Craft and Cosmogonies: The Reception of Hesiod in Plato’s Timaeus-Critias

Abstract

The poems attributed to Hesiod and composed in the 8th century BCE were highly influential in Socrates’ and Plato’s Athens of the 5th to early 4th centuries BCE. This dissertation examines Plato’s reception of the poetry attributed to Hesiod in the Timaeus-Critias dialogues. The first chapter examines Plato’s engagement with the Hesiodic myth of Pandora in Timaeus’ etiology for the body. I argue that Plato evokes the myth of Pandora in his audience’s minds in order to place his cosmogony, anthropogony, and zoogony in relation to this foundational myth and thereby make his likely story more likely. The second chapter examines the theme of competition in the Atlantis sections of the Timaeus-Critias. This chapter explores destructive and productive forms of competition in Plato and Hesiod. I show how Plato frames the speech competition in the dialogue as song contest through a discussion of the festival settings and the Certamen of Homer and Hesiod. Plato thus uses Hesiodic techniques to disrupt canonical etiologies for Athens. The third chapter investigates the themes of written versus oral modes of transmitting stories in the framing narrative for the myth of Atlantis and oral traditions generally. I demonstrate that Plato imitates the entextualization of oral poetic performance in his framing of the myth. Through a comparative analysis of etiologies in other oral traditions that coincide with the development of literacy, I demonstrate that mythical written texts frequently feature in the backstory for oral epic poetry in order to provide authority, but frequently rely on oral recitations to be transmitted through time. In the fourth and final chapter I document the process of co-founding and running a cross-disciplinary public Humanities project, UW Textile Studies Graduate Research Cluster (GRC). This project aimed to gather members of the public and researchers at the University of Washington from different disciplines who all shared an interest in the creation and study of textiles. This chapter highlights the goals and achievements of this project in relation to the overall project of the dissertation. Through collaborative efforts, the UW Textile Studies GRC successfully built reciprocal intellectual networks across and beyond the university.