Review
"...an excellent scholarly book abounding in insights and informed by a vast scholarship. Highly recommended." Choice
"Clay's valuable book should become essential reading on Hesiod and archaic Greek poetry." New England Classical Journal
"This is a virtuoso performance by a scholar whose knowledge of Hesiod few can match. It is a book that first-time readers of Hesiod, including students, can profit from, while it challenges recent critical and scholaraly perspectives." Classical World, Robert Lamberton, Washington University in St. Louis
"passionate, well-argued, deeply researched, driven by fresh perspectives which will challenge, provoke and excite" - Stephen Scully, Department of Classical Studies, Boston University
Book Description
In his two poems, the Theogony and the Works and Days, Hesiod, who was roughly contemporary with Homer, does not describe the deeds of the heroes but provides the earliest systematic and comprehensive account of the genesis of the Greek gods and the nature of human life that became the foundation for all later Greek literature and philosophy. Hesiod's Cosmos reveals the unity of his vision by reading the two poems as complementary halves of a whole embracing the divine and human cosmos.