Shepherd, farmer, poet, sophist: Hesiod on his own reception

This chapter argues that Hesiod shapes the history of his own reception by way of an elaborate biographical narrative, leading his readers from a conception of knowledge as Muse-inspired poetry in the Theogony, to one that centres on the human world and which must be acquired through reflection and personal experience, in the Works and Days. This vision of intellectual progress informed the reception of Hesiod in classical Athens, and may also have had a role in the wider intellectual developments of the 5th and 4th centuries BC.