Buy in U.K.

Buy in U.S.

If you like Homer, then you'll be sort of somewhat interested maybe in Hesiod.

The two of them are the golden twins of really ancient Greek poetry—that is, ancient to the same Greeks whom we call ancient today. They wrote about three or four hundred years before the "classical" Greeks of Socrates, Plato, Pericles, Sophocles and company. Unlike Homer who likely lived in a Greek colony, Hesiod is thought to have come from the Greek mainland near Ascra in Boetia, where he was born a poor farmer—or so the story goes.

As with Homer, scholarly controversy has raged as to who Hesiod was, whether someone named Hesiod composed all the works attributed to him, and whether the poems were written down or passed on orally.

However, Hesiod's worldview and philosophy, as presented in the works that bear his name, were quite different than those of the famous Greek writers that followed him. For him the world was composed of gods. There was a god for everything: the earth, the heavens, the hills, famine, work—you name it. And these gods ran everything. They made the world run as it does and they could hurt or help us mortal. Far from being the gods of some later monotheistic traditions, they were very human in their behaviour—jealous, vain, quarrelling, fickle. We had to placate them with praise and offerings to prevent risking their wrath—and even then they might turn on us to suit their own ends.

Later Greek thinkers turned away from this outlook to find natural or rational explanations of how the world worked and to figure out our place in it. Nonetheless, most of them continued to follow the traditions set down by Hesiod and to honour the gods as he proposed, even if they considered it myth (but useful myth)—just as many modern scientists today live and work in the Judaic-Christian tradition regardless of the non-theistic nature of their scientific activity.

Partly this is because Hesiod's writings provided more than a few fairy-tales about the Olympian gods, but provided advice for living that made sense to the ancients quite apart from the existence of deities. Again you could draw a parallel to modern life: one can get quite a lot of tips for living a moral life by selecting passages from the Bible, whether or not you buy the whole mythology. Killing and lying are bad, do onto others. etc.

© Copyright 2002–2008 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.