Book #5 – Theogony by Hesiod, trans. by Norman O. Brown
A re-read on my part. I’m reading Jack Holland’s Misogyny which begins the history of the prejudice with Pandora. I seemed to have mis-remembered the whole Pandora episode despite several Classics classes in college, so I plucked my edition of Theogony from the shelf for a quick refresher.
Impressions: More boring than I remembered it. I’m probably munging it together with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I recall as being a bit sexier. Due to Brown’s introduction, I do have a greater respect for the difficulties of plucking what is the original text from what was added in by later writers. Hesiod’s Works and Days might be an interesting read too. I also forget just how whacked classical myths are. For example. From the standpoint of a writer building a world and the cultures within that world, I tend to try and make everything sensible, to make myths that make sense to a modern reader’s sensibility. And those myths come out sounding false, because classical myths are based in a mindset that is pretty alien to me (to most people). Getting into such a mindset is difficult.
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Taking work up to the mall today. I’d like to get the galley done today.