Hesiod

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This article is about the ancient Greek poet. For the computer application, see
Hesiod (name service). For the crater, see Hesiod (crater).
Hesiodos redirects here. For the asteroid, see 8550 Hesiodos.

The Dance of the Muses at Mount Helicon by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1807). Hesiod cites
inspiration from the Muses while on Mount Helicon.
Hesiod ('hi?si?d or 'h?si?d;[1] Greek ?s??d?? Hesodos) was a Greek poet generally
thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same
time as Homer.[2][3] He is generally regarded as the first written poet in the
Western tradition to regard himself as an individual persona with an active role to
play in his subject.[4] Ancient authors credited Hesiod and Homer with establishing
Greek religious customs.[5] Modern scholars refer to him as a major source on Greek
mythology, farming techniques, early economic thought (he is sometimes considered
history's first economist),[6] archaic Greek astronomy and ancient time-keeping.

Contents [hide]
1 Life
1.1 Dating
2 Works
2.1 Theogony
2.2 Works and Days
2.3 Other writings
3 Reception
3.1 Portrait bust
4 Hesiod's Greek
5 Notes
6 Citations
7 References
8 Further reading
8.1 Selected translations
9 External links
Life[edit]
The dating of Hesiod's life is a contested issue in scholarly circles (see Dating
below). Epic narrative allowed poets like Homer no opportunity for personal
revelations. However, Hesiod's extant work comprises several didactic poems in
which he went out of his way to let his audience in on a few details of his life.
There are three explicit references in Works and Days, as well as some passages in
his Theogony that support inferences made by scholars. The former poem says that
his father came from Cyme in Aeolis (on the coast of Asia Minor, a little south of
the island Lesbos) and crossed the sea to settle at a hamlet, near Thespiae in
Boeotia, named Ascra, a cursed place, cruel in winter, hard in summer, never
pleasant (Works 640). Hesiod's patrimony there, a small piece of ground at the foot
of Mount Helicon, occasioned lawsuits with his brother Perses, who seems, at first,
to have cheated him of his rightful share thanks to corrupt authorities or kings
but later became impoverished and ended up scrounging from the thrifty poet (Works
35, 396.).

Unlike his father, Hesiod was averse to sea travel, but he once crossed the narrow
strait between the Greek mainland and Euboea to participate in funeral celebrations
for one Athamas of Chalcis, and there won a tripod in a singing competition.[7] He
also describes a meeting between himself and the Muses on Mount Helicon, where he
had been pasturing sheep when the goddesses presented him with a laurel staff, a
symbol of poetic authority (Theogony 2235). Fanciful though the story might seem,
the account has led ancient and modern scholars to infer that he was not a
professionally trained rhapsode, or he would have been presented with a lyre
instead.[nb 1]
Hesiod and the Muse (1891), by Gustave Moreau. The poet is presented with a lyre,
in contradiction to the account given by Hesiod himself in which the gift was a
laurel staff.
Some scholars have seen Perses as a literary creation, a foil for the moralizing
that Hesiod develops in Works and Days, but there are also arguments against that
theory.[8] For example, it is quite common for works of moral instruction to have
an imaginative setting, as a means of getting the audience's attention,[nb 2] but
it could be difficult to see how Hesiod could have travelled around the countryside
entertaining people with a narrative about himself if the account was known to be
fictitious.[9] Gregory Nagy, on the other hand, sees both Prses (the destroyer
from p????, prtho) and Hesodos (he who emits the voice from ???, hemi and a?d?,
aud?) as fictitious names for poetical personae.[10]

It might seem unusual that Hesiod's father migrated from Asia Minor westwards to
mainland Greece, the opposite direction to most colonial movements at the time, and
Hesiod himself gives no explanation for it. However around 750 BC or a little
later, there was a migration of seagoing merchants from his original home in Cyme
in Asia Minor to Cumae in Campania (a colony they shared with the Euboeans), and
possibly his move west had something to do with that, since Euboea is not far from
Boeotia, where he eventually established himself and his family.[11] The family
association with Aeolian Cyme might explain his familiarity with eastern myths,
evident in his poems, though the Greek world might have already developed its own
versions of them.[12]

