Hesiod
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Natalie stands up for the prize-winning Greek poet, cataloguer of gods and author of a flatpack wagon manual, Hesiod. She's joined by Professor Edith Hall and poet Alicia Stallings.
Hesiod is highly regarded by the ancients for his sublime poetry, and he won a prize for his Theogony, a detailed account of the origins of the gods. He also wrote a farming manual, including the wagon-building instructions, and an epic on how to pickle fish. Hesiod rails at the hardship of the farming life in autobiographical references in his poems: he is not a fan of his home town of Ascra in ancient Boeotia, and he describes being cold and hungry at low points in the year.
'Rock star mythologist’ and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. Here she explores key stories from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They might be biographical, topographical, mythological or epic, but they are always hilarious, magical and tragic, mystifying and revelatory. And they tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.
Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:06.0 | Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for Hesiod. |
| 0:09.0 | So Hesiod is one of the earliest poets whose work survives to us. |
| 0:25.9 | He's from the late 8th, maybe early 7th century BCE. |
| 0:29.9 | So he's roughly contemporary with Homer, maybe a little bit earlier, maybe a little bit later, we're not sure. |
| 0:35.9 | He wrote a bunch of poems, but two that |
| 0:38.0 | survived to us, specifically the Theogony and the Works and Days. And both of them, in case you're thinking, since we did a whole show on the Iliad and a whole show on The Odyssey, are a lot shorter than Homeric poems, which is very good news for those of us who are trying to learn them. So the theogony is just over a thousand lines |
| 0:36.1 | and works in days just over 800. |
| 0:38.4 | The ancients really pried very good news for those of us who are trying to learn them. So the Theogony is just over a thousand lines |
| 0:54.6 | and works in days just over 800. The ancients really prized both of these poets. They considered |
| 1:00.6 | Homer to be the most sublime and Hesiod to be the most sweet. I'm not always sure I find |
| 1:06.8 | Hesiod sweet, but we're going to give it a go to prove it tonight that he might be seen that way. |
| 1:11.8 | He's a hugely influential poet. |
| 1:14.0 | So when Virgil composed the Georgics in the first century BC, so that's 700-ish years after Hesiod, |
| 1:21.7 | he says he wants to sing Askra's song through Roman towns. |
| 1:27.3 | That is a reference to Hesiod, who, unlike Homer, |
| 1:31.9 | gives us some autobiographical details in his poetry. For example, that he lives in a small village |
| 1:39.0 | in Biosha, mainland Greece, called Askra. He tells us, amongst other things, that his dad was a merchant |
| 1:47.1 | sailor. His dad gave it up, though, to settle into farming because he wasn't making enough money |
| 1:52.1 | as a sailor. Heesiod doesn't follow him onto the sea. He follows him onto the land. Heesiod |
| 1:57.0 | claims he's only ever taken one sea voyage. He didn't like it. Didn't do it again. Best not. He didn't really like very many things, to be honest with you. But he particularly didn't like a sea voyage. He tends sheep, a noble profession. I think we can all agree, except nine people don't agree. Specifically nine, not just nine people in this room. More to come in a second. He has farming advice for you if you want it, but he is also |
| 2:20.0 | a prize-winning poet, not my words, his words. Would you please welcome to the stage my special |
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