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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter VII: Sources: Homer, Hesiod & the Tragedians

Hesiod: Theogony and Works and Days as Texts and Sources

Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days as texts: the poet of Ascra, the Muses, the Hymn to Hecate, the Five Ages, the farmer's calendar and their transmission.

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Hesiod was a Greek poet of Boeotia, usually dated to around 700 BCE, whose two surviving poems are the main early sources for Greek ideas about the gods and the order of the world. The Theogony ("Birth of the Gods") traces the generations of gods from Chaos to the reign of Zeus; Works and Days is a poem of moral advice and farming instruction addressed to the poet's brother Perses. Together with Homer, Hesiod gave the Greeks a shared account of their gods.

The myths that Hesiod tells are treated in their own articles: The Greek Creation Myth, The Titans and the Titanomachy and Prometheus and Pandora. This article looks at the poems themselves.

Hesiod of Ascra: The Poet in His Own Words§

Almost everything known about Hesiod comes from his own poems. In Works and Days he says that his father, a seafaring trader from Cyme in Aeolis, gave up the sea because of poverty and settled at Ascra, a village below Mount Helicon in Boeotia, a place he describes as harsh in winter, oppressive in summer and good at no season. After his father's death Hesiod and his brother Perses divided the inheritance, and Perses, he complains, took more than his share with the help of the bribe-taking lords (dōrophagoi, literally gift-eaters) who judged the case. The poem is framed as advice to this brother to stop litigating and start working.

Hesiod also says that he once crossed to Euboea, his only sea voyage, and won a tripod for song at the funeral games of Amphidamas at Chalcis. Because later sources link Amphidamas to the Lelantine War, this passage is one basis for dating Hesiod around 700 BCE, though some scholars place him before Homer, others after.

Most famously, the opening of the Theogony describes how the Muses met Hesiod as he was pasturing sheep under Helicon, gave him a staff of laurel and breathed a divine voice into him. They warned him, in Hugh Evelyn-White's public-domain translation (1914): "we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things." The line has been read as a claim of authority against rival poets, perhaps including Homer, and as an early reflection on the truth of poetry.

The Theogony as a Text: Structure and Purpose§

The Theogony opens with a long hymn to the Muses, daughters of Zeus and Memory (Mnemosyne), and then asks them to tell how the gods, the earth, the rivers and the sea came to be. The answer is a genealogy: first Chaos, then Gaia (Earth), Tartarus and Eros; then the children of Earth and Sky (Ouranos), including the Titans; the many children of Night and of the Sea; the next generation of gods; and finally the Olympians and the many marriages and children of Zeus.

Running through the catalogue of names is a story of succession. Ouranos suppresses his children and is castrated by Kronos; Kronos swallows his children and is overthrown by Zeus; Zeus defeats the Titans and the monster Typhoeus and then avoids the same fate by swallowing his first wife Metis, who was destined to bear a son stronger than his father. The present order of the world is thus the result of violent struggle ending in a stable, just kingship. Many names are personifications — Strife, Toil, Victory, Justice — so that to list the gods was also to map the forces of the world.

Since the decipherment of Hittite in the early twentieth century, scholars have noted close parallels between this succession story and the Hurro-Hittite Song of Kumarbi, in which a sky god is castrated by his son, as well as Babylonian texts such as the Enuma Elish. Martin West's The East Face of Helicon (1997) gathered such evidence on a large scale. How the motifs reached Greece remains debated.

The Hymn to Hecate and the Theogony's Puzzles§

The Theogony contains passages that have long puzzled readers. The most striking is a hymn of about forty lines praising the goddess Hecate, whom Zeus honoured above all others and to whom he gave a share in earth, sea and sky. Here Hecate is a benevolent universal helper of kings, warriors, athletes, horsemen, fishermen and herdsmen, quite unlike the goddess of crossroads, ghosts and magic of later sources, described in Hecate, Goddess of Crossroads and Magic. Some scholars have suggested that Hesiod's family had a special devotion to her; others think the passage reflects her importance in Boeotia or Asia Minor.

The ending of the poem is another problem. After the marriages of Zeus and lists of goddesses who bore children to mortal men, the Theogony leads directly into the opening of a different work, the Catalogue of Women. Where Hesiod's own poem stops is unclear; many editors place the end somewhere around line 900 or 964, and regard what follows as a later bridge to the Catalogue. Other passages, such as parts of the Typhoeus episode, have also been suspected. Such questions show that the Theogony was not a fixed scripture but a text that changed in transmission.

