choose for his part if he is going to (i) obey a moral norm or (ii) act against it in such conditions that if A and B both chose (i) they both would get fairly good results, and if they both chose (ii), they both would get essentially worse results, and if A (or B) chose (ii) while B (or A) chose (i), A (or B) would get the best possible result for himself, while B (or A) would get the worst possible result for himself .

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