God and the Land : The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil PDF Download
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Author: Stephanie A. Nelson Boston University
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195353579
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
In this pathbreaking book, which includes a powerful new translation of Hesiod's Works and Days by esteemed translator David Grene, Stephanie Nelson argues that a society's vision of farming contains deep indications about its view of the human place within nature, and our relationship to the divine. She contends that both Hesiod in the Works and Days and Vergil in the Georgics saw farming in this way, and so wrote their poems not only about farming itself, but also about its deeper ethical and religious implications. Hesiod, Nelson argues, saw farming as revealing that man must live by the sweat of his brow, and that good, for human beings, must always be accompanied by hardship. Within this vision justice, competition, cooperation, and the need for labor take their place alongside the uncertainties of the seasons and even of particular lucky and unlucky days to form a meaningful whole within which human life is an integral part. Vergil, Nelson argues, deliberately modeled his poem upon the Works and Days, and did so in order to reveal that his is a very different vision. Hesiod saw the hardship in farming; Vergil sees its violence as well. Farming is for him both our life within nature, and also our battle against her. Against the background of Hesiods poem, which found a single meaning for human life, Vergil thus creates a split vision and suggests that human beings may be radically alienated from both nature and the divine. Nelson argues that both the Georgics and the Works and Days have been misread because scholars have not seen the importance of the connection between the two poems, and because they have not seen that farming is the true concern of both, farming in its deepest and most profoundly unsettling sense.
Author: Stephanie A. Nelson Boston University
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195353579
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this pathbreaking book, which includes a powerful new translation of Hesiod's Works and Days by esteemed translator David Grene, Stephanie Nelson argues that a society's vision of farming contains deep indications about its view of the human place within nature, and our relationship to the divine. She contends that both Hesiod in the Works and Days and Vergil in the Georgics saw farming in this way, and so wrote their poems not only about farming itself, but also about its deeper ethical and religious implications. Hesiod, Nelson argues, saw farming as revealing that man must live by the sweat of his brow, and that good, for human beings, must always be accompanied by hardship. Within this vision justice, competition, cooperation, and the need for labor take their place alongside the uncertainties of the seasons and even of particular lucky and unlucky days to form a meaningful whole within which human life is an integral part. Vergil, Nelson argues, deliberately modeled his poem upon the Works and Days, and did so in order to reveal that his is a very different vision. Hesiod saw the hardship in farming; Vergil sees its violence as well. Farming is for him both our life within nature, and also our battle against her. Against the background of Hesiods poem, which found a single meaning for human life, Vergil thus creates a split vision and suggests that human beings may be radically alienated from both nature and the divine. Nelson argues that both the Georgics and the Works and Days have been misread because scholars have not seen the importance of the connection between the two poems, and because they have not seen that farming is the true concern of both, farming in its deepest and most profoundly unsettling sense.
Author: Stephanie Nelson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199723990
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this pathbreaking book, which includes a powerful new translation of Hesiod's Works and Days by esteemed translator David Grene, Stephanie Nelson argues that a society's vision of farming contains deep indications about its view of the human place within nature, and our relationship to the divine. She contends that both Hesiod in the Works and Days and Vergil in the Georgics saw farming in this way, and so wrote their poems not only about farming itself, but also about its deeper ethical and religious implications. Hesiod, Nelson argues, saw farming as revealing that man must live by the sweat of his brow, and that good, for human beings, must always be accompanied by hardship. Within this vision justice, competition, cooperation, and the need for labor take their place alongside the uncertainties of the seasons and even of particular lucky and unlucky days to form a meaningful whole within which human life is an integral part. Vergil, Nelson argues, deliberately modeled his poem upon the Works and Days, and did so in order to reveal that his is a very different vision. Hesiod saw the hardship in farming; Vergil sees its violence as well. Farming is for him both our life within nature, and also our battle against her. Against the background of Hesiods poem, which found a single meaning for human life, Vergil thus creates a split vision and suggests that human beings may be radically alienated from both nature and the divine. Nelson argues that both the Georgics and the Works and Days have been misread because scholars have not seen the importance of the connection between the two poems, and because they have not seen that farming is the true concern of both, farming in its deepest and most profoundly unsettling sense.
