Didactic Poetry

Birds do it, but it turns out bees don't. This paper places the bee-wife of Hesiod, Phocylides, and Semonides into conversation with scientific thought, specifically Aristotle's Generation of Animals and History of Animals. Bees represent the ideal wife because they fulfill Greek men’s fantasy of a world in which women contribute to the household but do not threaten it with their sexual appetite.

A tension between labor-intensive process and spontaneous emergence defines Hesiodic preoccupations with materiality and poetics. This tension is readily seen in the coexistence of the two plows that Hesiod recommends his addressee “store up in the house, one of a single-piece (αὐτόγυον) and the other fit together (πηκτόν), since it is much better (πολὺ λώιον) this way” (v. 433).

This paper examines the ambivalent relationship between immortality and the body as expressed through the Greek myths of Prometheus and Chiron, with a special focus on the meaning of the wounded body. In the poetry of Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Pindar, Prometheus and Chiron are presented as divine yet liminal figures, civilizers who pass knowledge and the means for living to mortals.

In its extensive description of Heracles' shield, the Hesiodic Aspis shows a remarkable preoccupation with motion and time. Near the end of the ekphrasis, the poem portrays a chariot race in which the charioteers have an 'eternal labor' (aidion...ponon 310) and 'unawarded prize' (akriton...aethlon 311), and the 'victory is never achieved' (oude pote...nikê epênusthê 310-11).

A didactic kettle of fish? Literary dimensions of Marcellus’ De Piscibus (GDRK 63)

The importance of birth within the genealogies of the Theogony has long been recognized (e.g. Angier 1964; West 1967; Arthur 1982; Thalmann 1984; Clay 2003; Scully 2015). As a primary catalyst of both cosmological and narrative development, birth provides the activity necessary to populate the physical and poetic landscape, moving the cosmos from formlessness to particularity by the mingling of both bodies and words.