Hesiod

The Muses on Helicon

The Theogony names its own singer. The Muses, the daughters of Zeus, taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon, the Boeotian mountain the poems give to them. In the same passage they hand him a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, and breathe a divine voice into him. Two poems carry his name: that one, which sets out the descent of the gods, and Works and Days, a poem of farming and justice addressed to his brother. Almost everything later readers knew about his life starts from passages like this one, inside the poems themselves.

The farm at Ascra

Works and Days supplies the family. His father left Aeolian Cyme because of poverty, the poem says, and crossed the sea to Boeotia, where he settled at Ascra, below the same Helicon. The poem allows the village nothing: bad in winter, sultry in summer, and good at no time. Hesiod addresses the poem to Perses, a brother who shares that father. Their quarrel is over their inheritance, and the poem reminds him of “your father and mine, foolish Perses”, who used to sail on shipboard for want of a living.

The one crossing and the tripod

Hesiod reports a single sea crossing of his own. He never sailed the wide sea, he says, except from Aulis over to the island of Euboea, at Aulis where the Achaeans once waited out a storm with their great host. He went to Chalcis, on Euboea, to the games of wise Amphidamas, where the sons of that great-hearted hero proclaimed and appointed the prizes. There, he says, he gained the victory with a song and carried off a handled tripod, which he dedicated to the Muses of Helicon, in the place where they first set him in the way of clear song.

What the contest at Delphi was

Delphi was the holy ground of the god Apollo, shared by all the Greek cities rather than owned by one, and its theatre and stadium held the Pythian Games every four years. Pausanias, the ancient traveller who described Greece place by place, says the oldest contest there, and the first for which prizes were offered, was the singing of a hymn to the god. Modern scholars read the tradition that kept Hesiod out of that contest as the exclusion of a performer who recited his verse without an instrument.

The statue with a harp on its knees

On Helicon, Pausanias saw a statue of Hesiod sitting with a harp upon his knees, and objected to it. The instrument is not at all appropriate for Hesiod to carry, he says, because the poet’s own verses have him sing holding a wand of laurel. He also found the Boeotians living around the mountain unwilling to credit him with much. They allowed him only the Works, and showed Pausanias a tablet of lead where the spring is, mostly defaced by time, with that poem engraved on it.

The death, and the bones

The historian Thucydides reports his death in a single sentence. Hesiod died in the precinct of Nemean Zeus, where the people living thereabouts said he had died, and an oracle had foretold that he should die in Nemea. Pausanias carries the sequel. A plague sent the Boeotians of Orchomenos to Delphi, and the Pythian priestess answered that they were to bring the bones of Hesiod from the land of Naupactus to the land of Orchomenos. Asked where in that land the bones would be found, she answered that a crow would show them the place.

What the ancients would not settle

His date was open in antiquity and stayed open. The historian Herodotus put Hesiod and Homer, the other poet the Greeks placed at the start of their verse, no more than 400 years before his own time, and credited the pair with teaching the Greeks the descent of the gods. Most ancient writers made Homer the elder, though opinion was not unanimous and some reversed the order. Pausanias, who collected what Boeotia said about the poet, looked into the question of his date and declined to write on it.