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89-414: Hesiod ( / ˈ h iː s i ə d / HEE -see-əd or / ˈ h ɛ s i ə d / HEH -see-əd ; ‹See Tfd› Greek : Ἡσίοδος Hēsíodos ; fl.   c. 700 BC ) was an ancient Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer . Several of Hesiod's works have survived in their entirety. Among these are Theogony , which tells

178-577: A Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language . Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages . The Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered

267-577: A basis for coinages: anthropology , photography , telephony , isomer , biomechanics , cinematography , etc. Together with Latin words , they form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary ; for example, all words ending in -logy ('discourse'). There are many English words of Greek origin . Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian , which, by most accounts,

356-417: A deep interest in a wide range of 'philosophical' issues, from the nature of divine justice to the beginnings of human society. Aristotle ( Metaphysics 983b–987a) believed that the question of first causes may even have started with Hesiod ( Theogony 116–53) and Homer ( Iliad 14.201, 246). He viewed the world from outside the charmed circle of aristocratic rulers, protesting against their injustices in

445-508: A faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill . The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase ( majuscule ) and lowercase ( minuscule ) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word: In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs : three different accent marks ( acute , grave , and circumflex ), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on

534-776: A few details of his life. There are three explicit references in Works and Days , as well as some passages in his Theogony , that support inferences made by scholars. The former poem says that his father came from Cyme in Aeolis (on the coast of Anatolia , a little south of the island of Lesbos ) and crossed the sea to settle at a hamlet near Thespiae in Boeotia named Ascra , "a cursed place, cruel in winter, hard in summer, never pleasant" ( Works 640). Hesiod's patrimony ( property inherited from one's father or male ancestor ) in Ascra,

623-477: A girl's brothers and murdered in reprisal despite his advanced age while the true culprit (his Milesian fellow-traveler) managed to escape. Greeks in the late 5th and early 4th centuries BC considered their oldest poets to be Orpheus , Musaeus , Hesiod and Homer —in that order. Thereafter, Greek writers began to consider Homer earlier than Hesiod. Devotees of Orpheus and Musaeus were probably responsible for precedence being given to their two cult heroes and maybe

712-522: A heroic age between the last two, representing its warlike men as better than their bronze predecessors. He seems in this case to be catering to two different world-views, one epic and aristocratic, the other unsympathetic to the heroic traditions of the aristocracy. The Theogony is commonly considered Hesiod's earliest work. Despite the different subject matter between this poem and the Works and Days , most scholars, with some notable exceptions, believe that

801-535: A hive. In the horror of the triumph of violence over hard work and honor, verses describing the "Golden Age" present the social character and practice of nonviolent diet through agriculture and fruit-culture as a higher path of living sufficiently. In addition to the Theogony and Works and Days , numerous other poems were ascribed to Hesiod during antiquity. Modern scholarship has doubted their authenticity, and these works are generally referred to as forming part of

890-590: A lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms , for most of their history. Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population. It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish ) and

979-400: A limited but productive system of compounding and a rich inflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in the nominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by

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1068-460: A lot of formulaic phrases that are not found in Homer, which indicates that he may have been writing within a different tradition. Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized :  Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized :  Hellēnikḗ ) is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within

1157-456: A major source on Greek mythology , farming techniques, early economic thought, Archaic Greek astronomy , cosmology , and ancient time-keeping . The dating of Hesiod's life is a contested issue in scholarly circles ( see § Dating below ). Epic narrative allowed poets such as Homer no opportunity for personal revelations. However Hesiod's extant work comprises several didactic poems in which he went out of his way to let his audience in on

1246-459: A mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels and a fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts . The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details): In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes ,

1335-717: A professor at Harvard University. Since 2000, he has been the director of the Center for Hellenic Studies , a Harvard-affiliated research institution in Washington, D.C. He is the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative literature at Harvard, and continues to teach half-time at the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts . From 1994 to 2000, he served as Chair of

1424-464: A proto-historical perspective in Hesiod, a view rejected by Paul Cartledge , for example, on the grounds that Hesiod advocates a not-forgetting without any attempt at verification. Hesiod has also been considered the father of gnomic verse . He had "a passion for systematizing and explaining things". Ancient Greek poetry in general had strong philosophical tendencies and Hesiod, like Homer, demonstrates