Author: Stephanie Anne Nelson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780197704622
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Connecting Hesiod's The Works and Days and Virgil's Georgics through agricultural and pastoral themes, this study brings them together with a metaphysical eye, showing how the two writers each viewed the farming lifestyle as a system of belief.
Author: Hesiod
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801879841
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
For this eagerly anticipated revised edition, Athanassakis has provided an expanded introduction on Hesiod and his work, subtly amended his faithful translations, significantly augmented the notes and index, and updated the bibliography. --Johns Hopkins University Press.
Author: G. R. Boys-Stones
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199236348
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 373
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Book Description
A collection of essays exploring the relationship between Plato and the poet Hesiod. The volume covers a wide variety of thematic angles, brings new and sometimes surprising light to a large range of Platonic dialogues, and represents a major contribution to the study of the reception of archaic poetry in Athens.
Author: Apostolos N. Athanassakis
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421443953
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
This best-selling translation of Hesiod's the Theogony, the Works and Days, and the Shield has been updated into the most indispensable edition yet for students of Greek mythology and literature. Next to the works of Homer, Hesiod's poems are foundational texts for students of the classics. His two major surviving works, the Theogony and the Works and Days, address the divine and the mundane, respectively. The Theogony traces the origins of the Greek gods and recounts the events surrounding the crowning of Zeus as their king, while the Works and Days is a manual of moral instruction in verse addressed to farmers and peasants. Though modern scholars dispute the authorship of the Shield, ancient texts treat this final poem about the shield of Herakles as unquestionably Hesiodic. Introducing his celebrated translations of Hesiod, Apostolos N. Athanassakis positions the philosopher-poet as heir to a long tradition of Hellenic poetry. Hesiod's poems demonstrate the author's passionate interest in the governance of human society through justice and a tangible work ethic. As a physicist and a materialist, Hesiod avoided such subjects as honor and the afterlife. His works contain the oldest fundamentals on law and Greek economy, making Hesiod the first great thinker of Western civilization. Athanassakis's contextual notes offer both comparison to Biblical and Norse mythologies as well as anthropological connections to modern Greece. The third edition of this classic undergraduate text includes a thoroughly updated bibliography reflecting the last two decades of scholarship. The introductions and notes have been enriched, clarifying contextual history and the meaning of Hesiod's own language and themes, and notes have been newly added to the Shield. Athanassakis has lightly improved his translation throughout the text, expertly balancing the natural flow of the verse while adhering closely to the literal Greek.
Author: Alexander Loney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190905360
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 611
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Book Description
This volume brings together 29 junior and senior scholars to discuss aspects of Hesiod's poetry and its milieu and to explore questions of reception over two and half millennia from shortly after the poems' conception to Twitter hashtags. Rather than an exhaustive study of Hesiodic themes, the Handbook is conceived as a guide through terrain, some familiar, other less charted, examining both Hesiodic craft and later engagements with Hesiod's stories of the gods and moralizing proscriptions of just human behavior. The volume opens with the "Hesiodic Question," to address questions of authorship, historicity, and the nature of composition of Hesiod's two major poems, the Theogony and Works and Days. Subsequent chapters on the archaeology and economic history of archaic Boiotia, Indo-European poetics, and Hesiodic style offer a critical picture of the sorts of questions that have been asked rather than an attempt to resolve debate. Other chapters discuss Hesiod's particular rendering of the supernatural and the performative nature of the Works and Days, as well as competing diachronic and synchronic temporalities and varying portrayals of female in the two poems. The rich story of reception ranges from Solon to comic books. These chapters continue to explore the nature of Hesiod's poetics, as different writers through time single out new aspects of his art less evident to earlier readers. Long before the advent of Christianity, classical writers leveled their criticism at Hesiod's version of polytheism. The relative importance of Hesiod's two major poems across time also tells us a tale of the age receiving the poems. In the past two centuries, artists and writers have come to embrace the Hesiodic stories for themselves for the insight they offer of the human condition but even as old allegory looks quaint to modern eyes new forms of allegory take form.