In spite of Hesiod's complaints about poverty, life on his father's farm could not
have been too uncomfortable if Works and Days is anything to judge by, since he
describes the routines of prosperous yeomanry rather than peasants. His farmer
employs a friend (Works and Days 370) as well as servants (502, 573, 597, 608,
766), an energetic and responsible ploughman of mature years (469 ff.), a slave boy
to cover the seed (4416), a female servant to keep house (405, 602) and working
teams of oxen and mules (405, 607f.).[13] One modern scholar surmises that Hesiod
may have learned about world geography, especially the catalogue of rivers in
Theogony (33745), listening to his father's accounts of his own sea voyages as a
merchant.[14] The father probably spoke in the Aeolian dialect of Cyme but Hesiod
probably grew up speaking the local Boeotian, belonging to the same dialect group.
However, while his poetry features some Aeolisms there are no words that are
certainly Boeotian. His basic language was the main literary dialect of the time,
Homer's Ionian.[15]

It is probable that Hesiod wrote his poems down, or dictated them, rather than
passed them on orally, as rhapsodes didotherwise the pronounced personality that
now emerges from the poems would surely have been diluted through oral transmission
from one rhapsode to another. Pausanias asserted that Boeotians showed him an old
tablet made of lead on which the Works were engraved.[16] If he did write or
dictate, it was perhaps as an aid to memory or because he lacked confidence in his
ability to produce poems extempore, as trained rhapsodes could do. It certainly
wasn't in a quest for immortal fame since poets in his era had probably no such
notions for themselves. However, some scholars suspect the presence of large-scale
changes in the text and attribute this to oral transmission.[17] Possibly he
composed his verses during idle times on the farm, in the spring before the May
harvest or the dead of winter.[12]

The personality behind the poems is unsuited to the kind of aristocratic withdrawal
typical of a rhapsode but is instead argumentative, suspicious, ironically
humorous, frugal, fond of proverbs, wary of women.[18] He was in fact a misogynist
of the same calibre as the later poet Semonides.[19] He resembles Solon in his
preoccupation with issues of good versus evil and how a just and all-powerful god
can allow the unjust to flourish in this life. He recalls Aristophanes in his
rejection of the idealised hero of epic literature in favour of an idealised view
of the farmer.[20] Yet the fact that he could eulogise kings in Theogony (80 ff.,
430, 434) and denounce them as corrupt in Works and Days suggests that he could
resemble whichever audience he composed for.[21]

Various legends accumulated about Hesiod and they are recorded in several sources

the story about the Contest of Homer and Hesiod;[22]

a vita of Hesiod by the Byzantine grammarian John Tzetzes;
the entry for Hesiod in the Suda;
two passages and some scattered remarks in Pausanias (IX, 31.36 and 38.3 f.);
a passage in Plutarch Moralia (162b).
Two differentyet earlytraditions record the site of Hesiod's grave. One, as early
as Thucydides, reported in Plutarch, the Suda and John Tzetzes, states that the
Delphic oracle warned Hesiod that he would die in Nemea, and so he fled to Locris,
where he was killed at the local temple to Nemean Zeus, and buried there. This
tradition follows a familiar ironic convention the oracle that predicts accurately
after all. The other tradition, first mentioned in an epigram by Chersias of
Orchomenus written in the 7th century BC (within a century or so of Hesiod's death)
claims that Hesiod lies buried at Orchomenus, a town in Boeotia. According to
Aristotle's Constitution of Orchomenus, when the Thespians ravaged Ascra, the
villagers sought refuge at Orchomenus, where, following the advice of an oracle,
they collected the ashes of Hesiod and set them in a place of honour in their
agora, next to the tomb of Minyas, their eponymous founder. Eventually they came to
regard Hesiod too as their hearth-founder (????st??, oikistes). Later writers
attempted to harmonize these two accounts.

Dating[edit]

Modern Mount Helicon. Hesiod once described his nearby hometown, Ascra, as cruel in
winter, hard in summer, never pleasant.
Greeks in the late 5th and early 4th centuries BC considered their oldest poets to
be Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod and Homerin that order. Thereafter, Greek writers
began to consider Homer earlier than Hesiod. Devotees of Orpheus and Musaeus were
probably responsible for precedence being given to their two cult heroes and maybe
the Homeridae were responsible in later antiquity for promoting Homer at Hesiod's
expense.