Hesiod
Hesiod
Flourished Circa Eighth Century b.c.e .
Poet
Significance. Along with Homer, Hesiod is the oldest extant Greek poet. Scholars have no clear evidence about his date, nor did the ancients: a much-debated topic was his chronological relationship with Homer, with many believing in Hesiod’s priority. Yet, unlike Homer, Hesiod reveals something of his life and family in his poetry, and his is the first distinctively individual voice in European literature. Hesiod’s father came from Cyme on the coast of Asia Minor and moved to the village of Ascra by Mt. Helicon in Boeotia. It was on the slopes of Helicon while he was shepherding that Hesiod claims the Muses appeared to him, gave him a laurel branch, and instructed him to sing. Of course he followed their command, and elsewhere tells us that he won a tripod in a singing competition held at a funeral at Chalcis. This story was later elaborated with the imaginative detail that his opponent on this occasion was Homer, and led to the composition, probably early in the fourth century b.c.e., of an account of the contest between the two great early poets of Greece. Hesiod had a brother called Perses, against whom he was engaged in some sort of litigation, perhaps on a matter of inheritance, and his pointed advice to his brother helps us see his social position as a poor peasant at the mercy of corrupt judges.
Truth. When the Muses told Hesiod that they could tell the truth as well as “lies like the truth”—a phase apparently lifted from Homer’s description of Odysseus’ words to his wife—they made it clear that there were different sorts of poetry, and that his job was to produce the true sort. The poems confidently ascribed to Hesiod—the Theogony and the Works and Days—differ radically from the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey (circa eighth-seventh centuries b.c.e.) in subject matter and in general outlook. The Theogony is an account of the creation of the world and the rise to power of the current generation of gods. Considerable similarity has been noted with Near Eastern “succession myths,” some of which contain parallel motifs in the struggles between generations of gods and between the established gods and a monster. Works and Days is a didactic poem on farming, but contains much other material, not least on the nature of justice and the gods’ concern for it. In this poem especially one gets a different viewpoint from the essentially aristocratic perspective of Homer: readers sense an ungallant misogyny, and learn about hard work, the weak position of the ordinary man in the face of corrupt power, and about a wavering faith in the divine justice that will set all this right.
Sources
Richard Hamilton, The Architecture of Hesiodic Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
Robert Lamberton, Hesiod (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
Mary R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).