1513-481: A quest for immortal fame since poets in his era had probably no such notions for themselves. However some scholars suspect the presence of large-scale changes in the text and attribute it to oral transmission. Possibly he composed his verses during idle times on the farm, in the spring before the May harvest or the dead of winter. The personality behind the poems is unsuited to the kind of "aristocratic withdrawal" typical of

1602-404: A rhapsode but is instead "argumentative, suspicious, ironically humorous, frugal, fond of proverbs, wary of women." He was in fact a " misogynist " of the same calibre as the later poet Semonides . He resembles Solon in his preoccupation with issues of good versus evil and "how a just and all-powerful god can allow the unjust to flourish in this life". He recalls Aristophanes in his rejection of

1691-492: A slave boy to cover the seed (441–6), a female servant to keep house (405, 602) and working teams of oxen and mules (405, 607f.). One modern scholar surmises that Hesiod may have learned about world geography, especially the catalogue of rivers in Theogony (337–45), listening to his father's accounts of his own sea voyages as a merchant. The father probably spoke in the Aeolian dialect of Cyme but Hesiod probably grew up speaking

1780-400: A small piece of ground at the foot of Mount Helicon , occasioned lawsuits with his brother Perses , who at first seems to have cheated him of his rightful share thanks to corrupt authorities or ‘kings’ but later became impoverished and ended up scrounging from the thrifty poet ( Works 35, 396). Unlike his father Hesiod was averse to sea travel, but he once crossed the narrow strait between

1869-460: A state of diglossia : the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki , the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa , meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed in the early 19th century that

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1958-462: A tone of voice that has been described as having a "grumpy quality redeemed by a gaunt dignity" but, as stated in the biography section, he could also change to suit the audience. This ambivalence appears to underlie his presentation of human history in Works and Days , where he depicts a golden period when life was easy and good, followed by a steady decline in behaviour and happiness through the silver, bronze, and Iron Ages – except that he inserts

2047-1002: Is sometimes called aljamiado , as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek: Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet : Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: Proto-Greek Mycenaean Ancient Koine Medieval Modern Gregory Nagy Nagy received his A.B. from Indiana University in 1962 in classics and linguistics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1966 in classical philology . Since 1966, he has been

2136-763: Is still used internationally for the writing of Ancient Greek . In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Greek the comma also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι ( ó,ti , 'whatever') from ότι ( óti , 'that'). Ancient Greek texts often used scriptio continua ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries. Boustrophedon , or bi-directional text,

2225-632: Is to modern spoken English ". Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near the Greek-Albanian border. A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in

2314-487: Is transmitted intact via a medieval manuscript tradition. Classical authors also attributed to Hesiod a lengthy genealogical poem known as Catalogue of Women or Ehoiai (because sections began with the Greek words ē hoiē, "Or like the one who ..."). It was a mythological catalogue of the mortal women who had mated with gods, and of the offspring and descendants of these unions. Several additional hexameter poems were ascribed to Hesiod: In addition to these works,

2403-562: The British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of the membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages . Greek is recognized as a minority language in Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts of Gjirokastër and Sarandë . It is also an official minority language in

2492-657: The European canon . Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world , the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute the objects of study of the discipline of Classics . During antiquity , Greek

2581-494: The Homeridae were responsible in later antiquity for promoting Homer at Hesiod's expense. The first known writers to locate Homer earlier than Hesiod were Xenophanes and Heraclides Ponticus , though Aristarchus of Samothrace was the first actually to argue the case. Ephorus made Homer a younger cousin of Hesiod, the 5th century BC historian Herodotus ( Histories II, 53) evidently considered them near-contemporaries, and

2670-516: The Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ), but little definitive evidence has been found. In addition, Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with other extinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termed Palaeo-Balkan , and Greek has a central position in it. Linear B , attested as early as

2759-522: The Shield of Heracles (see Hesiod's Greek below). Moreover, they both refer to the same version of the Prometheus myth. Yet even these authentic poems may include interpolations. For example, the first ten verses of the Works and Days may have been borrowed from an Orphic hymn to Zeus (they were recognised as not the work of Hesiod by critics as ancient as Pausanias). Some scholars have detected

