Hesiod
Hesiod was an Ancient Greek poet who did something almost no poet before him had done. He stepped out of the story and spoke as himself. In the epic tradition of Homer, the singer stayed invisible. Hesiod instead told his audience that his father came from across the sea, that his brother had cheated him, that he once won a tripod in a singing contest. He is generally regarded as the first written poet in the Western tradition to regard himself as an individual persona with an active role in his subject. He flourished around 700 BC, active somewhere between 750 and 650 BC, near the same era as Homer. Two of his poems survive whole. One traces the origins of the gods. The other dispenses advice about farming, justice, and the ages of mankind. From these scattered confessions, scholars have tried to reconstruct a man. But which details are real, and which are masks he wore for his audience?
Ascra was the hamlet where Hesiod lived, a place he called cursed, cruel in winter, hard in summer, never pleasant. It sat near Thespiae in Boeotia, at the foot of Mount Helicon. His father had crossed the sea from Cyme in Aeolis, on the coast of Anatolia, a little south of the island of Lesbos. That direction was unusual. Most colonial movements of the time ran the other way, and Hesiod gives no reason for it. Around 750 BC or a little later, seagoing merchants migrated from Cyme to Cumae in Campania, a colony shared with the Euboeans. His father's move west may have been tied to that current of trade.
Hesiod's patrimony was a small piece of ground that became the cause of lawsuits with his brother Perses. Perses first seems to have cheated Hesiod of his rightful share with the help of corrupt authorities, the figures Hesiod calls kings. Later Perses grew impoverished and ended up scrounging from the thrifty poet. Despite Hesiod's complaints about poverty, the farm could not have been too uncomfortable. The household he describes belongs to prosperous yeomanry rather than peasants.
His farmer employs a friend and several servants. There is an energetic, responsible ploughman of mature years, a slave boy to cover the seed, a female servant to keep house, and working teams of oxen and mules. One modern scholar suggests Hesiod learned world geography from his father's tales of merchant voyages, which may explain the catalogue of rivers in the Theogony. The father probably spoke the Aeolian dialect of Cyme, while Hesiod likely grew up speaking the local Boeotian, part of the same dialect group.
Mount Helicon was where Hesiod said he met the goddesses while pasturing sheep. The Muses presented him with a laurel staff, a symbol of poetic authority. Fanciful as the tale sounds, it carries a clue. Scholars, ancient and modern, infer from it that he was not a professionally trained rhapsode. Had he been one, the story would surely have given him a lyre instead of a staff.
Hesiod was averse to sea travel, unlike his father. He made one notable crossing, over the narrow strait between the Greek mainland and Euboea, to take part in funeral celebrations for Amphidamas of Chalcis. There he won a tripod in a singing competition. Plutarch later identified this Amphidamas with the hero of the Lelantine War between Chalcis and Eretria. He concluded the passage must be a later insertion, assuming the war came too late for Hesiod. Modern scholars accept the identification but reject the conclusion.
He probably wrote his poems down, or dictated them, rather than passing them on orally as rhapsodes did. The reasoning is that the strong personality in the poems would have been diluted through transmission from one singer to another. Pausanias reported that Boeotians showed him an old lead tablet on which the Works were engraved. If Hesiod did write, it was perhaps an aid to memory, not a quest for immortal fame, since poets of his era likely had no such notions for themselves.
Argumentative, suspicious, ironically humorous, frugal, fond of proverbs, wary of women. That is how the personality behind the poems has been described. Hesiod was a misogynist of the same calibre as the later poet Semonides. He resembles Solon in his worry over good versus evil, and over how a just and all-powerful god can allow the unjust to flourish in life. He recalls Aristophanes in rejecting the idealized hero of epic in favour of an idealized view of the farmer.
Gregory Nagy questioned whether Hesiod and his brother were real at all. He read both Perses, the destroyer, and Hesiodos, he who emits the voice, as fictitious names for poetic personae. Others see Perses as a literary creation, a foil for the moralizing of Works and Days. Yet there are arguments against that view. It would have been hard for Hesiod to travel the countryside entertaining people with a story about himself if everyone knew it was invented.
