Buch,
Hesiod's Verbal Craft: Studies in Hesiod's Conception of Language and its Ancient Reception
Oxford University Press, (August 2020)
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198807711.001.0001
Zusammenfassung
This study aims to define Hesiod’s place in early Greek intellectual history by exploring a network of issues related to language, knowledge, and authority in Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days. Part I demonstrates how much we can learn about the poet’s craft and his relation to the poetic tradition if we read his etymologies carefully. At the same time, Parts I and II together discuss aspects of the ‘correctness of language’: this correctness does not amount to a naïvely assumed one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified. Correct names and correct language are ‘true’ because they reveal something particular about the concept or entity named as numerous examples have shown. More importantly, however, correct language is imitative of reality, in that language becomes more opaque, ambiguous, and indeterminate as we delve deeper into the exploration of the condicio humana and the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize it in the Works and Days. Part III addresses three moments of Hesiodic reception. Chapter 10 compares the results of Parts I and II (Hesiod’s implicit theory of language and cognition) with the more explicit statements found in early mythographers and genealogists and shows that these later prose authors use discursive techniques similar to Hesiod’s. Chapter 11 demonstrates the importance of Hesiod’s poetry for Plato’s etymological project in the Cratylus. Finally, chapter 12 discusses the ways in which some ancient philologists treat Hesiod as one of their own, an expert reader of poetry who, however, misunderstood the Poet and spun out some of his narratives which he supported through the use of etymology.
