Hello, I'm Dominic Green. I'm Life and Arts Editor of Spectator USA and welcome to our weekly Life and Arts podcast.

My guest this week is the poet Alicia Stallings.

Born in Georgia, resident in Athens, this year Stallings has published two collections of verse,

one of them a translation of Hesiod's works and days, and the second, her third volume of verse like. Alicia Stallings, welcome to

Spectator USA. Thank you. So to begin at the beginning with Hissiod, what draws you to him,

other than that he may have been the first poet to have been aware of himself as a poet.

Well, it turns out I'm interested in epic didactic poems.

Of course.

Which are not maybe the most fashionable thing. But I had translated Lucretius, who again is, you know, trying to persuade

with his poem about a philosophy, and Hesiod is part of that tradition. He's sort of the

beginning of that tradition. But I am intrigued with him as the first personality in Western literature. I think nobody really

knows who is first Homer or Hesiod. That's an ancient debate in and of itself. But for the

ancients, Hesiod was the earlier poet. And we can never know who Homer was or whether it's even one person.

But Hesiod talks a lot about himself and gives us the first bio in literature.

Excellent.

And of course, since it's the first bio inin literature, we not only get who his antecedents are and where he grew up, but we get the fact that he won a major prize.

So poetry hasn't really changed that much in this time period.

So one of the difficulties of understanding old poetry is understanding the ambience in which

it was originally written and heard.

And so for that purposes, I've got a field recording of some cicadas recorded at Delphi,

not at the actual temple sites, but in the garden of a nearby

hotel. So before you read the Hesiod, cue the ambience.

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