Hellenistic Hesiod

This chapter uses Callimachus’s Aetia, Aratus’s Phaenomena, and Nicander’s Theriaca to explore the intense engagement with Hesiodic poetry in the Hellenistic period. Informed by statistics for explicit references to Hesiod at this time, it asks: Why is this the only period of antiquity in which the Theogony and the Works and Days are considered equally important? Questions of genre and didaxis, of inspiration and knowledge, are set against a backdrop of learned library culture, in order to determine what it really meant in the Hellenistic age to be a scholar-poet. This chapter draws on a recent wave of interest in the ancient reception of Hesiod and considers not only how Hesiodic poetry was used, but also how the potential for that use is embedded in the archaic poems themselves.