(Great) Works & (Long) Days: Hesiod in Reception M. D. USHER Homer famously describes rosy-fingered Dawn as “early born” (ἠριγένεια): ἦμος δ᾿ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς . . . Given its many iterations in both Iliad and Odyssey, this is perhaps one of the most memorable lines from Greek epic among those who have read only Homer’s poems, and only in English. But elsewhere in classical epic Dawn also arises early—from the lapping streams of Ocean, for example, or the perfumed bed of her paramour Tithonous—to shower the world with streams of light. Vergil captures the image well (and with considerable irony) in his deft imitation describing the dawning of two fateful days in Dido’s Carthage: Oceanum interea surgens Aurora reliquit. (Aeneid 4.129) . . . . . et iam prima novo spargebat lumine terras Tithoni croceum linquens Aurora cubile. (Aeneid 4.584-85) Hesiod, too, gives Erigeneia her due. In the Theogony, she births first the mythological winds: Zephyrus, Boreas, Notos— figures worthy of a study of reception in their own right owing to their pervasive presence in literature of the Western canon, not least in Poliziano’s ecphrasis on a depiction of Venus on Stephen Scully, Hesiod’s Theogony: From Near Eastern Creation Myths to Paradise Lost. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xi + 268 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-025396-7. arion 24.3 winter 2017 the doors of that goddess’s fantasy castle (Stanze per la Giostra 1.97–104), which our author, Stephen Scully, observes “marks the first serious engagement with any aspect of the Theogony in well over a thousand years” prior to that point, serving as the inspiration for Botticelli’s sumptuous masterpiece , the Birth of Venus.1 That may be true. Though it must be said, not noted by our author, that there is more than a whiff of influence here, not from Hesiod, but from Homeric Hymn No. 6 to Aphrodite, published in Florence in 1488 with Chalcondylas’ editio princeps of Homer. In Hesiod’s account, no wind blows at the birth—or Advent—of Aphrodite. In the Homeric Hymn, in Poliziano, and in Botticelli, on the other hand, it is a prominent feature. (Zephyr’s puffy cheeks in Botticelli doth attest.) It was not for nothing, apparently, that Chalcondylas was Poliziano’s tutor in ancient Greek. And No. 6 is a perfect student text—elegant, representative of the genre, and only 21 lines long. But that is just a quibble, and one of the things that makes reception studies, Scully’s topic, so enjoyable, like a whodunit thriller. What is beyond dispute , however, to return to our primary source, is that Hesiod ’s Dawn next gives birth to the eponymous Morning Star, (great) WORKS & (long) DAYS: hesiod in reception 164 Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus. Scala / Art Resource, NY. Eosphoros (“Bringer of Dawn”), and all the other shining lights of heaven (Theogony 378-82). The following remarks on Scully’s book on Hesiod’s Theogony are, in contrast to the Greek Dawn, “late-born,” ὀψίγονος, perhaps even an epiphenomenon, for Scully’s work has already received the positive attention it deserves in the usual venues. But it provides an occasion, as all good books do, for thoughts of one’s own. Such an impulse, as it happens , is itself wholly Hesiodic. In the Works & Days, which as Scully duly notes has been by far the more popular poem through the ages, Hesiod says that “the best man of all is one who thinks about everything for himself” (πανάριστος ὃς αὐτῷ πάντα νοήσει)—a person who takes a long view, “mulling over what is better in the end” (φρασσάμενος . . . ἐς τέλος . . . ἀμείνω). And yet “Good, too,” Hesiod concedes, “is he who listens to words well-spoken by another” (ἐσθλὸς δ᾿ αὖ καὶ κεῖνος, ὃς εὖ εἰπόντι πίθηται; lines 293–95). Lilah Grace Canevaro takes this complementary disposition of intellectual independence and teachability as the starting point for her engaging study of the Works & Days, subtitled How to Teach Self-sufficiency (Oxford 2015), revealing it as a core strategy of Hesiodic poetics and self-presentation. “In the Works and Days,” she writes, “Hesiod responds to and engages with his Theogony, recasting his relationship to the Muses, refining his moral landscape, and refocusing his myths in order to mark out the poem as a new (independent) didactic project—and himself a new (independent...