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Hesiod’s Theogony: from Near Eastern Creation Myths to Paradise Lost

Online ISBN:
9780190253981
Print ISBN:
9780190253967
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Hesiod’s Theogony: from Near Eastern Creation Myths to Paradise Lost

Stephen Scully
Stephen Scully

Associate Professor

Associate Professor, Boston University
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Published online:
17 September 2015
Published in print:
1 March 2016
Online ISBN:
9780190253981
Print ISBN:
9780190253967
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book both offers a reading of Hesiod’s Theogony and traces the reception and shadows of this authoritative Greek creation story in Greek and Roman texts up to Milton’s Paradise Lost. It also considers the poem in light of Near Eastern creation stories, including the Enûma elish and Genesis, as well as Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. In this book, Hesiod’s poem is read as a hymn to Zeus and a city-state creation myth, arguing that Olympus is portrayed as an idealized polity and—with but one exception—a place of communal harmony. This reading informs the study of the Theogony’s reception. Major authors and texts studied include the long Homeric Hymns, Solon, the Presocratics, Pindar, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Plato; the Alexandrian scholars, Callimachus, Euhemerus, and the Stoics; Ovid, Apollodorus, Lucan, a few Church fathers, and the Neoplatonists. Tracing the poem’s reception in the Byzantine, medieval, and early Renaissance, including Petrarch and Erasmus, the book ends with a lengthy exploration of Milton’s imitations of the poem in Paradise Lost. The book also considers Hesiod’s artful interplay of narrative, genealogical lists, and personified abstractions in the Theogony in relation to Homeric narrative techniques and treatment of epic verse.

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