Hesiod, with Homer, is one of the two foundational poets of Greek literature. Where Homer gave the Greeks their heroic cycle (the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Epic Cycle of which they were the centre), Hesiod gave them their cosmogony — the story of how the world was born, how the gods came to be, how the ages of man succeeded one another, and why the world is the kind of world it is. The two poets were treated, from the fifth century BCE onwards, as a pair: “from Helicon there came / a slender voice, the first of those who sang / the Greeks to greatness” is how the imperial-period Greek writer Bacchylides describes it, and the comparison with Homer is the one that has stuck for twenty-five hundred years. The two are not interchangeable. Homer sang the wars of heroes; Hesiod sang the ordering of the world. The Greek tradition recognised the difference, and it placed the two poets in different cities: Homer at Smyrna or Chios, Hesiod at Ascra in Boeotia.
The Life of Hesiod
Hesiod is one of the very few early Greek poets whose biography has come down to us from antiquity, and the biography is largely a fiction made up of his own poems. He is said to have been the son of a man named Dios (“of Zeus”), who had migrated from Cyme in Asia Minor to Ascra, a village at the foot of Mount Helicon in Boeotia. Hesiod himself tells the story of how, once, he was tending sheep on the slopes of Helicon, and the Muses appeared to him and gave him a laurel staff and the gift of song. He never returned to the shepherd’s life, but became a poet and a farmer for the rest of his days. The story is told in the proem of the Theogony and is the source of the iconography of the inspired poet.
The Works and Days gives a more personal Hesiod, involved in a dispute with his brother Perses over the inheritance of their father. The poem is a long exhortation: do not be a glutton, do not be idle, do not trust the rhetoric of the basileis, the corrupt local judges, do not steal, do not be a parasite. The work is a strange mixture of agricultural almanac, moral exhortation, and myth (the myth of Prometheus and Pandora is told in the Works and Days as the explanation of why the human condition is the way it is), and it is one of the first real works of Greek prose-like wisdom poetry.
The date of Hesiod is uncertain, but is conventionally placed in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, slightly after Homer if Homer is dated to the eighth century. The two poets are treated as contemporaries in the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi (the Contest of Homer and Hesiod), an imperial-era Greek work of fiction that imagines the two poets meeting in a poetic contest. The Certamen is not a real biography, but it preserves a real Greek sense: that Homer and Hesiod were the two halves of the Greek poetic inheritance, and that the right way to think about Greek myth is to put them in dialogue.
The Theogony
The Theogony is the central poem of Hesiod and the first great cosmogony of Greek literature. The poem tells the story of the world from the beginning. From Chaos came Gaia (Earth), Tartarus (the Underworld), and Eros (Desire). From Gaia came Ouranos (Sky), who became both her son and her husband. With Ouranos, she produced the twelve Titans, the three Cyclopes, and the three Hecatoncheires (the hundred-handed ones). Ouranos, fearing his children, hid them inside Gaia’s body, and Gaia persuaded her son Cronus to castrate his father. The blood of Ouranos, falling on Earth, produced the Furies, the Giants, and the Meliae. The severed genitals, thrown into the sea, produced Aphrodite, who emerged from the foam near Cyprus.
Cronus, warned that he would be overthrown by his own children, swallowed each of them as they were born: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon. Rhea, his wife, hid the youngest, Zeus, on Crete, and gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to swallow instead. Grown to manhood, Zeus was given a potion by the Titaness Metis, and Cronus vomited up his brothers and sisters. The freed gods fought the Titans in the Titanomachy, and with the help of the Cyclopes (who forged Zeus’s thunderbolts) and the Hecatoncheires, they won. The Titans were cast into Tartarus. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades drew lots for the cosmos, and Zeus won the sky, Poseidon the sea, Hades the underworld.
The Theogony is a genealogy first and a theology second. Its interest is in the order of the cosmos, the way each generation is born of the previous, the way the divine order succeeds the chaos, the way Zeus is the last and final ruler. The poem is the source of most of the genealogies used in the later Greek tradition: the family tree of the gods, the family tree of the Titans, the family tree of the heroes, all are descended from this poem. Later writers — Apollodorus, Pausanias, the mythographers of the Roman period — used the Theogony as the spine of their own works.
