Hesiod: The Works And Days/Theogony/The Shield Of Herakles (1959) - Plot & Excerpts
tI decided that I was going to try and write a review for every book I read this year, but I've been putting this one off. It turns out, it's a lot more fun to write a review about something that I loved than it is to write about something that I found disappointing.tI had really been looking forward to this book (for years actually) because I've always loved both the Iliad and the Odyssey and I knew that Hesiod was a famous contemporary of Homer that wrote about the same mythological stories and characters. I expected monsters, adventure, all the things that one usually finds in Greek myths; I could not have been more off the mark.tInstead, what I found was that Hesiod would have made a great 20th Century magazine writer. Why? Take any magazine of the rack these days and what's on the cover? Lists. "The 10 best getaway locations, 20 must-see summer movies, 15 different exercises for rock hard abs," etc. This is exactly what The Works and Days, The Theogony, and The Shield of Herakles were like. tThe Works and Days, the highlight of this collection (in my opinion), is at its core a list of things that one should do in order to lead a good life. I know I've sounded mostly negative about this book so far, but I'll admit: I kind of enjoyed this part. Its amazing really how many of the things that made someone a good person in 700 B.C.E. still hold true today. On the other hand, there are a few things that did not still hold true today, here's a great example: t "Never stand upright and make water facing the sun, but only, remember, when he has set or before his rising."tRidiculous advice like this was fun to read in a different way, very marvelous to see how far humanity has come in regards to both ethics, and understanding of things. So, to reiterate, this piece was an interesting read for sure, but high adventure it was not. tOnce the The Works and Days was done; however, I moved into the Theogony. Again, there were some beautiful retellings of ancient creation myths here. One thing in particular that struck me was how integrated into nature the gods of the early parts of the Theogony were. Whereas in many later myths, the Gods are anthropomorphized, here we see the Earth worshipped as the first thing to be born from chaos, and then Tartaus, the underworld, and then Erebus which is the space in-between these two places. But beautiful though it may be, it's easy to see the lists forming again. By the end, Hesiod, is just going straight down the family tree, doing a two line description of each family member of the Greek pantheon. It became quite tedious.tHaving sort of slogged through the first two pieces, I was not much looking forward to plowing through the final piece in this collection. So, you can imagine my surprise when I started reading the final piece in this collection entitled, The Shield of Herakles, and it begins with action right away. The blood and thunder type of action that leaves our hero Herakles and his cousin Iolaos prepared to do chariot combat with Ares, God of War, and his son Kyknos. Just as the battle is about to be joined, Herakles lifts his shield and... Hesiod spends the remaining pages describing what's on it. I kept paging ahead to see when the actual battle would begin, when suddenly it hit me: the title is The Shield of Herakles. This work is 99% about the shield; I guess I should have read the title better. All in all, I'm glad I read The Works and Days, and there were bits and pieces that I like about both the Theogony and The Shield of Herakles; but those small bits were not enough to make me love Hesiod like I thought I was going to.
In terms of a didactic poem Works and Days has a lot of character. It isn’t tedious, the explaining is eloquent and it gives one a firm background on ancient Greek beliefs. Homer, for example, is enriched in light of this explanation. The explaining of sacrifices (thigh bones wrapped in fat comes from Prometheus) is instructive. I also really liked the description of the different ages of Man. It puts events like the Trojan War in a greater perspective. It should be said that this perspective is flat out brutal. Zeus is a harsh overlord, with a marked contempt for mankind. Even the ones he likes can easily fall out of his favor. He’s capricious, but he can afford to be, he’s the strongest being in the cosmos… FOR NOW.Theogony, while not being as awesome as I anticipated, was still fantastic. Here we see a primary motif in Greek Mythology, one that has lasted into the present day: The Overthrow of the Father. The battles between the Olympians and the Titans read like Shakespeare with a dose of added castration, with balls that must have been like frickin’ meteors crashing into the sea from which out of the oozing jizz comes the goddess of Love and Desire who for all intents and purposes just causes a lot of trouble (see: Paris). SOUND FAMILIAR?!Shield of Herakles is like a mini-Iliad (not the mini-Iliad). With ancient lore you don’t get a start-to-finish chronological, linear story. You get pieces here and there and things generally explain themselves over the years and countless re-readings. So it is with SoH. Herakles’ conception was a new one on me, I didn’t know he had a twin bro, but it glosses over a ton of his life. The shield, and the idea of describing a shield in such a way, is almost like a video advertisement on Facebook except within it one gleans the destructive will of the universe. FANTASTICHE!All in all, this is an important compilation and necessary for people interested in Ancient Greece. I don’t think everyone will “like” it or “approve” of it. But guess what? Zeus doesn’t give a FUCK. The belief system is not kind to women and has an unquenchable thirst for blood. It is precisely because of this brutal backdrop that emotion and sensitivity finds such value and is so important
What do You think about Hesiod: The Works And Days/Theogony/The Shield Of Herakles (1959)?
1) Slightly cheating on this as we're not reading the last 30 pages or so, The Shield of Herakles.2) Hesiod hates women. Poor guy obviously didn't appreciate sex. It's pretty funny, he gives advice like:"Get yourself an oxen for plowing and also a woman.""Do not let any sweet-talking woman beguile your good sense with the fascinations of her shape. It's your barn she's after."3) The myths of Pandora and Prometheus are much better in their original form than I had come to expect from cultural osmosis. These were the best parts of The Works and Days and Theogony, but they were relatively small compared to how many lines these poems are.
—Kaila
The works of Hesiod stand apart from the more famous worksmanship of Homer. Theogony is a dense description of Greek mythology, jumping from story to story character to character Theogony gives brief overviews of the earliest Greek myths. Works & Days however is markedly different, and categorizes more under "Wisdom Literature" more akin to Ecclessisates in its advice to the reader and after 2500 hundred years or so still seems to apply. Both attributed to Hesiod, I can't help but wonder if Theogony & Works & Days were in fact written by two different people.
—Shawneci
I had to put this one down for months until I got a couple weeks off from work and could read it without falling asleep.The Dover version I got doesn’t include the ‘Catalogue of Women’, which is a shame ‘cause I don’t like gaps in my reads and this one is tied up to ‘The shield of Heracles’. But hey, it was a very affordable edition and it served its purpose, which was introducing me to Hesiod.Reading Hesiod is very similar to reading Homer or maybe Ovid. It’s not necessarily about the story that’s been told but the way it is told. I mean, these are poems, right? Cataloguing and epic but still poems. I was taking a course on Greek mythology last year and ‘Theogony’ was covered in it and the professor pointed out things that would be lost to a common reader, like the way that Hesiod linked together the story of nymphs and minor deities into the big scheme of religion brought together different provinces and gave them a sense of unification and belonging. It’s not just a boring long list of gods for the sake of it. Same thing with ‘Works and days’, which is a text Hesiod wrote for his brother but that serves as a peek into Greek society and its customs.In my opinion this is a text that can only be appreciated if the reader has already some notion of Greek customs and history or maybe got an edition full of footnotes (which I would like, actually), because otherwise it is easy to be put off by the archaic style and end up missing the meaning and importance of the text.
—Erika
