In his obituary of Silius Italicus (Ep. 3.7), Pliny uses a series of apposite intertextual allusions drawn from a variety of sources (especially from Seneca’s Dialogi and Epistles, Cicero’s Epistulae ad Familiares and Hesiod) which help him denigrate Silius’ posthumous reputation. Pliny evokes several titles of Senecan works and thus virtually creates an epistolary library with a section containing Stoic best sellers. In this letter, Pliny absorbs Seneca’s Stoicism, prompts his readers to evaluate Silius’ character through the lens of Stoic discourses and to notice an inconsistency between Silius’ Stoic death and his un-Stoic way of life, while all the while associating the epic poet with Epicureanism. He has good reasons to undermine Silius’ reputation, since the latter was Pliny’s rival for the title of Cicero’s heir. However, at the same time Pliny differentiates himself from Seneca by rejecting some of his central ideas, as e.g. his idea that human life is not short. The negative insinuations against Silius are further accentuated by intratextual links with other letters addressed to Caninius Rufus.

This chapter explores the indexical potential of time in three ways: chronological perspective, the use of temporal adverbs and adjectives to situate an episode within a larger span of literary history; marked iteration, the self-reflexive replay or foreshadowing of other events; and epigonal self-consciousness, the direct or indirect appeal to poetic predecessors. All three tropes are active in archaic epic and lyric, but with differing accents. In epic, references to time and iteration mark intratextual and intertextual cross-references and doublets, while epic heroes’ epigonal relationships with their πρότεροι figure the tensions of the poet’s relationship with his predecessors. In lyric poetry, temporal references similarly index tradition; δηὖτε marks both generic and intertextual repetition; and direct appeals to πρότεροι follow and challenge both whole genres and specific texts. Indexical temporality was deeply embedded in archaic Greek poetics from the very start.

The epilogue charts a return to the earliest Greek poets on record, Homer and Hesiod, and a discussion of how these poets used monumentality to depict matter shaping time.

The sanctuary of Artemis on the island of Korkyra, modern Corfu, is presented as a case study of the relationship between the changing environment and the monumentalization of Greek sanctuaries through Doric stone architecture. Although the sculptural decoration of the Artemis temple, which is one of the earliest Doric temples known so far, is relatively well preserved, modern scholars disagree on the interpretation of the sculptures. The question of how the representations of Medusa and other mythological figures on the pediments and metopes related to the divinity worshipped in the sanctuary and to the local context are particularly controversial. However, as the chapter argues, the builders of the temple had no interest in highlighting this relationship in the first place. The temple and its sculptural decoration were meant to express Panhellenic values and standards rather than local traditions. Thus, the local elite of Korkyra presented themselves as part of a Panhellenic elite network. At the same time, the elite showed the local population that they were taking care of the religious landscape in an unstable and radically transformative situation.

This chapter explores coincidences and divergences between Hesiod’s conception of language and those found in Akkadian literature. First, it provides a synopsis of Hesiod’s ideas about language and the interrelation of these ideas with the poet’s broader poetics. Then it discusses how Hesiodic conceptions of language are deeply intertwined with the interpretation of divine names. The chapter also investigates how Hesiod’s particular ways of interpreting theonyms is used to endorse hermeneutic practices anchored in an oral tradition. It explores the differences between the Theogony and its cuneiform counterparts, especially by comparing how wordplay and etymology are deployed in the analysis of divine names.

The origins of modern georgic writing lie in the ancient Mediterranean, in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. On the Greek side the genre begins with the poetry of Hesiod, embraces dozens of treatise in poetry and prose written during the Hellenistic era, and comes to an end in Byzantine times with the massive compilation of farming lore known as the Geoponica. Latin georgic starts with Cato’s essay on agriculture, culminates in Vergil’s Georgics – the poem that defined the genre for later European authors – and persists in the Latin prose of Columella, Pliny, and Palladius. The diversity of the genre evades definition. Its popularity is unsurprising in the context of a world where wealth meant ownership of land and most people tilled the soil.

This chapter analyses John Tzetzes’ Theogony, a long poem in political verse that narrates genealogies of mythical gods and heroes following the example of Hesiod. The poem was dedicated to the sebastokratorissa Irene, a powerful patron of the Komnenian aristocracy, and is an important witness to the role of classical learning in twelfth-century Byzantium. The first part of the chapter examines the relation of Tzetzes’ poem to Hesiod’s Theogony, the Homeric epics and the Catalogue of Women, a fragmentary ancient work ascribed to Hesiod. It also provides a list of the main literary sources of the poem, which demonstrates Tzetzes’ dependence on other ancient poets. The second part analyses the narrative voice of Tzetzes, his linguistic style and the didactic character of the poem. The chapter concludes with an examination of the audience of the Theogony and its function as a didactic poem, which reflects patronage relationships in the Komnenian period. The chapter thus sheds light on Tzetzes’ attitude towards the ancient authors by situating the Theogony within his broad activity as a professional poet and commentator of ancient texts.

