Hesiod

Hesiod (Hesiodos) was an early Greek poet and rhapsode, believed to have lived around 700 BC. Greek historians debated the priority of Hesiod or of Homer, and even brought them together in an imagined poetic contest; most modern scholars agree that Homer lived before Hesiod.

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Hesiod serves as a major source for knowledge of Greek mythology, of farming techniques, of archaic Greek astronomy and of ancient time-keeping.

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As with Homer, legendary traditions have accumulated round Hesiod. Unlike Homer, some biographical detail is known: the few details of Hesiod's life come from three references in Works and Days; some further inferences can be derived from his Theogony. Hesiod lived in Boeotia. His father came from Cumes in Aeolia, which lay between Ionia and the Troad in southwestern Anatolia, but crossed the sea to settle at Ascra, "a cursed place, cruel in winter, hard in summer, never pleasant" (Works, 640). Hesiod's patrimony there was a small piece of ground at the foot of Mount Helicon that occasioned a lawsuit with his brother Perses, who won; some scholars have seen Perses as a literary creation, a foil for the moralizing of the Works and Days that is directed to him.

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Helicon was the home of the Muses, who gave Hesiod the gift of poetic inspiration one day while he tended sheep. In another biographical detail, Hesiod mentions a poetry contest at Chalcis in Euboea where the sons of one Amiphidamas awarded him a tripod (ll.654-662). Plutarch first identified this passage as 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. The account of this contest inspired the later tale of a competition between Hesiod and Homer.

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Two different, yet early, traditions 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 had 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 turns out to be true, after all.

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The other tradition, first mentioned in an epigram of Chersios 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 Ascra was ravaged by the Thespians, the villagers sought refuge at Orchomenus, where, following the advice of an oracle, they collected the ashes of Hesiod and placed them in a place of honour in their agora, beside the tomb of Minyas, their eponymous founder, and inm the end came to regard Hesiod too as their "hearth-founder" (???????? / oikist?s).

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Later writers attempted to harmonize these two accounts.

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Legends that accumulated about Hesiod were to be found in several sources: a treatise "The poetic contest (???? / Ag?n) of Homer and Hesiod"; 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, 31.3?6 and 38.3?4); a passage in Plutarch Moralia (162b).

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Greek: The noun Greek refers to:...

Poet: Poets are authors of poems, or of other forms of poetry such as dramatic verse. Poets are often regarded as imaginative thinkers or writers. Bad poets are called poetasters....

Rhapsode: In classical antiquity, a rhapsode was a professional reciter of poetry, especially the epics of Homer, but also the wisdom-verse of Hesiod and the satires of Archilochus, among others. Plato's dialogue Ion, wherein Socrates confronts a star rhapsode, remains our richest source of information on th...