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Hesiod odyssey

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Hesiod


Hesiod
Description:

A poet and rhapsode, Hesiod lived around 700 B.C. Hesiod is always compared to Homer and is one those rare poets whose compositions survive to this day. No one knows who was born first Homer or Hesiod, but some assume they lived around the same time.
Some ancient Greek scholars like Aristarchus argued that Homer was the earlier and many accepted this later. But this claim is doubtful because both these poets existed when no records of history were compiled. So whoever was born first may never be known.
Hesiod claimed himself to be a farmer in Boeotia, an area in Central Greece. His father belonged to Kyme in Aeolis but travelled to Ascra and settled there (described as cursed in his poems). Hesiod's father owned a small piece of land and practised law along with his brother Perses. These details are derived from his works 'Works and Days' and the 'Theogony' but other than this, little of him is known.
Only these famous works 'Works and Days' and the 'Theogony' exist today and some lines of his composition 'Shield of Heracles'.

Works and Compositi
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Hesiod
by
Ruth Scodel
  • LAST REVIEWED: 14 December 2009
  • LAST MODIFIED: 14 December 2009
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0019

  • Blümer, Wilhelm. 2001. Interpretation archaischer Dichtung: Die mythologischen Partien der Erga Hesiods. Münster, Germany: Aschendorff.

    Blümer argues at length against Nagy and his school and in favor of Hesiod’s individuality, especially at pp. 73–87.

  • Griffith, Mark. 1983. Personality in Hesiod. Classical Antiquity 2:37–65.

    This paper assumes that Hesiod is an individual author but argues that all the autobiographical material in the poems serves a purpose in its context and need not be true.

  • Martin, Richard. 1992. Hesiod’s metanastic poetics. Ramus 21:11–33.

    Suggests that the claim that Hesiod’s father came to Ascra from Aeolic Cymae (Works and Days 633–640) is intended to give the poetic voice an outsider’s authority to criticize the community.

  • Nagy, Gregory. 1990. Greek mythology and poetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.

    Chapter 3, “Hesiod and the poetics of pan-Hellenization,”

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    Hesiod’s Life and Works

    Related Links in the GSR:

    Source: Introduction to Hesiod's The Poems and Fragments done into English Prose with Introduction and Appendices by A.W. Mair M.A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908).

    INTRODUCTION

    I. THE HESIODIC EPOS

    1. ‘Poetry is earlier than Prose’ is a familiar dictum of historical literary criticism, and the dictum is a true one when rightly understood. It has been a difficulty with some that prose—prosa oratio, or direct speech—the speech which, like Mark Antony, ‘only speaks right on,’ should be later in literature than verse. But all that is meant is merely this: that before the invention of some form of writing, of a mechanical means in some shape or other of recording the spoken word, the only kind of literature that can exist is a memorial literature. And a memorial literature can only be developed with the help of metre.

    Aristotle finds the origin of poetry in two deepseated human instincts: ‘the instinct for Imitation and the instinct for Harmony and Rhythm, metres being clearly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, sta

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