Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Shield

268 Pages·2004·1.54 MB·English

by  Hesiod

HESIOD
HESIOD
Theogony,
Works and Days,
Shield
Translation, Introduction, and Notes by Apostolos N.
Athanassakis
SECOND EDITION
The first edition of this book was published with the generous assistance of the
David M. Robinson Publication Fund.
© 1983, 2004 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published
2004
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hesiod.
[Selections. English. 2004]
Theogony ; Works and days ; Shield / Hesiod ; translation, introduction, and
notes by Apostolos N. Athanassakis.—2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8018-7984-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Hesiod—Translations into English. 2.
Religious poetry, Greek—Translations into English. 3. Didactic poetry, Greek—
Translations into English. 4. Heracles (Greek mythology)—Poetry. 5.
Agriculture—Greece—Poetry. 6. Gods, Greek—Poetry.
I. Athanassakis, Apostolos N. II. Title.
PA4010.E5T5 2004
881′.01—dc22
2004002129
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
To Lloyd W. Daly, teacher and friend, with gratitude
Contents
Preface
Introduction
List of Abbreviations
The Theogony
Theogony
Notes
The Works and Days
Works and Days
Notes
The Shield
Shield
Select Bibliography
Index
Preface
The Greek text I have used in translating the Theogony, the Works and Days,
and the Shield is that of Friedrich Solmsen (Oxford, 1970). The translation of the
Theogony and the Works and Days follows the original line by line. Few
exceptions have been made for cases in which this practice would result in
ambiguous or hardly comprehensible English. I have done this probably at great
cost. I know that a freer translation would be more elegant, and even more
dynamic and moving. But these two poems are primary sources for Greek
religion and mythology, and for the history of the development of Greek
thought, and my aim is to provide especially the Greekless student of these
subjects with a dependable translation to which convenient reference may be
made for academic discussion and writing. In the translation of the Shield, I felt
that I could afford the luxury of departing from this practice because the poem is
not frequently studied as a primary source for Greek mythology and religion and
because its structure and tempo made a freer rendition into English imperative.
Let me assure my readers that I consider all three poems beautiful, and I hope
that my departures from the literal meaning of the original do not make my
translations unfaithful. I have tried to let Hesiod speak for himself and not to use
his poetry as a spring-board for fanciful rhapsodizing of my own making.
Classical texts of such importance and pristine dignity are only distorted and
tarnished when they are made relevant to each passing fad.
The first man to whom I wish to record gratitude is Professor Lloyd W. Daly,
who was an inspiring and patient teacher when I studied Hesiod as a graduate
student at the University of Pennsylvania. My debt to M. L. West for his
masterful commentaries to the Theogony and the Works and Days is great. Carlo
F. Russo is the only scholar who has treated the Shield with the seriousness and
insightfulness it deserves, and the excellent introduction to his critical edition
and commentary has been of inestimable value to me.
In my notes, there is considerable material from the beliefs and practices of
the people of rural Greece. Classicists usually have such an attachment to pre-
classical and classical Greece that they resent the intrusion of modern Greek
survivals and instructive analogues. It is high time for this elitist trend to reverse
itself, especially now that the tide of mass communications threatens to destroy
in one or two generations what millennia have preserved. Relevant details from
oral tradition and folk culture are every bit as important as the shards
archeologists conscientiously collect and evaluate. To spurn them is to turn one’s
eyes away from what frequently turns out to be useful evidence.
The Johns Hopkins University Press published the first edition of my
translation of Hesiod’s works in 1983, exactly twenty years ago as I write these
lines. This first edition has been published many times during the last two
decades, and the demand for the book has gone much beyond my expectations.
Reception by the readership has been very warm. Poetry is untranslatable. Yet,
the love of the ancient originals and the imperative need to share them with
others, both as poetic achievements and as precious sources of information and
knowledge, drive us to do the impossible. The present revision is a gentle one.
Its principal aim is greater accuracy, the removal of words that are strikingly
obsolete, and the reduction of overly long lines. The additions to the notes are
lean, offering the reader critical information and fresh perspectives born of new
research.
I have been fortunate to have had the benefit of extraordinarily competent
assistance in the preparation of the present text. Anna Roberts and Liz Frech,
both members of our staff, must be recognized here for all the valuable aid they
offered me. I wish to thank Timothy S. Heckenlively, a doctoral candidate in our
Department of Classics, for the genealogical charts and the bibliography, which
are, for the most part, his work. Benjamin M. Wolkow, also a doctoral candidate
in the Department of Classics, sustained the great burden of typing the entire
text, as well as incorporating changes in translation and additions to the notes.
