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HESIOD was the bard to whom
Greek tradition attributed all ancient poetry of what is called
the Boeotian School. These writings contain long genealogies
and catalogues of mythical heroes or heroines, their adventures
and their races; lists of "proverbs," like the Proverbs
of Solomon, but referring mostly to agriculture; a minute knowledge
of everything Boeotian; and a greater interest in the arts of
peace than in the Homeric themes of war and heroism. In one of
these didactic poems--the Works and Days--the poet gives
us his biography, which passed in later Greece as the biography
of "Hesiod."
His father came from the colony of Cume, in Asia-Minor, to
Ascra, in Boeotia, to better himself as a farmer. The farm which
should have come to the poet, was obtained, through the decision
of unjust and corrupt judges, by his brother Perses, to whom,
in the poem, he addresses many rebukes and lamentations. But
the greater part of the poem consists of advice for profitable
husbandry and agriculture, interspersed with happy touches of
natural description, and full of a simple charm. The moral teaching
is simple, personal, and intensely practical. The theology which
appears incidentally, in rustic superstitions, in the Works
and Days is developed fully in the Theogony, which
systematises into a regular Pantheon all the popular deities
of the time. It was the influence exercised by this work over
the imagination of his countrymen which gained Hesiod the reputation
of having, with Homer, "created the religion of the Greeks."
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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