Greek agriculture took place within a largely Mediterranean regime of annual, dry-farmed grains and pulses, alongside perennial vines and olives. Hesiod’s Works and Days, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, the Attic orators, inscriptions, intensive survey, and comparative data from before 1950 form the main evidence. The agricultural year centred around winter sowing and summer harvest. Scholars propose two competing models of agriculture. Extensive agriculture used draft animals and biennial fallow and was more suited to at least mid-sized holdings, nucleated settlement, and transhumant livestock. Intensive agriculture required greater hand-cultivation and was suited to smaller plots, dispersed settlement, and mixed farming to provide year-round animal manure. High risk of crop failure made intensification, diversification, and storing a ‘normal surplus’ a rational subsistence strategy for smaller landowners. However, there is also evidence for connectivity and production for market. Debates over agricultural slavery, settlement, and possible intensification from the fifth century BCE intersect with the question of market participation.

In “Nature in the Anthropocene,” Hiltner contends that we must reject nostalgic attempts to reconstruct a lost harmony with nature that never really existed, such as narratives of Eden and the Golden Age, in favor of a sustainable future-oriented version of nature. Nature in the Anthropocene, Hiltner argues, must be a nature we consciously craft using the tools of modern science and technology. Exploring the classical works of Hesiod and Ovid, as well as the Judeo/Christian/Muslim story of Eden, Hiltner foregrounds how nostalgic visions of harmony with nature still structure much of the environmentalist thinking of the present. Using early modern examples, Hiltner shows how humanity has long grappled with environmental problems of its own creation. The chapter ultimately turns to the example of Rachel Carson to illustrate a scientifically informed approach to forging a more livable and sustainable concept of nature.

The Greek world from ca. 750 onwards saw the establishment of wealthy elites, the widespread use of chattel and other slaves, and the occupation of new territories across the Mediterranean, all of which laid the groundwork for later developments. Elite property owners exploited the labour of the free poor, thereby adding to their own surpluses while keeping levels of consumption in the wider community minimal and archaeologically invisible. Only when and where social unrest or outright civil war led to restrictions on exploitation, and when new trading opportunities emerged around 600, did a middling class begin to establish itself, and to create demand for a range of staples that they could not produce themselves. In the late sixth century, the economic and social structure of the classical Greek world took shape, as regional and local specialisation and trade networks reached a level that enabled significant – if unquantifiable – per capita growth. Not all parts of the Greek world shared equally in these developments. Sparta, Crete, and Thessaly retained a polarised social structure of leisured elite and slave workers and continued to aim at agricultural self-sufficiency, institutionalising key features of the old predatory regimes that other Greeks were leaving behind.

Scholarship on Early Greek housing has moved from creating fictional reconstructions based on Homeric poetry, through typological sorting of archaeological houses by shape and rooms, to analysing access patterns and functionalization. These more recent approaches have largely estranged epic poetry from archaeology. However, since they seek to understand domestic structures as experienced by living people, there is a way to build poetry back in by using it to explore the ways their inhabitants thought about domestic spaces. The phrase ‘in the halls’ is used abundantly in the Homeric and Hesiodic corpus as a metonymy for familial life and prosperity. The phrase should be read not as a reality to be sought in the archaeological record but abstractly as an indicator of the importance of physical space in a household’s formation and success. The link between prosperity, family and house can also be seen in the renovations and increasing complexities in some early Greek domestic architecture. Success and wealth modify and are expressed in the house. ‘In the halls’ thus refers to an important cultural idea, also seen in archaeology, linking house, home and family with prosperity.

The previous chapter locates Parmenides in his physical and linguistic contexts; this chapter locates him in his poetic, intellectual, and cultural milieux. It argues that we need to understand Parmenides’ poem in light of the late archaic revolution in the way that Homer was conceptualized. This chapter examines the epistemological framework Parmenides inherits from Hesiod and Xenophanes in considering the nature of human enquiry; the way that other poets in the late archaic period make use of the newly emergent figure of Homer and the corpus of Homeric poetry, especially with respect to their claims to knowledge and their relationship to the Muses; and the ways that scholars have characterized developments between Homeric poetry and the poetry of the late archaic period. I show how Parmenides uses the resources this Homeric tradition offers to launch a multipronged response to the challenges set down by Hesiod and Xenophanes. These include: reinitiating contact with a Muse-like figure in the proem; the use of crossroads imagery to articulate fundamental distinctions; ceding the voice of the poem to the unnamed goddess; the use of argument; and the return to the privileged poetic form of epic dactylic hexameter.

