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Hesiod

Also called: Hesiodos

Ancient Greek poet of the Theogony and the Works and Days, who lived at Ascra in Boeotia around 700 BC; with Homer, the oldest source of Greek myth

His life is known almost entirely from his own poems. According to the Works and Days, his father crossed the sea from Cyme in Aeolis in Asia Minor to escape poverty and settled at Ascra, a village at the foot of Mount Helicon in Boeotia, which Hesiod called “bad in winter, hard in summer, never good”. At the opening of the Theogony he says the Muses gave him a laurel staff while he was tending sheep and made him a poet, and he records winning a tripod for his song at the funeral games of Amphidamas at Chalcis in Euboea. A quarrel with his brother Perses over their father’s land lies behind the Works and Days. Of his death there are only varying traditions, such as that he was murdered in Locris, and whether he lived before or after Homer was debated even in antiquity.

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    700 BCHesiod Composes the Theogonyauthor

    Around 700 BC the Boeotian poet Hesiod composed the Theogony, on the beginning of the world, the generations of the gods and how Zeus became king. With his Works and Days, it is the oldest systematic account of Greek myth.

Themes this person appears in

  • The Olympian Gods800 BC – 432 BC

    From Chaos and Gaia to the War of the Titans, the reign of Zeus, Prometheus and Pandora — the gods of Greek myth in story order, alongside Hesiod’s Theogony and the real sanctuaries where the myths lived: Eleusis, Delphi, the Parthenon and Olympia