The Works and Days
The Works and Days is Hesiod’s other surviving poem, and it is the more personal. The poem is addressed to Hesiod’s brother Perses, who had taken the larger share of their father’s inheritance by persuading the local judges to favour him. Hesiod’s response is both a moral and a practical one. He gives Perses moral instruction (do not be a thief, do not be a glutton, do not be idle, do not trust the corrupt basileis), and he gives him practical instruction on agriculture (when to plant, when to harvest, when to plough). The myth of the Five Ages of Man, the myth of Prometheus and Pandora, the myth of the hawk and the nightingale: these are the three great mythological passages of the Works and Days, and they are the source of much of the standard Greek thinking on the human condition.
The myth of the Five Ages is the most influential. The first age, the age of gold, was the age of Cronus, when men lived without toil, without sickness, without old age, and the earth gave its fruits without being asked. The second age, the age of silver, was the age of Zeus’s first reign, when men lived long lives but were children for a hundred years. The third age, the age of bronze, was the age of war and weapons. The fourth age, the age of heroes, was the age of the Trojan War, the only age whose men are not wholly evil. The fifth and current age, the age of iron, is the age of Hesiod himself, when men work and suffer and die. The myth is a myth of decline, and it became the standard Greek account of the human condition: the world was once good, the gods broke it, and the only answer is the moral instruction of the Works and Days itself.
The Catalogue of Women
The third major poem attributed to Hesiod is the Catalogue of Women (also called the Ehoiai), of which only fragments survive. The poem was a long genealogical work, organised by the great female figures of the heroic past: Helen, Alcmene, Semele, Callisto, the mothers of the heroes. The work was the source of much of the standard Greek heroic genealogy, and the loss of the poem is one of the great losses of Greek literature. We have only the summaries of later writers and the quotations of the lyric poets. The poem was the model for the late-classical mythographer Apollodorus and for the great Bibliotheca that goes under Apollodorus’s name.
The Importance of Hesiod
Hesiod is the other foundational poet of Greek myth, and the importance of his work is hard to overstate. The Theogony is the source of the standard genealogy of the gods; the Works and Days is the source of the standard account of the human condition; the Catalogue of Women is the source of the standard account of the heroic past. Three of the central organising schemes of Greek myth come from one poet, and the loss of any one of his works would be a loss to Greek myth as a whole. Homer gave the Greeks the Iliad and the Odyssey; Hesiod gave them everything else. The two together are the foundation of the Greek mythological tradition.
Hesiod in the Visual Arts
Hesiod is one of the few poets who appears regularly in Greek and Roman art. The earliest known depiction of Hesiod, from the chest of Cypselus in the Heraion at Olympia (seventh century BCE, described by Pausanias), shows him tied to a pillar, being beaten by Helicon, a thamyris-like figure, in a scene that Pausanias himself finds puzzling. The famous Hellenistic portrait of Hesiod, of which the best surviving copy is a Roman marble from the second century CE in the National Museum in Madrid, shows him as a mature man with a beard, a fillet in his hair, and a scroll in his hand. The Roman poets — Virgil, Ovid, and the Certamen — picked up the image, and the standard iconography of the inspired poet became a literary motif of the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
Hesiod in the Modern World
Hesiod has been a touchstone of Western poetry since the Renaissance. Milton’s Paradise Lost is, in part, a reworking of the Hesiodic cosmogony, and the famous invocation in Book I of the Iliad — “Sing, O Muse, the wrath” — is paralleled in Milton’s “Sing, heavenly Muse.” Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) makes Hesiod central to the Greek sense of Apollonian order against the older Dionysian chaos, and the reading has been influential in classical scholarship ever since. The modern reception of Hesiod is, in some ways, more influential than the ancient: we have lost the sense of how the Catalogue of Women was read in the Greek world, but we have Nietzsche’s reading of the Theogony and West’s Hesiod’s Theogony (1966), which is the standard scholarly edition of the poem.
A Note on Reading Hesiod
The right way to read Hesiod is to read him with Homer, not against him. The two poets are the two halves of the Greek inheritance, and neither is fully intelligible without the other. The Iliad makes sense only against the background of the Theogony: the war at Troy is a war of the Olympian gods, and the Olympian order is a Theogony order. The Theogony makes sense only against the background of the Iliad: the gods of the Theogony are the gods of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the Theogony is the prelude to the heroic age. The two poems are the foundation of Greek myth, and the modern reader who reads either without the other is missing half of what the Greeks meant.
For more, see the Homer page, the complete guide to Greek mythology, and the Olympian gods pillar page.