Hesiod

HESIOD. - Greek poet, who probably lived in the 8th century B.C. What is known of him is deduced from his works: his father was from Cyme in Aeolis, who emigrated to Ascra in Boeotia where, it seems, Hesiod was born. He lived cultivating the land left to him by his father and poetry; in a poetic contest at Chalcis in Euboea he won a tripod. It seems he died at Ascra.

The ancients attributed many works to him: the most remembered are the Θεογονία ("Theogony"), the Ἔργα ("Works"), in various codices the title "Works and Days" is found, but the Ἡμέραι were added later; the Ἀσπὶς Ἡρακλέους ("Shield of Heracles"); the Ἡρωίδες ("Ehoiai"); the Κατάλογος τῶν γυναικῶν ("Catalogue of Women"). Like Homer, Hesiod became the authority regarding the generations of the gods. His "Theogony" is precisely the series of divine generations, the history of the gods. First was Chaos, then Earth, Uranus, Cronus and finally Zeus. The gods who rule the world are sons of Cronus and of Zeus. Hesiod takes the core of his gods from the Homeric Olympus, but in him theology extends beyond the narrow circle of the Olympian divinities and becomes cosmogony. He is not a reformer, he does not desire new forms of worship, but he wants the ancient conceptions to be penetrated by the idea of law, justice, peace, now rising for the first time to the importance of personifications. With Zeus Hesiod feels the closest contacts, he is the god whose power he aims to establish, the one who does everything, who gives to the world and to men what he wills: Hesiod believes in his justice. The gods are interwoven with the history of humanity in the "Works and Days". Hesiod does not say how men were born, perhaps from Earth, because he admitted a common origin with the gods; woman is the punishment of man created by Zeus. Hesiod here connects the myth of the ages of the world; five races have succeeded one another on earth: the race of gold, when men knew neither work 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 killed one another and are now in Hades; the race of the demigods, the heroes of Thebes and Troy who partly perished, partly live in the islands of the Blessed; the race of iron, the present one, which becomes more wicked every day: Zeus will destroy it.

Luiza Banti