| The dissertation on The Other Poet sets out to show how the concept Hesiod was used in several Greek texts throughout the centuries. Its main goal is not so much to find out how ancient authors thought about Hesiod, or how they reconstructed his persona, but rather how they deployed the poet in their own (often literary-critical) discourse. The research hypothesis is that among the many factors determining the applicability of Hesiod in a certain text, one of the most important is his relationship with the concept of Homer. Hesiod occupies a unique place in the Greek experience because he is the only poet who can be compared to the great Homer (same age, same genre). It will be argued in the dissertation that the applicability of Hesiod depends to a large extent on his relationship with his fellow-epic poet. This hypothesis allows for the distinction of three different manifestations of Hesiod in later texts: a Hesiod who is depicted together with and comparable to Homer (chapter 1), a Hesiod who appears on his own (chapter 2), and a Hesiod who is represented as the opposite of Homer (chapter 3). The basic hypothesis underlying the first chapter is that the two poets, when they are represented as similar or interchangeable , mostly appear as the (moral) educators of the Greeks, whether the later authors are happy with that or not. The second chapter is about the use of the concept Hesiod on its own, so without the influence of the concept Homer. This chapter will be concerned with the characteristic quality of Hesiod in the field of poetry, philosophy and ethics; it will also show that Hesiod, when on his own, features in very different texts and is deployed to very different ends than when he is presented together with Homer. Finally, it will be shown in the third and last chapter how Hesiod is sometimes conceived as Homer s opposite, and how this antithesis functions within familiar conceptual oppositions as that between nomos and physis, and democracy and monarchy. The dissertation will thus demonstrate that Hesiod was seen and used as the second first poet of Greece, who resembles Homer enough to count as an ancient authority but differs enough from him to articulate all kinds of (un-Homeric) dissenting voices. Because of its productive relationship with the concept Homer , Hesiod thus appears as a polyvalent concept that can be employed in Greek texts in many different ways. |
