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Voice and Theme Voice and Theme
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Length and Form Length and Form
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Style, Narrative, and Genealogical Lists Style, Narrative, and Genealogical Lists
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Notes Notes
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References References
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6 Hesiodic Poetics
Get accessStephen Scully is professor of classical studies at Boston University. He has written on Homer, Hesiod, Greek tragedy, Plato, Freud’s antiquities, and aspects of reception. Translations include Plato’s Phaedrus (Focus Publishing, 2003; now distributed by Hackett Publishing) and, with Rosanna Warren, Euripides’ Suppliant Women (Oxford University Press, 1995; now in The Complete Euripides, vol. III, 2010), and recent publications include the introduction to George Chapman’s Homer’s Hymns and Other Homerica (Princeton University Press, 2008); “Englished Homer from Chapman to Walcott,” Arion 17 (2009); Hesiod’s Theogony: From Near Eastern Creation Myths to Paradise Lost (Oxford University Press, 2015); and “Dryden’s Aeneis,” in Virgil and His Translators (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
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Published:08 August 2018
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Abstract
In terms of poetics, the contest between Hesiod and Homer seems simultaneously natural and surprising: natural because both of them composed in the artificial “song dialect” and highly formulaic medium of epea, and surprising because Homer’s long, heroic poetry differed so greatly in voice, theme, length, structure, and style from Hesiod’s much shorter, catalogic narrative poetry or from his didactic poetry. This chapter examines Hesiod’s poetry alongside Homer’s in terms of voice and theme, length and form, and style and genealogical lists. With examples from both singers, I propose that it may be a stylistic feature of catalogic poetry to interweave the personified names in a list with the corresponding lowercase words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) in the surrounding narrative. I also propose that, to a greater extent than Homer, Hesiod, with his fondness for word play and etymological punning, draws attention upon individual words.
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