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2848-452: The Suda lists an otherwise unknown "dirge for Batrachus, [Hesiod's] beloved". Portrait of Hesiod from Augusta Treverorum ( Trier ), from the end of the 3rd century AD. The mosaic is signed in its central field by the maker, 'MONNUS FECIT' ('Monnus made this'). The figure is identified by name: 'ESIO-DVS' ('Hesiod'). It is the only known authenticated portrait of Hesiod. The Roman bronze bust,

2937-780: The United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout the Eastern Mediterranean , in what are today Southern Italy , Turkey , Cyprus , Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Palestine , Egypt , and Libya ; in the area of the Black Sea , in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria , Romania , Ukraine , Russia , Georgia , Armenia , and Azerbaijan ; and, to

3026-481: The conventional metre and language of epic. However, the Shield of Heracles is now known to be spurious and probably was written in the sixth century BC. Many ancient critics also rejected Theogony (e.g., Pausanias 9.31.3), even though Hesiod mentions himself by name in that poem. Theogony and Works and Days might be very different in subject matter, but they share a distinctive language, metre, and prosody that subtly distinguish them from Homer's work and from

3115-468: The genitive ). The verbal system has lost the infinitive , the synthetically -formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood . Many have been replaced by periphrastic ( analytical ) forms. Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual , and plural in the ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in

3204-417: The syntax of Greek have remained constant: verbs agree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact (nominative for subjects and predicates, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for possessors), articles precede nouns, adpositions are largely prepositional, relative clauses follow the noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However,

3293-503: The "Hesiodic corpus" whether or not their authorship is accepted. The situation is summed up in this formulation by Glenn Most : "Hesiod" is the name of a person; "Hesiodic" is a designation for a kind of poetry, including but not limited to the poems of which the authorship may reasonably be assigned to Hesiod himself. Of these works forming the extended Hesiodic corpus, only the Shield of Heracles ( Ἀσπὶς Ἡρακλέους , Aspis Hērakleous )

3382-566: The 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from Albanian , South Slavic ( Macedonian / Bulgarian ) and Eastern Romance languages ( Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian ). Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include: mathematics , physics , astronomy , democracy , philosophy , athletics , theatre, rhetoric , baptism , evangelist , etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as

3471-661: The 4th century BC sophist Alcidamas in his work Mouseion even brought them together for an imagined poetic ágōn ( ἄγών ), which survives today as the Contest of Homer and Hesiod . Most scholars today agree with Homer's priority but there are good arguments on either side. Hesiod certainly predates the lyric and elegiac poets whose work has come down to the modern era. Imitations of his work have been observed in Alcaeus , Epimenides , Mimnermus , Semonides , Tyrtaeus and Archilochus , from which it has been inferred that

3560-512: The 7th century BC (within a century or so of Hesiod's death), claims that Hesiod lies buried at Orchomenus, a town in Boeotia. According to Aristotle 's Constitution of Orchomenus, when the Thespians ravaged Ascra the villagers sought refuge at Orchomenus, where, following the advice of an oracle, they collected the ashes of Hesiod and set them in a place of honour in their agora , next to

3649-586: The 8th century BC. ( Theogony 337–45). Hesiod mentions a poetry contest at Chalcis in Euboea where the sons of one Amphidamas awarded him a tripod ( Works and Days 654–662). Plutarch identified this Amphidamas with the hero of the Lelantine War between Chalcis and Eretria and he concluded that the passage must be an interpolation into Hesiod's original work, assuming that the Lelantine War

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3738-626: The Classics Department at Harvard University. He was Chair of Harvard's undergraduate Literature Concentration from 1989 to 1994. He served as the president of the American Philological Association in the academic year 1990-1991. From 2015 to 2021, he posted about his work on a frequent basis at his research blog, Classical Inquiries . In 2013 Harvard offered his popular class, The Ancient Greek Hero, which thousands of Harvard students had taken over

3827-544: The Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet , with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit

3916-549: The Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary ), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet. Greek has been written in