His patience, enthusiasm, and razor-sharp editorial and philological skills have
helped me enormously in the preparation of this revised edition.
Introduction
There is no agreement among modern scholars as to Hesiod’s exact date. The
best we can do is place him somewhere between the second half of the eighth
century and the first quarter of the seventh. The prevalent opinion among Greeks
of the classical period was that Hesiod was among the earliest poets and teachers
of the race. They usually placed him after the mythical Orpheus and Mousaios
and before Homer. But by the fifth century, the memory of what had happened
three centuries earlier was blurred, and, despite the anecdotal poetic contest
between Homer and Hesiod, there is no compelling reason for the assumption
that Hesiod either preceded Homer or even that he was his contemporary. As for
details concerning his life, it should be said that we ought to rely only on what
Hesiod himself tells in the poems, either directly or by inference. Even if the
information that he supplies is scant, it is better than all fanciful conjecture.
Hesiod is Hesiod’s best biographer.
From Works and Days 27–41, 63–68, and Theogony 22–35, we gather that
Hesiod was the son of an immigrant from Aeolian Kyme (Cyme) in Asia Minor.
His father settled in Boeotian Askra, close to the slopes of Mt. Helikon. He tells
us that he tended sheep in the foothills of this mountain, and that one day, while
tending his sheep, he had a profound experience: he met the Muses and they
gave him the gift of song. Given the pastoral character of the region and the
intense religiosity and vivid imagination of the Greeks, neither claim can be
refuted by scientific inquiry. Indeed, there is no reason to assume that either
Hesiod’s shepherding or his vision is fiction or pure literary convention. As is
clear from the Works and Days, Hesiod’s less enterprising brother, Perses, tried
to cheat him of his rightful portion of the patrimony by resorting to lies and
bribery. We do not know how the strife was settled, but Hesiod at some point
turned his poetic ability to the composition of a poem that would teach his
brother and others like him how to pursue their own well-being without harming
others, how to work, and when to work. The poet became a moral and practical
preceptor to his greedy brother, and thus, it seems, the Works and Days was
born. The dispute may also have preceded the composition of his more
ambitious Theogony, which in its present form antedates the Works and Days. It
was probably composed sometime in the last quarter of the eighth century.
The date of the composition of Hesiod’s poems, especially of the Theogony,
roughly coincided with the introduction of the alphabet to Greece. We do not
know how long it took until the alphabet was first used in literary composition.
Hesiod definitely belongs to that transitional period when the oral tradition was
slowly coming to an end, and the written was taking its first, timid steps. If the
Homeric epics were composed without the aid of writing, it follows a fortiori
that the much shorter Hesiodic poems could have also been composed without
the aid of writing. There is little or nothing in the poems of Hesiod that proves or
disproves oral composition. Large sections of the poems were definitely part of
traditional didactic lore. And if Hesiod employed writing, he did so not in our
sense. It is entirely possible that he operated like a traditional oral poet except
for some minimal use of the new art, perhaps as a sort of crude stenographic
device, at least until later in his life when the finished poems could be committed
to writing in their final form.
There is no doubt that the Theogony and the Works and Days were Hesiod’s
major poems. Although most modern scholars question the authenticity of the
Shield, all standard editions include it, thus paying homage to the weight of
ancient tradition. There is an excellent edition of the fragments of Hesiod’s
poetry, the Fragmenta Hesiodea, by R. Merkelbach and M. L. West (Oxford
University Press, 1966). The bulk of the fragments comes from the Catalogue of
Women, from which the first fifty-four or fifty-six lines of the Shield were
borrowed by the rhapsode who composed the poem. Of his lost Ornithomanteia
(Bird Divination) nothing survives, except perhaps what is now line 828 of the
Works and Days. There are also fragments from such works as Astronomy,
Idaean Dactyls, Aigimios, the Marriage of Keyx, the Divinations of Melampus,
the Precepts of Cheiron, the Great Eoiai, and the Great Works. Many of these
are of doubtful authenticity, and their number indicates that, much as in the case
of Homer and Hippocrates, tradition tended to ascribe to one consecrated master
both works that seemed to be thematically connected with his oeuvre as well as
impressive imitations by anonymous rhapsodes.
The poetry of Hesiod has attracted political and sociological interest. He is,
after all, the oldest repository of Western culture when it comes to the origin of
the cosmos and the many divinities in it, as well as to the social values and
practices that make human culture and human survival possible. A. R. Burn’s
influential book The World of Hesiod was published in 1936. Burn ignored
entirely the great German scholar Wilamowitz for reasons that could have been
only political. To Burn, Hesiod was an anomaly, an un-Homer whose gift of
poetry raised him above the miseries of the peasant underclass to which he was
born, an underclass that consisted of racially inferior Greeks steeped in the mire
of magic and superstition. It would be interesting to know how great scholars