Illusion? Nevertheless, personal perception prevails. For some reasons, I can imagine that Homer composed his poems somewhere along the shores of Ionia. But the composition of the Theogony, the Works, and the Catalogue of Women in the remote and dreary Askra of Boeotia by Hesiod remains a mystery.

In these terms, the poet's confession that his life changed one day on Helicon, when the Muses answered him, and turned him from a humble shepherd into a singer of truth, seems a plausible explanation. Perhaps there, at the end of the eighth pre-Christian century, the miracle occurred - in a landlocked village, far from the sea, on the slopes of the mountains.

I needed to discover Hesiod as if he had been elusive from the very beginning, almost hidden; I hope this sensation is retained by the translations; choices that are somewhat arbitrary, unless they were commissioned from somewhere or provided.

Fourteen years have already passed since the first edition of the Hesiodic Selection, which took place while the translation of Homer's Odyssey was still progressing as supportive ally. Its forthcoming renewal (with many unannounced corrections and four additional translations) now synchronizes and cohabitates in Agra editions with the translation of the Iliad, which its twelve rhapsodies are already being tested in the first published volume.

Neither the Odyssean nor the Iliadic coincidence had been planned; they seem to have arisen from an instinctive search for a second, contemporaneous and equal voice, different in manner and tone from the Homeric - let’s say, more intimate and more deeply marked by the name and face of the poet.