4005-505: The Greek mainland and Euboea to participate in funeral celebrations for one Amphidamas of Chalcis and there won a tripod in a singing competition. He also describes meeting the Muses on Mount Helicon , where he had been pasturing sheep, when the goddesses presented him with a laurel staff, a symbol of poetic authority ( Theogony 22–35). Fanciful though the story might seem, the account has led ancient and modern scholars to infer that he

4094-471: The Greek world might have already developed its own versions of them. In spite of Hesiod's complaints about poverty, life on his father's farm could not have been too uncomfortable if Works and Days is anything to judge by, since he describes the routines of prosperous yeomanry rather than peasants. His farmer employs a friend ( Works and Days 370) as well as servants (502, 573, 597, 608, 766), an energetic and responsible ploughman of mature years (469 ff.),

4183-593: The Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece , Cyprus , Italy (in Calabria and Salento ), southern Albania , and other regions of the Balkans , Caucasus , the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor , and the Eastern Mediterranean . It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek

4272-598: The Near East .) Works and Days is a poem of over 800 lines which revolves around two general truths: labour is the universal lot of Man, but he who is willing to work will get by. Scholars have interpreted this work against a background of agrarian crisis in mainland Greece , which inspired a wave of documented colonisations in search of new land. Works and Days may have been influenced by an established tradition of didactic poetry based on Sumerian, Hebrew, Babylonian and Egyptian wisdom literature. This work lays out

4361-777: The Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations , Boston University and chair of the Ilex Foundation, served as Faculty Deans (previously called co-masters) of Currier House at Harvard from 1986 to 1990. Nagy has two brothers in allied fields: Blaise Nagy is a professor emeritus of Classics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts , while Joseph F. Nagy is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Irish Studies in

4450-404: The acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography . After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic orthography (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system),

4539-479: The arrival of Proto-Greeks, some documented in Mycenaean texts ; they include a large number of Greek toponyms . The form and meaning of many words have changed. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian , and Turkish . During the older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from

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4628-643: The conventional dialect of epic verse, which was Ionian. Comparisons with Homer, a native Ionian, can be unflattering. Hesiod's handling of the dactylic hexameter was not as masterful or fluent as Homer's and one modern scholar refers to his "hobnailed hexameters". His use of language and meter in Works and Days and Theogony distinguishes him also from the author of the Shield of Heracles . All three poets, for example, employed digamma inconsistently, sometimes allowing it to affect syllable length and meter, sometimes not. The ratio of observance/neglect of digamma varies between them. The extent of variation depends on how

4717-796: The country. Prior to the Greco-Turkish War and the resulting population exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed in Turkey , though very few remain today. A small Greek-speaking community is also found in Bulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek diaspora which has notable communities in the United States , Australia , Canada , South Africa , Chile , Brazil , Argentina , Russia , Ukraine ,

4806-432: The countryside entertaining people with a narrative about himself if the account was known to be fictitious. Gregory Nagy , on the other hand, sees both Pérsēs ("the destroyer" from πέρθω , pérthō ) and Hēsíodos ("he who emits the voice" from ἵημι , híēmi and αὐδή , audḗ ) as fictitious names for poetical personae . It might seem unusual that Hesiod's father migrated from Anatolia westwards to mainland Greece,

4895-441: The dative led to a rise of prepositional indirect objects (and the use of the genitive to directly mark these as well). Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO. Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before

4984-402: The definite article associated with digamma, oἱ. Though typical of epic, his vocabulary features some significant differences from Homer's. One scholar has counted 278 un-Homeric words in Works and Days , 151 in Theogony and 95 in Shield of Heracles . The disproportionate number of un-Homeric words in W & D is due to its un-Homeric subject matter. Hesiod's vocabulary also includes quite

5073-528: The earliest forms attested to four in the modern language). Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun. The inflectional categories of the Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history but with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for: Many aspects of

5162-521: The evidence is collected and interpreted but there is a clear trend, revealed for example in the following set of statistics. Hesiod does not observe digamma as often as the others do. That result is a bit counter-intuitive since digamma was still a feature of the Boeotian dialect that Hesiod probably spoke, whereas it had already vanished from the Ionic vernacular of Homer. This anomaly can be explained by

5251-412: The extent that one can speak of a new language emerging. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language. It is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, " Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English

