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God and the Land - The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,491
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God and the Land - The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil (Paperback)
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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.
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