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I will show you the measures
of the much-thundering sea... (line 648)
Observe measures. Timeliness is best in all matters. (line 694)
Hesiod,The Works and Days, trans., Richard Lattimore, Ann Arbor,1969, pp. 95 and 101
PLACE: Boiotia, Greece
TIME: ca. 8th Century B.C.
CIRCUMSTANCE: Hesiod has already described the events in the farmer's annual life. He now describes the cycles in the sailor's life. Of the two types of existence he clearly prefers the farmer, for, as a Boiotian poet he lives "far away from the sea and its tossing waters", which sets him apart from Homer, whose works are conceived close to the element.
... and the infinite great sea
moaned terribly
and the earth crashed aloud,
and the wide sky resounded
as it was shaken, and tall Olympos rocked
on its bases
in the fan of the wind of the immortals,
and a strong shudder drove deep
into gloomy Tartaros under the suddenness
of the footrush
and the quenchless crashing of their feet
and their powerful missiles.
So either against either they threw
their re-echoing weapons
and the noise of either side outcrying
went up to the starry
heaven as with great war crying
they drove at each other.
Now Zeus no longer held in his strength,
but here his heart filled
deep with fury, and now he showed
his violence entire
and indiscriminately. Out of the sky
and off Olympos
he moved flashing his fires incessantly,
and the thunderbolts,
the crashing of them and the blaze
together came flying, one after
another, from his ponderous hand,
and spinning whirls of inhuman
flame, and with it the earth,
the giver of life, cried out
aloud as she burned, and the vast forests
in the fire screamed....
The wonderful conflagration crushed Chaos, (line 700)
and to the eyes' seeing
and ears' hearing the clamor of it,
it absolutely
would have seemed as if Earth
and the wide Heaven above her
had collided, for such would have been
the crash arising
as Earth wrecked and the sky came piling down
on top of her,
so vast was the crash heard
as the gods collided in battle.
The winds brought on with their roaring
a quake of the earth and dust storm,
with thunder and with lightning,
and the blazing thunderbolt,
the weapons thrown by great Zeus,
and they carried the clamor
and outcry between the hosts opposed,
and a horrible tumult
of grisly battle uprose,
and both sides showed power in the fighting.
Hesiod,Theogony, lines 678-694 and 700-710, trans., Richard Lattimore, Ann Arbor, 1968, p.163-165.
PLACE: Boiotia, Greece
TIME: ca. 8th Century B.C.
CIRCUMSTANCE: Hesiod tells how the Titans and the gods fought, how the Titans were defeated and were banished to Tartaros, in the bowels of the earth.
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