5340-509: The fact that Hesiod made a conscious effort to compose like an Ionian epic poet at a time when digamma was not heard in Ionian speech, while Homer tried to compose like an older generation of Ionian bards, when it was heard in Ionian speech. There is also a significant difference in the results for Theogony and Works and Days , but that is merely due to the fact that the former includes a catalog of divinities and therefore it makes frequent use of

5429-417: The five Ages of Man , as well as containing advice and wisdom, prescribing a life of honest labour and attacking idleness and unjust judges (like those who decided in favour of Perses ) as well as the practice of usury. It describes immortals who roam the earth watching over justice and injustice. The poem regards labor as the source of all good, in that both gods and men hate the idle, who resemble drones in

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5518-424: The gods ( theogony ), beginning with Chaos , Gaia , Tartarus and Eros , and shows a special interest in genealogy . Embedded in Greek myth , there remain fragments of quite variant tales, hinting at the rich variety of myth that once existed, city by city; but Hesiod's retelling of the old stories became, according to Herodotus , the accepted version that linked all Hellenes . It's the earliest known source for

5607-405: The idealised hero of epic literature in favour of an idealized view of the farmer. Yet the fact that he could eulogize kings in Theogony (80 ff., 430, 434) and denounce them as corrupt in Works and Days suggests that he could resemble whichever audience he composed for. Various legends accumulated about Hesiod and they are recorded in several sources: Two different—yet early—traditions record

5696-449: The language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to the modern period. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it. Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows

5785-440: The last few decades, through edX as a massive open online course . To assist Professor Nagy, Harvard appealed to alumni to volunteer as online mentors and discussion group managers. About 10 former teaching fellows have also volunteered. The task of the volunteers is to focus online class discussion on the course material. The course had 27,000 students registered. Nagy and his wife, Olga Davidson, Research Fellow, Institute for

5874-467: The late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek. It is basically a syllabary , which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A , has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language). The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek , is the earliest known form of Greek. Another similar system used to write

5963-467: The latest possible date for him is about 650 BC. An upper limit of 750 BC is indicated by a number of considerations, such as the probability that his work was written down, the fact that he mentions a sanctuary at Delphi that was of little national significance before c. 750 BC ( Theogony 499), and he lists rivers that flow into the Euxine , a region explored and developed by Greek colonists beginning in

6052-417: The local Boeotian, belonging to the same dialect group. However whilst his poetry features some Aeolisms there are no words that are certainly Boeotian. His basic language was the main literary dialect of the time, Homer's Ionian . It is probable that Hesiod wrote his poems down, or dictated them, rather than passing them on orally, as rhapsodes did—otherwise: the pronounced personality that now emerges from

6141-452: The many other countries of the Greek diaspora . Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary . Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is

6230-465: The morphological changes also have their counterparts in the syntax, and there are also significant differences between the syntax of the ancient and that of the modern form of the language . Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, and the modern variety lacks the infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of

6319-747: The myths of Pandora , Prometheus and the Golden Age . The creation myth in Hesiod has long been held to have Eastern influences, such as the Hittite Song of Kumarbi and the Babylonian Enuma Elis . This cultural crossover may have occurred in the eighth- and ninth-century Greek trading colonies such as Al Mina in North Syria . (For more discussion, read Robin Lane Fox 's Travelling Heroes and Peter Walcot's Hesiod and

6408-800: The opposite direction to most colonial movements at the time, and Hesiod himself gives no explanation for it. However, around 750 BC or a little later, there was a migration of seagoing merchants from his original home in Cyme in Anatolia to Cumae in Campania (a colony they shared with the Euboeans), and possibly his move west had something to do with that, since Euboea is not far from Boeotia , where he eventually established himself and his family. The family association with Aeolian Cyme might explain his familiarity with Eastern myths, evident in his poems, though

6497-593: The origins of the gods, their lineages, and the events that led to Zeus 's rise to power, and Works and Days , a poem that describes the five Ages of Man , offers advice and wisdom, and includes myths such as Pandora's box . Hesiod is generally regarded by Western authors as 'the first written poet in the Western tradition to regard himself as an individual persona with an active role to play in his subject.' Ancient authors credited Hesiod and Homer with establishing Greek religious customs. Modern scholars refer to him as

