Friedrich Solmsen provides a new approach to Hesiod's
personality in this book by distinguishing Hesiod's own
contributions to Greek mythology and theology from the traditional
aspects of his poetry. Hesiod's vision of a better world, expressed
in religious language and imagery, pictures the savagery and
brutality of the earlier days of Greece giving way to an order of
justice. In this new order, however, the good aspects of the past
would be preserved, giving an inner continuity and strength to the
changing world.
Solmsen traces the influence of Hesiod's ideas on other Athenian
poets, Aeschylus in particular. From personal political experience
Aeschylus could give a deeper meaning to Hesiod's dream of an
organic historical evolution and of a synthesis of old and new
powers. For Aeschylus, justice became the crucial problem of the
political community as well as of the divine order. Through close
readings of Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days and of Aeschylus'
Prometheia and Eumenides, Solmsen reinterprets the political ideas
of the Greek city state and the relation between divine and human
justice as seen by early Greek poets.
First published in 1949, this book has long been recognized as
the standard work on Hesiod's influence. For the 1995 paperback
edition, G. M. Kirkwood has written a new foreword that addresses
the book's reception and discusses more recent scholarship on the
works Solmsen examines, including the disputed authorship of
Prometheia.
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