HESIOD. - Greek poet, who probably lived in the 8th century B.C. What is known of him comes from his works: his father was from Aeolian Cumae, who emigrated to Ascra in Boeotia, where, it seems, Hesiod was born. He lived there cultivating the land left to him by his father and the village; in a poetic contest in Euboea in Chalcis he won a tripod. He seems to have died at Ascra.
The ancients attributed many works to him: the most important are the Θεογονία (Theogony), the Ἔργα (Works); in various manuscripts the title is ἔργα καὶ ἡμέραι (Works and Days), but also Ἡρακλέους ἀσπίς (Shield of Heracles); the Προοίμια (Prooemia); the Κατάλογος γυναικῶν (Catalogue of Women). Like Homer, Hesiod became the common source for the generations of the gods. His Theogony is precisely the series of divine generations, the history of the gods. First came Chaos, then Earth, Heaven, Cronus, and finally Zeus. The gods who rule the world are the sons of Cronus and Zeus. Hesiod takes the nucleus of his gods from the Homeric Olympus, but in him theology expands beyond the narrow circle of Olympian deities and becomes cosmogonic. He is not a reformer, does not desire new forms of worship, but wants the ancient conceptions to be permeated by the idea of law, justice, peace, which for the first time rise to the importance of personifications. With Zeus Hesiod feels the closest ties; he is the god whose power he aims to consolidate, the one who was everything, who gives to the world and to men what he wills: Hesiod believes in his justice. The gods intertwine with the history of humanity in Works and Days. Hesiod does not say how men were born, perhaps from Earth, because he admits a common origin with the gods; woman is the punishment of man, created by Zeus. Here he links the myth of the ages of the world: five races have succeeded one another on earth: the race of gold, when men knew neither toil nor sorrow nor death; the race of silver, wicked, which did not honor the gods, and was buried in the Underworld; the race of bronze, warlike and terrible, when men slaughtered one another and now dwell in Hades; the race of demigods, the heroes of Thebes and Troy who in part perished, in part live in the Isles of the Blessed; the race of iron, the present one, which grows ever more wicked: Zeus will destroy II.