Author: Alexander Kirichenko
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192692003
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
Greek Literature and the Ideal contends that the development of Greek literature was motivated by the need to endow political geography with a sense of purposeful structure. Alexander Kirichenko argues that Greek literature was a crucial factor in the cultural production of space, and Greek geography a crucial factor in the production of literary meaning. The book focuses on the idealizing images that Greek literature created of three spatial patterns of power distribution: a decentralized network of aristocratically governed communities (Archaic Greece); a democratic city controlling an empire (Classical Athens); and a microcosm of Greek culture located on foreign soil, ruled by quasi-divine royals, and populated by immigrants (Ptolemaic Alexandria). Kirichenko draws connections between the formation of these idealizing images and the emergence of such literary modes of meaning making as the authoritative communication of the truth, the dialogic encouragement to search for the truth on one's own, and the abandonment of transcendental goals for the sake of cultural memory and/or aesthetic pleasure. Readings of such canonical Greek authors as Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians, Thucydides, Plato, Callimachus, and Theocritus show that the pragmatics of Greek literature (the sum total of the ideological, cognitive, and emotional effects that it seeks to produce) is, in essence, always a pragmatics of space: there is a strong correlation between the historically conditioned patterns of political geography and the changing mechanisms whereby Greek literature enabled its recipients to make sense of their world.
Author: Michael K. Kellogg
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1616145765
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that all of Western philosophy was "but a series of footnotes to Plato." By the same token, one could argue that all of Western civilization is but an extension of the ancient Greek cultural legacy. The Greeks invented tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, philosophy, and democracy. They also made remarkable advances in science, medicine, and mathematics. In the author’s view, what ties this wide-ranging intellectual ferment together is a restless search for wisdom. The author looks at ten outstanding examples of Greek wisdom, offering fresh and engaging portraits of the epic poets (Homer, Hesiod); dramatists (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes); historians (Herodotus, Thucydides); and philosophers (Plato, Aristotle) against the background of Greek history. In each case he asks what the author has to tell us— regardless of genre—about our place in the world and how we should live our lives. By surveying some of the highest peaks of ancient civilization, the author argues that we gain perspective on the historical terrain that lies below. This book presents an eloquent and convincing case that a study of the Greek classics, as Gustave Flaubert explained, makes us "greater, wiser, purer."
Author: T. H. M. Gellar-Goad
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000922731
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
This book collects new work on Latin didactic poetry and prose in the late Republic and early Empire, and it evaluates the varied, shifting roles that literature of teaching and learning played during this period. Instruction was of special interest in the culture and literature of the late Roman Republic and the Age of Augustus, as attitudes towards education found complex, fluid, and multivalent expressions. The era saw a didactic boom, a cottage industry whose surviving authors include Vergil, Lucretius, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, Varro, Germanicus, and Grattius, who are all reexamined here. The contributors to this volume bring fresh approaches to the study of educational literature from the end of the Roman Republic and early Empire, and their essays discover unexpected connections between familiar authors. Chapters explore, interrogate, and revise some aspect of our understanding of these generic and modal boundaries, while considering understudied points of contact between art and education, poetry and prose, and literature and philosophy, among others. Altogether, the volume shows how lively, experimental, and intertextual the didactic ethos of this period is, and how deeply it engages with social, political, and philosophical questions that are of critical importance to contemporary Rome and of enduring interest into the modern world. Didactic Literature in the Roman World is of interest to students and scholars of Latin literature, particularly the late Republic and early Empire, and of Classics more broadly. In addition, the volume’s focus on didactic poetry and prose appeals to those working on literature outside of Classics and on intellectual history.
