Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica

About the book

This collection brings Hesiod's Works and Days and Theogony together with other Hesiodic material, the Homeric Hymns, and texts or fragments associated with early Greek epic. Advice about labour and justice sits beside accounts of divine generations and narratives honouring individual gods. The hymns give figures such as Demeter, Apollo, and Hermes distinct stories, while the fragmentary material offers glimpses of traditions that do not survive as continuous works. Introduction and notes help orient readers within that variety. The volume should be approached as a gathering of different poems and witnesses, rather than as a single work by one author. Its range makes visible how questions of daily conduct, ritual honour, genealogy, and heroic memory could share the resources of an inherited poetic language.

• Divine order
• Labour and justice
• Mythic tradition

Why read it

For a broad view of early Greek poetic traditions that places practical counsel beside divine narrative and surviving epic fragments.

Poems and fragments · English translation associated with Hugh G. Evelyn-White