Hesiod

Hesiod stands second in the canonical arc of archetype, immediately after homer, as one of the two ancient headwaters of the Western tradition of taking the soul seriously as a psychological reality. Where Homer gives the epics of the pre-unified Greek self in action, Hesiod gives the [[theogony|Theogony]] and the [[works-and-days|Works and Days]] — the genealogy of the divine powers and the ethical-agrarian poem of human labor under those powers.

Hesiod names himself in his own poem (Theogony 22), receiving his vocation from the Muses on Mount Helicon — the first such self-identification in the Greek poetic tradition (Nagy 1979). The same act inscribes him into the genealogical structure his poem inaugurates: as therapôn of the Muses, he is parallel to the warrior who is therapôn of Ares, and therefore “worthy of being a cult hero” (Nagy 1979). The investiture of the poet is, in the same gesture, the apotheosis of the poet.

The philological recovery reads Hesiod as the author of two structurally distinct but complementary poems. The Theogony gives the order of the gods as a hierarchy of psychic and cosmic powers, culminating in the sovereignty of Zeus. The Works and Days reads that order from below, tracing the human obligation to Dike and the consequences of hubris. Together they constitute the earliest systematic Greek attempt to read divine, natural, and human orders as aspects of a single intelligible structure. Vernant locates Hesiod precisely “between the Homeric world and the world of the polis” (Vernant 1983) — the hinge between the heroic body and the genealogical theology that classical philosophy will inherit.

Key concepts

• theogony
• works-and-days
• succession-myth
• dichterweihe
• muses
• mnemosyne
• dike
• hubris
• myth-of-the-races
• hesiodic-cosmogony-chaos
• pandora-anodos

Major works

• theogony
• works-and-days