Works and Days: Justice, Labour and the Five Ages§

Works and Days opens with a hymn to Zeus and then corrects the Theogony: there are not one but two Strifes (Eris), a destructive one that causes war and lawsuits, and a good one that drives a man to compete with his neighbour in work. From this beginning the poem urges Perses toward justice (dikē) and honest labour.

Hesiod explains why life is hard through two myths. The first is a new telling of Prometheus and Pandora, in which the first woman opens a jar (pithos) and releases evils into the world, leaving Hope inside. The second is the myth of the Five Ages (or races) of humanity: golden, silver, bronze, the race of heroes who fought at Thebes and Troy, and finally the iron race of the poet's own day, condemned to toil and decline. The insertion of the heroes into a sequence of metals is unusual and has prompted comparison with Near Eastern and Persian schemes of world ages.

The poem also contains the earliest Greek animal fable, the hawk and the nightingale, in which a hawk tells the captured songbird that resistance to the stronger is folly; Hesiod uses it to warn the lords that Zeus punishes injustice. Some of his best-known lines describe the road to virtue; in Evelyn-White's version: "between us and goodness the gods have placed the sweat of our brows."

The Farmer's Year and the Lucky Days§

The central part of Works and Days is a practical calendar for a farmer in Boeotia. Its times are fixed by the stars and nature rather than by dates: harvest begins when the Pleiades rise before dawn in early summer, and ploughing when they set in autumn; the cry of the migrating crane signals the ploughing season; the rising of Arcturus marks the end of winter, and Sirius the dog days of summer, when Hesiod recommends rest in the shade with wine and food. Advice on ploughs, oxen, storage and debt follows, and a cautious section on seafaring.

The poem ends with the "Days", a list of days of the lunar month that are favourable or unfavourable for different tasks: some for shearing sheep or reaping, others for a birth, a marriage or the opening of a storage jar. The fifth days are harsh, because on a fifth day the Furies attended the birth of Oath, while the seventh is holy as the birthday of Apollo (see The Number Seven). Some scholars think this section was added later; others see it as the natural end of a poem about doing the right thing at the right time. It is an early witness to the idea, later developed in astrology and almanacs, that time itself has qualities.

Transmission, the Hesiodic Corpus and Later Influence§

In antiquity Hesiod's name covered a whole body of poetry. Besides the Theogony and Works and Days, the surviving Shield of Heracles and the fragmentary Catalogue of Women, a vast genealogy of heroic families, were attributed to him, along with lost works on astronomy, the seer Melampus and the advice of Chiron. Most scholars think these were composed by later poets in his tradition. A work called The Contest of Homer and Hesiod, in a form dating from Roman times but using older material, imagined the two poets competing, with Hesiod winning the prize because he praised farming and peace over war.

Byzantine schools kept Works and Days as a textbook, and the poems were printed in Italy in the late fifteenth century. Virgil's Georgics drew openly on Works and Days, and George Chapman published an English version in 1618; Martin West's commentaries (1966, 1978) remain standard. Hesiod's fusion of genealogy, cosmic order and divine justice also shaped Greek speculation about the origins of the cosmos from the Presocratics to the Neoplatonists. For his place beside the epic tradition, see Homer and the Homeric Question.

Frequently asked questions§

When did Hesiod live?§

Hesiod is usually dated to around 700 BCE, mainly because of his reference to the funeral games of Amphidamas. The date is uncertain, and whether he preceded or followed Homer is debated.

What is the difference between the Theogony and Works and Days?§

The Theogony is a genealogy of the gods ending with the rule of Zeus. Works and Days deals with human life: justice, work, Pandora and the Five Ages, a farmer's calendar and lucky days.

What are Hesiod's Five Ages of Man?§

Five successive races of humans: golden, silver, bronze, the heroes of Thebes and Troy, and the present iron race. Each metallic race is worse than the last, but the heroes interrupt the decline.

Did Hesiod write the Catalogue of Women?§

It was attributed to him in antiquity and was attached to the end of the Theogony, but most modern scholars date it to the sixth century BCE and regard it as the work of a later poet in the Hesiodic tradition.

Sources and further reading§