Illusion? But personal perception prevails. For some reason, I can imagine that Homer composed his poems somewhere on the shores of Ionia. But the composition of Theogony, Works, and Catalogue of Women in the remote and miserable Askras of Boeotia by Hesiod remains a mystery. In these terms, the poet's confession that his life changed one day on Mount Helicon, when the Muses answered him and made him a singer of truth from a shepherd, seems like a logical explanation. Perhaps there, in the late eighth pre-Christian century, the miracle worked - in a landlocked village, far from the sea, on the slopes of the mountains.

I had to discover Hesiod, perhaps he was initially hard to find, almost hidden; I hope that is the feeling that the translations retain; choices more or less arbitrary, unless they were commissioned or given from somewhere.

Fourteen years have passed since the first edition of the Hesiodic Election, which took place as the translation of the Homeric Odyssey was still in progress as a supportive ally. Its current renewal (with many undisclosed corrections and four additional translations) is now synchronized and coexists in Agora editions with the translation of the Iliad, where the twelve rhapsodies are already being tested in the first published volume. Neither the Odyssey nor the Iliad coincidence were planned, they rather emerged from an instinctive search for a second, simultaneous and equal voice, different in style and tone from the Homeric - let's say more familiar and more strongly marked by the name and the person of the poet.
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