Hesiod could eulogize kings in the Theogony and denounce them as corrupt in Works and Days. That flexibility suggests he could resemble whichever audience he composed for. M. L. West summed up the figure as a surly, conservative countryman, given to reflection, no lover of women or life, who felt the gods' presence heavy about him. Various legends later gathered around him, recorded in the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, a vita by the Byzantine grammarian John Tzetzes, the entry in the Suda, passages in Pausanias, and a passage in Plutarch's Moralia.
Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros stand at the very beginning of the Theogony. The poem concerns the origins of the world and of the gods, and shows a special interest in genealogy. It tells the lineages of the gods and the events leading to Zeus's rise to power. It is the earliest known source for the myths of Pandora, Prometheus, and the Golden Age. Embedded in it are fragments of variant tales, hints of the rich variety of myth that once existed city by city.
Herodotus credited Hesiod's retelling with becoming the accepted version that linked all Hellenes. The creation myth has long been held to carry Eastern influences. Scholars point to the Hittite Song of Kumarbi and the Babylonian Enuma Elis. This cultural crossover may have happened in Greek trading colonies such as Al Mina in North Syria. The family association with Aeolian Cyme might also explain Hesiod's familiarity with Eastern myths.
The Theogony is commonly considered Hesiod's earliest work. Most scholars believe the same man wrote it and Works and Days, though many ancient critics rejected it, including Pausanias. The two poems differ sharply in subject but share a distinctive language, metre, and prosody. They also refer to the same version of the Prometheus myth. The poem gives glimpses of Hesiod's darker imagination, in lines that name Hateful strife bearing painful Toil, Neglect, Starvation, and tearful Pain, Battles, Combats.
Over 800 lines make up Works and Days, a poem built on two truths. Labour is the universal lot of man, but he who is willing to work will get by. Scholars read it against a background of agrarian crisis in mainland Greece, a crisis that inspired a wave of documented colonisations in search of new land. The poem may also draw on an established tradition of didactic poetry rooted in Sumerian, Hebrew, Babylonian, and Egyptian wisdom literature.
The five Ages of Man form its grand scheme. Hesiod describes a golden period when life was easy and good, followed by a steady decline through the silver, bronze, and Iron Ages. He inserts a heroic age between the last two, casting its warlike men as better than their bronze predecessors. He seems to cater to two world-views at once, one epic and aristocratic, the other unsympathetic to the heroic traditions of the aristocracy.
Idleness draws his scorn throughout. The poem regards labor as the source of all good, holding that both gods and men hate the idle, who resemble drones in a hive. It attacks unjust judges, like those who decided in favour of Perses, and condemns the practice of usury. It describes immortals who roam the earth watching over justice and injustice. In its vision of the Golden Age, the nonviolent diet of agriculture and fruit-culture appears as a higher path of living.
Three works survived under Hesiod's name through ancient commentators: Works and Days, Theogony, and the Shield of Heracles. The Shield is now known to be spurious, probably written in the sixth century BC. Of the extended Hesiodic corpus, only the Shield of Heracles came down intact through a medieval manuscript tradition. Glenn Most drew the distinction cleanly. Hesiod is the name of a person, while Hesiodic is a designation for a kind of poetry.
The Catalogue of Women, also called the Ehoiai, was a lengthy genealogical poem attributed to him. Its name came from the Greek words e hoie, meaning Or like the one who, which began its sections. It catalogued the mortal women who had mated with gods and traced their offspring and descendants. It created a vogue for catalogue poems in the Hellenistic period. Theocritus, for instance, set catalogues of heroines into two of his bucolic poems, recited in character by lovelorn rustics.
