Conhecimento e mito na obra de Hesíodo.

Abstract

This work deals with the relationship between knowledge and myth in Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and days, from the assumption that myth, in the Hesiodic context, was the form of language which described and performed the experience of taking part in a world that consisted of gods. In this sense, we seek to ascertain, according to Hesiod’s poems, of what this knowledge consists, through a process of immersion in the Greek poet’s work. In the first chapter we examine the author and his context, focusing on descriptions contained in Theogony and Works and days, and relating them to historically established issues. In the second chapter we discuss Hesiod’s work, which, in his context, steeped in an oral tradition, configured itself as a set of songs whose gift – form and sense – proceeded from goddesses named Muses, daughters of Zeus and Memory. In the third chapter we verify what gift, what form and what sense was that, and exemplify, with the narrative of Prometheus, present in both poems, the revelation (knowledge) of fundamental aspects of the human condition.