6586-401: The poems would surely have been diluted through oral transmission from one rhapsode to another. Pausanias asserted that Boeotians showed him an old tablet made of lead on which the Works were engraved. If he did write or dictate, it was perhaps as an aid to memory or because he lacked confidence in his ability to produce poems extempore, as trained rhapsodes could do. It certainly was not in

6675-643: The regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , Greek is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia, Hungary , Romania, and Ukraine. It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne . The phonology , morphology , syntax , and vocabulary of

6764-642: The site of Hesiod's grave. One, as early as Thucydides , reported in Plutarch, the Suda and John Tzetzes, states that the Delphic oracle warned Hesiod that he would die in Nemea , and so he fled to Locris , where he was killed at the local temple to Nemean Zeus, and buried there. This tradition follows a familiar ironic convention: the oracle predicts accurately after all. The other tradition, first mentioned in an epigram by Chersias of Orchomenus written in

6853-502: The so-called Pseudo-Seneca , of the late first century BC found at Herculaneum is now thought not to be of Seneca the Younger . It has been identified by Gisela Richter as an imagined portrait of Hesiod. In fact, it has been recognized since 1813 that the bust was not of Seneca when an inscribed herma portrait of Seneca with quite different features was discovered. Most scholars now follow Richter's identification. Hesiod employed

6942-437: The stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks ( rough and smooth breathing ), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis , used to mark the full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in handwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of

7031-531: The tomb of Minyas , their eponymous founder. Eventually they came to regard Hesiod too as their "hearth-founder" ( οἰκιστής , oikistēs ). Later writers attempted to harmonize these two accounts. Yet another account taken from classical sources, cited by author Charles Abraham Elton in his Remains of Hesiod the Ascræan, Including the Shield of Hercules by Hesiod , depicts Hesiod as being falsely accused of rape by

7120-426: The two works were written by the same man. As M. L. West writes, "Both bear the marks of a distinct personality: a surly, conservative countryman, given to reflection, no lover of women or life, who felt the gods' presence heavy about him." An example: Hateful strife bore painful Toil, Neglect, Starvation, and tearful Pain, Battles, Combats... The Theogony concerns the origins of the world ( cosmogony ) and of

7209-574: Was a distinct dialect of Greek itself. Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regards Phrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexical isoglosses , with some being exclusive between them. Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian ) or

7298-557: Was also used in Ancient Greek. Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin script , especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics . The term Frankolevantinika / Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (because Frankos / Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe

7387-556: Was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world . It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek . In its modern form , Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union . It is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey , and

7476-486: Was not a professionally trained rhapsode or he would have been presented with a lyre instead. Some scholars have seen Perses as a literary creation, a foil for the moralizing that Hesiod develops in Works and Days , but there are also arguments against that theory. For example, it is quite common for works of moral instruction to have an imaginative setting as a means of getting the audience's attention, but it could be difficult to see how Hesiod could have traveled around

7565-430: Was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary . The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin , Cyrillic , Coptic , Gothic , and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in

7654-699: Was too late for Hesiod. Modern scholars have accepted his identification of Amphidamas but disagreed with his conclusion. The date of the war is not known precisely but estimates placing it around 730–705 BC fit the estimated chronology for Hesiod. In that case, the tripod that Hesiod won might have been awarded for his rendition of Theogony , a poem that seems to presuppose the kind of aristocratic audience he would have met at Chalcis. Three works have survived which were attributed to Hesiod by ancient commentators: Works and Days , Theogony , and Shield of Heracles . Only fragments exist of other works attributed to him. The surviving works and fragments were all written in

7743-580: Was under the control of the Frankish Empire ). Frankochiotika / Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios . Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications. The Latin script is nowadays used by the Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy . The Yevanic dialect

7832-637: Was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth to Standard Modern Greek , used today for all official purposes and in education . The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language are often emphasized. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to

7921-673: Was written by Romaniote and Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using the Hebrew Alphabet . In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado , some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet . The same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina . This also happened among Arabic-speaking Byzantine rite Christians in the Levant ( Lebanon , Palestine, and Syria ). This usage

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