Hesiod

and philology and loss of meaning

Dear Herodotus,

I am back in class again and among friends; some old, many new. My tutor teaches the Greek language as if it were a song that pierced her heart; Poetry being her lot chosen before the dawn of time.

I think it's safe to say that I've found "my subject". No detail is too tedious, because all is Beautiful; anything challenging feels like a dance that I MUST join in at the earliest possible beat. Just seeing a single Greek letter can draw out a sigh from me, like a mother gazing upon her infant.

Eros has smote me, dearest H!

After many interrupted attempts, I was finally able to read through Hesiod's Theogony. The wonder-child of your namesake, H, tells me that all I need to know of Greek civilization is right there in Homer and Hesiod! And boy, did I feel that after reading Hesiod. He wrote of the vast cosmos of the Ancient Greek world, in which I recognized only a few of the stars. I know as I revisit this text over the years, more and more will become familiar to me. To navigate such beauty is a dream!

It is said that Hesiod's name could have been etymologically derived from words meaning "He who speaks delightfully" or "I will set a road/a way". Being the blessed willing vessel of the Muses, and his works being one of the oldest surviving, I would say he fulfilled such a destiny. Commentators have said his name holds no real particular significance. Well, it's just like the moderns to say that something (especially as inherent as a NAME) has no meaning. Heaven's splendor! Hesiod was a poet of one of the most nuanced languages known to man; a poet among the times in which civilizations balanced on the razor's edge by dreams, oracles, and honoring the divine.

As the philologist Professor Ransom points out, there is no mere coincidence. In our earthly understanding, two sounds being similar may seem to have no connection; but we do not have access to the expansive pattern that without which connections are lost. I agree, as he does with the philosophers of old, there is no such thing as chance.

Well, I must be off to translate a passage about Plato’s Cave!

xoxo,

Penelope ✨

Hesiod and the Muse by Gustav Moreau

"Such is the Muses' holy gift to men. For while it is from the Muses and far-shooting Apollo that men are singers and citharists on earth, and from Zeus that they are kings, every man is fortunate whom the Muses love; the voice flows sweet from his lips. Though a man's heart be withered with the grief of a recent bereavement, if then a singer, a servant of the Muses, sings of the famous deeds of men of old, and of the blessed gods who dwell in Olympus, he soon forgets his sorrows and thinks no more of his family troubles, quickly diverted by the goddesses' gifts." -Hesiod’s Theogony