Hesiod
750 BCE - 650 BCE
LC heading: lived during the 8th century BC)
Biography:
Archaic Greek poet of Boeotia, ca. 775-660 bce, to whom the poems Theogony and Works and Days are attributed. Hesiod's reception has been chiefly confined to the myths and motifs that he provides, rather than to his poems as complex wholes. These motifs include a codification of the Greek gods; a cosmology; the Muses who encounter the shepherd Hesiod on Mount Helicon and initiate him into poetry; the gods' complex, violent, bloody familial politics; the intercourse of earth (Gaia) and sky (Ouranous); Kronos' castration of Ouranos and Aphrodite's subsequent birth from Ouranos' severed genitals, which had been cast into the sea; battle among gigantic primal beings, including monsters of many limbs, many heads, and voracious appetites; the intertwined stories of Pandora and Prometheus; the labors of the agricultural year; and the Five Ages of the World. These myths and motifs were staples of mythological encyclopedias by the late 15th century, when the earliest printed versions of Hesiod appeared.
Hesiod's poems were known across the Aegean world by 600 bce; they have been well preserved and disseminated by rhapsodes, scribes, editors, grammarians, commentators, philosophers, mythographic encyclopedists, and other poets. Extensive allegorical scholia derived from grammarians' commentaries on Hesiod were used to explain Hesiod to Byzantine schoolboys. There were editions out of Basel throughout the mid-16th century, usually with parallel Latin translation; in 1566 Henri Estienne published Hesiod in his large folio edition of the major Greek poets, Poetae graeci principes heroici carminis.
Hesiodic details of myth saturate European epic and mythopoeic writing, perhaps most spectacularly in Dante, Milton, Blake, and Keats, who make much of Hesiod's infernal regions, his Titans and primordial monsters, his giant battles. In the 20th century Charles Olson juxtaposed Hesiod with the local lore of his New World epic in Maximus, from Dogtown, I and IV. Women writers have countered the ill fortunes and bad characters of Hesiod's female beings; perhaps most remarkable of these efforts is the Korean American feminist poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée (1982), which profoundly reworks and challenges Hesiod on the Muses and the Catalogue of Women long attributed to him, and focuses the gender politics represented in Hesiod's works.
Artists have never abandoned a fascination with Hesiod on the Muses. In the 19th century the artist Gustave Moreau created many visual representations of their initiation of the poet. Both Rubens and Goya painted famous and harrowing pictures of Kronos (Saturn) devouring one of his children, a motif from the Theogony; William Blake engraved a series after drawings by his friend John Flaxman called The Theogony, Works and Days, and the Days of Hesiod (1816-1817); Georges Braque chose the Theogony as the subject of 20 etchings.
Recently the rising global poetry movement has looked to Hesiod as spokesman for the laborer and the harsh but life-giving locality. He figures thus for the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, for the Australian Les Murray (whose polemical contrast between an urbane country of the mind called Athens and a rugged native land called Boeotia sparked significant discussion of white Australian culture), and memorably for the Australian-born British poet Peter Porter, in his influential poem "On First Looking into Chapman's Hesiod":
("Hesiod". 2010. In The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. http://ezproxy.bpl.org/login?url=http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/harvardct/hesiod/0. Accessed January 2016).
Person TypeIndividual
Last Updated8/7/24
Terms
active East Aurora, New York, 1895 - 1915
Venice, about 1460 - about 1526, Venice
Bradford, Yorkshire, 1872 - 1945, Far Oakridge
