Hesiod's Cosmos

Reads Hesiod's poems as complementary halves of a whole embracing the divine and human cosmos.

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.

Introduction; 1. Orientations: the Theogony; 2. Orientations: the Works and Days; 3. Overtures; 4. The origins of mankind; 5. The two Prometheuses; 6. Perspectives on gods and men; 7. Hybrids; Conclusion.

In the Theogony and the Works and Days Hesiod provides the earliest systematic and comprehensive account of the genesis of the Greek gods and the nature of human life. Hesiod's Cosmos argues for reading the two poems as complementary halves of a whole embracing the divine and human cosmos.

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).