The two poems the Greeks set beside Homer: the Works and Days, a farmer’s advice to his feckless brother Perses on work, justice and the seasons, and the Theogony, the birth of the gods from Chaos to the reign of Zeus. The Shield of Heracles, long attributed to him, follows.
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No other book on this shelf shares a run of seven words with Works and Days, Theogony that is not a formula. On the evidence of the wording, nothing here quotes it and it quotes nothing here. That is not proof of isolation — this measure cannot cross a translation, so it finds nothing between Virgil and Homer either — but there is no quotation to show.
Of the sixty counted across the shelf, the ones this book names most. A name is counted wherever it is written, whoever is speaking. Each one has a page of its own listing every chapter, in every book, that carries it.
Translator: Hugh G. Evelyn-White, 1914. Source: Gutenberg 348.
The text here is Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s translation for the Loeb Classical Library, 1914, public domain, from Project Gutenberg ebook 348. His line numbers head each passage; his footnotes, and the fragments and Homeric Hymns printed in the same volume, are not included.
The Shield was doubted as Hesiod’s even in antiquity; it is printed because it came down with his poems.
Public domain, and free to read, copy and quote. Nothing on this page is written by anyone living: the words are the translator’s and the counts are the text’s.