Hesiod (c. 776 BCE - c. 700 BCE) was an ancient Greek poet active in the archaic period, and with Homer one of the two earliest Greek poets whose work survives. [1] His Theogony gives the first ordered genealogy of the Greek gods, while Works and Days combines agricultural instruction, calendrical lore and moral argument addressed to his brother Perses. [2] He is also the earliest Greek poet to speak about himself in the first person.
Life
Almost everything known about Hesiod comes from his own poems, and the dates traditionally assigned to him, in the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE, are approximate. [1] He records that his father emigrated from Cyme in Aeolis, on the coast of Asia Minor, to Ascra in Boeotia in mainland Greece, a village he describes without affection as bad in winter, harsh in summer and never good. He appears to have worked as a farmer and shepherd there.
In the opening of the Theogony he describes being visited by the Muses on Mount Helicon while tending sheep, and receiving from them a staff and the gift of song. [3] In Works and Days he mentions winning a tripod for a poetic performance at a funeral contest at Chalcis, and a dispute with his brother Perses over the division of their inheritance, in which he says corrupt local rulers gave a crooked judgement. Ancient tradition placed his death at Ascra or in Locris and recorded competing claims to his tomb.
Theogony
The Theogony narrates the origin of the cosmos from Chaos and the successive generations of divine rulers: Uranus overthrown by Cronus, and Cronus in turn by Zeus, who establishes a stable order after defeating the Titans and the monster Typhoeus. [2] It is the principal surviving source for the Greek creation myth and supplied later poets, mythographers and artists with the standard genealogies of gods, nymphs and monsters. Comparative study has connected parts of the succession myth with earlier Near Eastern traditions, including Hittite and Mesopotamian texts. [4]
Works and Days
Works and Days is addressed to Perses and organised around the value of honest labour and just dealing. [2] It contains the myth of Pandora, the account of the five ages of humanity from the Golden Age to the present Age of Iron, the fable of the hawk and the nightingale, a calendar of farming and seafaring tasks, and instruction on lucky and unlucky days. The poem is the earliest substantial description of everyday life in archaic Greece and of the small landholder's economy.
Other works and transmission
A number of further poems circulated in antiquity under Hesiod's name, of which the most important was the Catalogue of Women, a genealogical survey of heroines and their divine unions, surviving only in fragments and papyrus finds. [1] The Shield of Heracles is generally regarded as a later composition attached to his name. Like Homeric epic, his poetry is composed in dactylic hexameter and in the traditional epic dialect.
Legacy
Hesiod was read throughout antiquity as a foundational authority on the gods and as a moral teacher, quoted by Plato, Aristotle and later writers, and paired with Homer in the ancient imagination as the pair who, in Herodotus's phrase, gave the Greeks their gods. [3] His agricultural poem influenced Virgil's Georgics, and modern scholarship treats him as a central witness to the society, religion and economy of archaic Greece. [4]