Many more hexameter poems carried his name. Among them were the Megalai Ehoiai, the Wedding of Ceyx noted for its riddles, the Melampodia about the great seers of mythology, and the Precepts of Chiron, which presented Chiron's teaching to the young Achilles. There was an Astronomia that Callimachus apparently compared to Aratus' Phaenomena, an Aegimius about the Dorian Aegimius, and a Kiln or Potters asking Athena to aid potters if they paid the poet. The Suda even lists a dirge for Batrachus, Hesiod's beloved.
The Delphic oracle, in one tradition, warned Hesiod that he would die in Nemea. He fled to Locris, where he was killed at the local temple to Nemean Zeus and buried there. The story follows a familiar ironic convention, in which the oracle proves accurate after all. This account appears as early as Thucydides and is reported in Plutarch, the Suda, and John Tzetzes.
A rival tradition places his grave at Orchomenus, a town in Boeotia. It was first mentioned in an epigram by Chersias of Orchomenus in the 7th century BC, within a century or so of Hesiod's death. According to Aristotle's Constitution of Orchomenus, when the Thespians ravaged Ascra the villagers fled to Orchomenus. There, following an oracle, they collected Hesiod's ashes and set them in a place of honour in their agora, beside the tomb of Minyas, their eponymous founder. In time they came to regard Hesiod as their hearth-founder, their oikistes. Yet another account, cited by Charles Abraham Elton in his Remains of Hesiod the Ascraean, depicts Hesiod falsely accused of rape and murdered in reprisal despite his advanced age, while the true culprit, his Milesian fellow-traveler, escaped.
Only one authenticated portrait of him is known. It is the Monnus mosaic from Augusta Treverorum, modern Trier, made at the end of the 3rd century AD. The maker signed it MONNUS FECIT, and the figure is labelled ESIODVS. A Roman bronze bust from Herculaneum, the so-called Pseudo-Seneca, was long taken for Seneca the Younger. Since 1813, when an inscribed portrait of Seneca with quite different features was found, scholars knew it was not him. Gisela Richter identified it instead as an imagined portrait of Hesiod, the man whose own poems insisted he be remembered as himself.
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Common questions
Who was Hesiod the ancient Greek poet?
Hesiod was an Ancient Greek poet who flourished around 700 BC, active somewhere between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. He is generally regarded as the first written poet in the Western tradition to regard himself as an individual persona with an active role in his subject.
What did Hesiod write?
Hesiod wrote the Theogony, which tells the origins of the gods, their lineages, and Zeus's rise to power, and Works and Days, which describes the five Ages of Man and offers advice and wisdom. The Shield of Heracles was also attributed to him in antiquity but is now known to be spurious.
Where did Hesiod live?
Hesiod lived at Ascra, a hamlet near Thespiae in Boeotia, at the foot of Mount Helicon. He called it a cursed place, cruel in winter, hard in summer, never pleasant. His father had crossed the sea from Cyme in Aeolis on the coast of Anatolia.
What is the Theogony by Hesiod about?
The Theogony concerns the origins of the world and of the gods, beginning with Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros, and traces the divine genealogies leading to Zeus's rise to power. It is the earliest known source for the myths of Pandora, Prometheus, and the Golden Age.
How did Hesiod die?
Two early traditions record the site of Hesiod's grave. One says the Delphic oracle warned he would die in Nemea, so he fled to Locris where he was killed at the temple of Nemean Zeus, while another tradition holds that he lies buried at Orchomenus in Boeotia.
Was Hesiod or Homer first?
Greeks in the late 5th and early 4th centuries BC ranked their oldest poets as Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer in that order, but later writers began placing Homer earlier than Hesiod. Most scholars today agree with Homer's priority, though there are good arguments on either side.
All sources
9 references cited across the entry
- 4bookThe Remains of Hesiod the Ascræan, Including the Shield of Hercules by HesiodCharles Abraham Elton — BALDWIN, CRADOCK, AND JOY — 1815
- 7inlineSuda, s.v. 583).
- 8bookPergamon und HesiodErika Simon — Philipp von Zabern — 1975