Hesiod’s Works and Days: How to Teach Self-Sufficiency
By Lilah Grace Canevaro
Abstract: This book argues that the structure of Hesiod’s Works and Days and the modes of reading the poem which it encourages reflect the interplay between self-sufficiency – Hesiod2019s Iron Age ideal – and the very point of didactic literature. It considers Hesiod’s didactic method from two perspectives: in terms of the gaps he leaves, and of how he challenges his audience to fill them. It places the Works and Days within a wider context, showing how it draws on and contributes to a tradition of usefulness. Hesiod’s Works and Days was performed in its entirety, but was also relentlessly excerpted, quoted, and reapplied. This book situates the poem within these two modes of reading and argues that the text itself, through Hesiod’s complex mechanism of rendering elements detachable whilst tethering them to their context for the purposes of the poem, sustains both treatments. One difficulty with the poem is that Hesiod gives remarkably little advice on how to negotiate different modes of reading. The seeds of reception are there in the poem’s structure and formulation, but a fully worked-out schema of usage is not. This book argues that this reticence is linked to the high value Hesiod places on self-sufficiency, which creates a productive tension with the didactic thrust of the poem as teaching always involves a relationship of exchange and, at least up to a point, reliance and trust. Hesiod negotiates this potential contradiction by advocating not blind adherence to his teachings but thinking for oneself and working for one’s lesson.
Published by Oxford University Press, 2015.