ESIODO. – Greek poet, probably active in the eighth century B.C. What is known of him is inferred from his works: his father was from Cuma celica and emigrated to Ascra in Beozia, where, it seems, E. was born. He lived by cultivating the land left to him by his father and by poetry; in a poetic contest at Calciè in Eubea he won a tripod. He seems to have died at Ascra.
The ancients attributed many works to him: the best known are the Θεογονία (“Theogony”), the Ἔργα (“Works”); in several manuscripts the title “Works and Days” is found, but the Ἡρήραι were added later; the Ἀσπία Ἡρακλέους (“Shield of Heracles”); the Ἡρωίδες (“Heroines”); and the Κατάλογος τῶν γυναικῶν (“Catalogue of Women”). Like Omoro, E. became the authority concerning the generations of the gods. His “Theogony” is precisely the succession of the divine generations, the history of the gods. First came Caca, then Earth, Uranus, Cronus, and finally Zeus. The gods who rule the world are the children of Cronus and Zeus. E. takes the nucleus of his gods from the Homeric Olympus, but in him theology extends beyond the restricted circle of the Olympian divinities and becomes cosmogony. He is not a reformer and does not seek new forms of worship; rather, he wants the ancient conceptions to be permeated by the idea of law, justice, and peace, which now, for the first time, rise to the importance of personifications. E. feels the closest ties with Zeus: he is the god whose power he seeks to establish, the one who does everything and gives the world and human beings whatever he wills; E. believes in his justice. The gods are interwoven with the history of humanity in the “Works and Days.” E. does not say how human beings came into existence, perhaps from Earth, since he presupposes a common origin with the gods; woman is the punishment for man, created by Zeus. Here E. connects the myth of the ages of the world: five races have succeeded one another on earth—the race of gold, when human beings knew neither labor nor suffering nor death; the race of silver, wicked and dishonoring the gods, which was buried in the Underworld; the race of bronze, warlike and terrible, when human beings killed one another and are now in Hades; the race of demigods, the heroes of Tebe and Troia, who partly perished and partly live in the Isles of the Blessed; and the race of iron, the present one, which becomes more wicked every day: Zeus will destroy II.