21 How to Succeed in the Iron Age w/ Alicia Stallings
Ancient Greece Declassified
Dr. Lantern Jack
4.8 • 587 Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2019
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Summary
Hesiod's didactic epic Works and Days is probably most famous for containing the stories of Prometheus and Pandora. But these tales are part of a greater mission of explaining how one can live justly and succeed in a harsh world.
Our guest today is widely recognized as having produced the best translation of the Works and Days into English. Alicia Stallings is an acclaimed poet, author, McArthur fellow, and translator of Hesiod and of Lucretius. If you would like to read the Works and Days, get yourself a copy of her translation.
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The intro to this episode was provided by Derek of The Hellenistic Age Podcast, a show exploring the vast arena of cultures impacted by the conquests of Alexander the Great. Check out The Hellenistic Age Podcast on your podcast app or click here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A brief message from a friend of the podcast. |
| 0:02.3 | My name is Derek, and I'm the host of the Hellenistic Age podcast. |
| 0:07.1 | I wish to take you on a tour of the Hellenistic world, born from the conquest of Persia by |
| 0:12.0 | Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, down to the death of Cleopatra, some 300 years later. |
| 0:18.7 | Greek culture was able to spread from the shores of the Italian peninsula as far as the Hindu Kush, |
| 0:24.3 | fusing the local traditions of those who had dwelt there. |
| 0:27.3 | You will meet figures like Menander I, a Greek king of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan turned Buddhist |
| 0:33.1 | or Olympius of Epirus, the most dangerous tiger mom of the Greek world. |
| 0:38.1 | We will go into depth about the many fascinating stories and cultures of this understudied period. |
| 0:43.6 | To find out more about the podcast, you can look me up under iTunes or SoundCloud, |
| 0:47.9 | or head to my website at hellenisticagepodcast.orgpress.com. |
| 1:05.6 | Music age podcast.wordpress.com. Hi. Thanks for tuning in to ancient Greece declassified. |
| 1:08.0 | Episode 21. |
| 1:11.6 | How to succeed in the Iron Age We've spent a fair amount of time on this show |
| 1:17.0 | exploring Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and talking about epics in general, |
| 1:21.2 | of which there are many from the ancient Mediterranean. |
| 1:24.2 | Today we're going to talk about a peculiar genre |
| 1:26.7 | that the ancient Greeks and Romans classified as a kind of epic, but which might not look like epic storytelling to us. |
| 1:33.5 | This genre is called didactic epic. |
| 1:36.3 | Didactic in Greek means instructional or educational. |
| 1:40.1 | Now, just like the good old heroic epics, didactic epics were originally long songs or poems performed by bards in front of live audiences. |
| 1:49.3 | Line after line, these poems flowed in a characteristic rhythmical pattern called dactylic examiner, |
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