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Hesiod (Hesiodos) was an early Greek
poet, believed to have lived around the year 700
BC. From the 5th century BC there was debate about the priority of Hesiod or Homer.
Most modern scholarship agrees that Homer lived before Hesiod.
Hesiod lived in Boeotia and regularly visited Mt Helicon, the mythological home of the Muses, who, he says, gave him the
gift of poetic creation one day while he was out tending sheep.
The few details of Hesiod's life come mostly from his own works. His poem Works and Days mentions that he lost a
lawsuit with his brother Perses over their inheritance. However, some scholars have argued that Perses is a literary creation, a foil for the moralizing
of the Works and Days. Another biographical detail Hesiod mentions is a poetry contest at Chalcis where he was awarded a tripod by the sons of one Amiphidamas (ll.654-662). Plutarch was the
first to state that this was an interpolation into Hesiod's original work, based on his identification of Amiphidamas with the
hero of the Lelantine War
between Chalcis and Eretria, which occurred around 705 BC. This contest was the inspiration for the later tale of a competition between Hesiod and Homer.
Two different, yet early, traditions record the site of his grave. One, as early as Thucydides, states that Hesiod had been warned by an oracle that he would die in Nemea, and so fled to Locris, where he was killed at the local temple to Nemean Zeus, and buried. The other
tradition, first mentioned in an epigram of Chersios of
Orchomenus written in the seventh century BC, claims that he was
buried at Orchomenus, a town in Boeotia. Later writers
attempted to harmonize these two accounts.
The only poem ascribed to Hesiod universally considered authenic is the Works and Days but the Theogony, if not by Hesiod, is very close in style and substance considering the
purposely difference in subject matter.
Works and Days is a poem of advice and wisdom, prescribing a life of honest
work and attacking idleness and unjust judges (like those who decided in the favor of Perses).
The Theogony concerns the origins of the world and the gods and is
especially concerned with genealogy.
Also attributed to Hesiod by classical authors are later genealogical poems called Catalogues of Women or
Eoiae because sections began with the Greek words e oie 'or like her'. Only small fragments of these have
survived. They are concerned with the genealogies of kings and heroes of the legendary heroic period. These are generally thought
to be later examples of the poetic tradition to which Hesiod belonged. A final poem attributed traditionally attributed to
Hesiod, The Shield of Heracles, appears to be a late expansion of one of these genealogical poems.
Hesiod is a major source both for knowledge of Greek mythology,
farming techniques and for archaic Greek astronomy and time-keeping.
External links
- Web texts taken from Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, edited and translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White,
published as Loeb Classical Library #57, 1914, ISBN 0674990633:
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