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Hello, this is Let's Talk About Nits Baby. And I'm your host, Liv, who fucking loves just reading things aloud.

We've had a lot of conversation episodes these past Fridays and we'll have a lot more to come. So today felt like the perfect place to put in a nice simple reading episode.

Plus, while I'm traveling and had to prepare a bunch of things early in my original plans for today's episodes, changed it last minute. So here we are.

I am always looking for more ancient sources to read aloud, particularly those I can read that have translations that are legally available and also, you know, not impossible to understand because they're hundreds of years old.

When I'm back with my travels, I'll likely start some new reading that will take up a bunch of episodes, but for now I need shorter ones. And, well, so enter this particular reading episode.

The shield of Heracles is not one of the most popular epics today. And peak behind the curtain, I have not even read it.

But it was quite popular in the ancient world. It's attributed to Hesiod, but of course, that's probably not true because that attribution was likely done later to make this work seem a bit fancier and because, well, Hesiod was almost certainly not a real person, just like Homer was almost certainly not a real person.

This work, though, provides a bit more of Heracles's endless, endless story, particularly his time in Thessaly.

It's also kind of an ode to Homer, calling back to the long-winded description of the shield that have feistus makes for Achilles in the Iliad, which of course is later called upon again in Virgil's Ineid with the shield that Vulcan makes for NES.

Extensive shields were a bit of a hot topic.

All of the works attributed to Hesiod and Homer come from the just the brilliant and incredible tradition of oral storytelling in the ancient Greek world. This work, the shield of Heracles, fits in with that tradition, something that was sung by traveling bards around the ancient Greek world that grew and changed through time that took on elements and lost others.

I just love the idea of oral tradition so much, just more than anything, honestly.

Eventually, though, these pieces were written down into the versions that we have now, and somewhere down the line, possibly quite late, in the case of this one, this particular epic poem was attributed to Hesiod, and it just kind of stuck.

But in the end, it doesn't matter who did or did not write it, or whether or not they were or not named Hesiod.

It's an ancient epic poem nonetheless, and so it's pretty worthy of our reading, and specifically, my reading it to you.

Just a warning this piece does jump kind of right in. I'm not sure what parts are fragmentary or otherwise, but we just kind of get thrown into the story of Heracles' parents kind of, and so on.

So, I think you'll gather it, you know, or just listen to my voice saying ancient things to you, I guess.

This is the Shield of Heracles, attributed to Hesiod,

translated by Hugh Evelyn White.

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