For decades, Hesiodic studies in English have been reliant on and haunted by the 1966 Theogony commentary of M. West.Footnote ¹ Happily, sixty years later, we have a new full commentary from two expert Hesiodists. The authors declare that their work is ‘not intended to replace West’ (p. vii), but it does replace him in an important way. West’s portrait of Hesiod in his ‘young man’s edition’ of the Theogony (M. West, Hesiod: Theogony [1966], p. viii) as ‘an artisan with his big, awkward fingers … patiently, fascinatedly, imitating the fine seam of the professional tailor’, viz. the presumptively normative Homer (West [1966], p. 73), has constrained many later studies. This new commentary updates the record, showing how Hesiodic practice, considered on its own terms rather than Homer’s, suits the author’s artistic and thematic goals (e.g. pp. 24–7 on catalogues and digressions, pp. 30–1 on anachronies, and p. 33 n. 116 on formulaic diction).

This trait of our authors’ work is particularly important for a ‘Green and Yellow’ commentary, whose ‘primary goal’ is ‘to help graduate and advanced undergraduate students work their way through the text of the Theogony’ (p. vii). In this regard, this commentary neither succeeds nor fails at replacing West’s; it is a different kind of book. I hope that this book, alongside R. Scodel’s forthcoming commentary on the Works and Days in the same series, can power a surge in Hesiodic studies in undergraduate Classics programmes – a welcome development, since Hesiod’s exploration of justice in an unjust world speaks to us ever more clearly. Therefore, I wish to examine this book through the lens of pedagogy.

Both authors are experienced Hesiodists. Their mastery shines through in particular sections of the introduction; we perceive Strauss Clay’s interest in Hesiod’s ‘cosmos’ (pp. 27–9) and his Near Eastern and Indo-European models (pp. 7–11), and Vergados’s on his verbal craft (pp. 32–3). Their joint effort has left a few gaps. Some involve taking for granted the little gobbets of knowledge that a scholar should have but an undergraduate will not, like naming both the Shield of Heracles and the Aspis in a list without clarifying that they are the same thing (p. 6) or naming a certain fragmentary Hesiodic poem in three different ways (pp. 4, 7 and 358), none of which is its canonical English name the Precepts of Chiron. But the authors are generally fair and balanced in their presentation of major themes and appropriately modest when facing the limits of our knowledge of the poem. Setting aside my own suspicion that the Hesiodic poems circulated unwritten longer than our authors seem to credit, on their own terms their conclusions on the fixation of texts (pp. 34–7) are arguable. For example, of three arguments suggesting ‘that Hesiod used writing’, the third holds only ‘if we follow West’ on ‘an oral performance of the Theogony at the funeral games for Alcidamas in Chalkis’ (p. 36). West’s ([1966], p. 45) argument for Theogony’s appropriateness there rests on his transposition of verses within Theog. 429–42; our authors reject this transposition (horsemen go with the games as athletes, not with warfare as cavalrymen); so the case for performance in the wake of the Lelantine War is weaker. Pp. 36–7 would have benefited from more on the physical technology proposed for writing a thousand verses in the seventh century bce (West [1966], p. 48 at least makes suggestions) and from more explanation of the comparison to ‘pre-500 bce’ inscriptions from herders in Attica. Scribbling a verse or two – and in the archaic alphabet, with its poor differentiation of vowel quantity and diphthongs – is different from writing a thousand. However, the section on Hesiodic phonology, inflection, syntax and metre (pp. 38–61) is well considered and accessible. It has a laudable habit of not just naming something, but showing its derivation – useful for exciting the interest and memory of a curious student (see, e.g., pp. 44 on the dative plural, 44 n. 169 on the two stems for inflecting ‘Zeus’, and 48 n. 177 on forms of the infinitive).

The commentary promises great help to its intended audience. The notes are rich in clarifications of idioms, choices among possible meanings, comparanda and parsings of unusual forms. Each narrative or thematic section is introduced with general remarks. (I wish very much that these sections were reflected in the text by indenting their first lines.) Equipped with a rich bibliographyFootnote ² and clear explanations of its topics, the commentary will enable Hesiodic poetry to reach a much wider audience of young Classicists.

The book makes no pretence to be a new edition; it largely follows West (1966), though it diverges in thirty-odd places, often following F. Solmsen’s OCT (1970) instead (pp. 65–6). Our authors make more conservative choices than West, usually successfully. Several of his readings are based on unnecessary conjectures or on such eccentric manuscripts as practically to be conjectures, whereas our authors rely on a broader consensus. They generally agree with Solmsen and the paradosis in leaving unbracketed some verses that West would seclude. In important cases they justify their textual choices in the commentary, which will serve curious undergraduate readers very well. Occasionally there are puzzling punctuational divergences from both West and Solmsen. For example, at Theog. 510 they write a comma after Προμηθέα but none after αἰολόμητιν in Theog. 511, against both editions, muddying the relationship among the words. Of course, Greek punctuation is an editorial choice – but for a less-experienced reader I would prefer West’s maximalism.

Having indexed for this publisher myself, I wish to warn future compilers and perusers of indexes. The index’s transliteration scheme is inconsistent within itself (e.g. ‘Heracles’ and ‘Cyclopes’, but ‘Hekate’ and ‘Okeanos’) and with the book’s body text (‘Hecate’). This may seem like a small matter, but an innocent undergraduate needs as much help as possible when searching for terms. The selection of lemmata is baffling: one finds a single footnote indexed for episynaloephe (which Wiktionary tells me is a ‘synonym of synecphonesis’), yet this index omits one of the single most important figures in the poem, Cronus/Kronos, and two of its most important readers, Proclus and John Tzetzes, all cited numerous times in the text. Though, being a commentary, this book will have many references to a term scattershot among several pages, it seems to me that strings like ‘marriage: … 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336’ are not very helpful. Some entries include glosses (e.g. ‘Dichterweihe (poetic initiation)’, ‘diektasis (distention)’), but most do not (inter alia: ‘episynaloephe’, ‘amphiboly’, ‘kenning’, ‘psilosis’ [italics sic]). For a book aimed at undergraduates I commend the former practice.

But this is the pedantry of a harmless drudge like me. In their work, mature after years of effort, Strauss Clay and Vergados have left us a hymn to the blessed gods who exist for ever.