The most available translations of Hesiod are M. L. West, Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days (Oxford: 1988) and A. N. Athanassakis, Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Shield (Baltimore: 1983). Serious engagement with the Hesiodic poems must begin with M. L. West’s commentaries: Hesiod Theogony (Oxford: 1966) and Hesiod Works and Days (Oxford: 1978). For a general orientation and bibliography, see J. Strauss Clay, Hesiod’s Cosmos (Cambridge: 2003). C. G. Thomas, Finding People in Early Greece, Fordyce Mitchel Memorial Lectures 2 (Columbia, MO: 2005), pp. 88-127, deals with Hesiod’s background. F. Blaise, P. Judet de la Combe and P. Rousseau, (eds.), LeMetier du Mythe: Lecture d’Hesiode (Lille: 1996), offer a stimulating collection of essays on Hesiod. For discussions of Hesiod’s rhetorical principles and practices as well as his place in the history of rhetoric, see, in addition to the handbooks, J. Walker, Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford: 2000), Chapter 1 and J. Kirby, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics in Hesiod’, Ramus 21 (1990), pp. 34-60, who both view Hesiod as an important forerunner for later Greek rhetorical theory. M. Gagarin, ‘The Poetry of Justice’, Ramus 21 (1990), pp. 61-78, argues for dike as a speech act; see also P. Pucci, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore: 1977), R. P. Martin, ‘Hesiod, Odysseus and the Instruction of Princes’, TAPA 114 (1984), pp. 29-48 and F. Solmsen, ‘The ‘‘Gift’’ of Speech in Homer and Hesiod’, TAPA 85 (1954), pp. 1-15. On the rhetoric of the Works and Days, see my ‘The Education of Perses: From Mega Nepios to Dion Genos and Back’, MD 31 (1993) pp. 23-33 and J.-U. Schmidt, Adressat und Paraineseform: Zur Intention von Hesiods ‘Werken und Tagen’, Hypomnemata 86 (Gottingen: 1986), and most recently, C. Calame, Masks of Authority: Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Poetics (Ithaca: 2005), pp. 36-54.
World History