For ancient authors, hope tends to be a dangerous thing. It can set us up for practical as well as moral failure. Elpis, the Greek word we translate as hope, is typically an attitude or emotion that is desiderative and goal-oriented, but it can also denote neutral expectation of evils as well as goods. The first author to treat elpis as an unqualified good, given a very specific object of desire (eternal life in Christ), is St. Paul, the earliest writer in the New Testament. Before him, good hopes – including eschatological hopes expressed in other ancient mystery religions – had to be designated as such to be distinguished from bad hopes, which preponderate in Greek literature. But the ancients recognize good hope, foremost in the competitive strife that defines public life. Hope could be seen as a necessary motive, linked to confidence and courage. The ancient world, especially in Jerusalem and Rome, knew also hope in a future ruler, a hope more soteriological than political. Whatever hopes might be expressed for the city-state or empire, the philosophical schools of antiquity developed the case against personal hope and passionate agitation.

This chapter investigates the critique of anthropomorphism that we find in Xenophanes of Colophon and Heraclitus of Ephesus. Hesiod’s Theogony is assumed as background and as paradigm for the tendency to treat either the world’s components or gods generally as humanlike. With Xenophanes of Colophon we have the first and one of the fiercest attacks on such a kind of anthropomorphism, inasmuch as Xenophanes not only challenges anthropomorphism in traditional religion and myth but also intimates that at the root of religious beliefs and practices, among his fellow Greeks as well as among foreigners, is a motive of philautia, of self-love. Another strong early critique of anthropomorphism is found in Heraclitus of Ephesus, who curtly dismisses the idea of world-making by a god and stridently attacks certain traditional forms of religious worship. And yet neither thinker can avoid sliding into a particular kind of anthropomorphism, namely into what Mourelatos calls ‘epistemic anthropo-philautia’ – philautia understood not as the ‘self-love’ or ‘vanity’ an individual may show, but rather as the species-philautia we indulge in when we project upon the cosmos structures and forms that cognitively afford special intuitive appeal to us human beings.

The surviving ‘Judaeo-Christian’ Sibylline Oracles, recomposed over several centuries from the late Hellenistic period onwards, offer an understudied example of overlap between didactic, oracular and universalising strands in ancient Homeric and Hesiodic receptions. This chapter makes a multifaceted case for viewing the Sibylline Oracles as latter-day ‘Hesiodic rhapsody’, whose blend of universal history and ethical exhortation is informed by supra-Homeric perspectives.

This paper explores the category of neighbor from a literary-critical perspective. Hesiod’s depiction in Works and Days of the relationships between neighbors as characterized by random proximity and uncertain ethical status is adopted as a frame for understanding the stylistic approach of the epic poet and the affinities that Pindar’s epinicians show to his work. A case is made for the interpretive utility of the lateral and arbitrary structure of neighboring, and the desirability of such a model alongside the more common idea of genealogical inheritance within the modern scholarly treatment of ancient receptions.

This chapter revisits the arguments for and against a Near Eastern inspiration of Hesiod’s well-known Myth of the Ages (or Races), and takes this opportunity to reflect on the criteria that are available to us in assessing the plausibility of literary-historical influence. The degree of similarity between the literary comparanda will naturally remain the first and most obvious criterion, but the story or theme should not also be part of an Indo-European or other tradition, or attributable to common human experience, and further, the story or theme should be quite unique and therefore unlikely to have been fashioned independently in Greece and the Near East. Both considerations naturally oblige the scholar to cast the net more widely, beyond the two standard corpora of Greek and ancient Near Eastern literature, in order to gain an impression of how significant a given parallel is likely to be, in this case ranging from Mesoamerica to the Mahābhārata. While the strength of the Near Eastern parallels leads the author to conclude that the Myth of the Ages is indeed likely to have been inspired by Near Eastern sources, Lardinois is also careful to explain how it came to be anchored in existing and more familiar Greek tales of gods and heroes.

This chapter considers the case of the Song of Emergence that has proved central to several contributions collected here, but approaches the comparison as an opportunity to appreciate the distinctive differences reflected in the various relevant sources. This chapter emphasises the role of female wife–mother figures as destabilising elements in Hesiod’s Theogony, in contrast to the more limited roles of female characters particularly in the Song of Emergence, and locates that gendering theme within the wider context of early Greek mythology. This comparison allows us to see the individual element working within its own context, to determine what is distinctive about each tradition and so, finally, to understand all of them better. Genealogy, at least in the way most Classicists would like to practise it, is neither possible nor profitable. But the comparison remains, and its analogy can tell us a lot.