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know a bit more about him, because his writings actually include some autobiographical clues. His father had been a merchant sailor, and after living in Cyme, on the coast of Asia Minor (Turkey), had moved back to mainland Greece and started a farm in a time of growing prosperity in Greece. The family’s estates were small, and when Hesiod and his brother, Perses, inherited them, the brothers apparently quarreled over their shares. It also seems apparent that Hesiod was a somewhat cranky country gentleman, and no fan of women—as best represented in his telling of the familiar story of Pandora, the first woman (see below, What was in Pandora’s “box”?). The ills of the world, in Hesiod’s words, are all due to a female, created by the gods to torment men—“a calamity for men who live by bread.”

By this time in history, the Greeks had borrowed and adapted the Phoenician writing system. As the scholar and translator M. L. West writes, “The existence of writing now made it possible for poems to be recorded and preserved in a more or less fixed form. Hesiod and Homer were among the first to take advantage of this possibility, and that is why…they stand at the beginning of Greek literature.”

After the Muses appeared to Hesiod on the sacred Mount Helicon and presented him with a staff, he was told to sing of the gods and became a poet, or a man who entertained at private gatherings and feasts, an ancient “wedding singer,” reciting the familiar old stories and songs as well as composing them. Theogony was the first result of this “divine” inspiration. Relatively brief, compared to Homer’s two major epics, the poem contains the names of more than three hundred gods, some of them obscure and insignificant in the Greek pantheon. Theogony also tells of the birth of the first gods, their stormy family relationships, the story of Prometheus, and ends with the marriage of Zeus and Hera, king and queen of the Greek gods.

Works and Days, Hesiod’s even more popular work, was a poem addressed to his brother, Perses, in which he examined human life and set forth his moral values. Also fairly brief, it is nonetheless a rambling compendium of myths, moral philosophy, proverbial wisdom, and practical advice that makes Hesiod sound like an ancient Greek Ben Franklin, offering Farmer’s Almanac–style advice on cultivating crops, what should be sown, and when the harvest should take place. But Works and Days also expresses Hesiod’s philosophy that life is difficult and people must work hard in spite of the just rule of Zeus, the king of the gods.

It may be that this advice was aimed directly at his brother, Perses, who got the larger share of the family farm, apparently after bribing some local officials Hesiod called “bribe swallowers.” But Perses was not, apparently, sufficiently industrious and Hesiod constantly upbraided him for his laziness. Perhaps more curious, some of his advice went so far as to explain the proper way to relieve oneself:

Do not urinate standing towards the sun; and after sunset and until sunrise, bear in mind, do not urinate either on the road or off the road walking, nor uncovered: the night belongs to the blessed ones. The godly man of sense does it squatting, or going to the wall of the courtyard enclosure…. And never urinate in the waters of rivers that flow to the sea, or at springs—avoid this strictly—nor void your vapours in them; that is not advisable.”

—Works and Days, M. L. West, translator

Not exactly what we have in mind when we think about the glories of Greece.

But Hesiod’s two collections offer a treasure trove nonetheless, both in understanding the early stories of the gods and as a valuable source of insight into common life in the Greek world of the Archaic Age.

MYTHIC VOICES

Great Heaven came bringing on the night, and desirous of love, stretched out in every direction. His son reached out from the ambush with his left hand; and with his right he took the huge sickle with its long row of sharp teeth and quickly cut off his father’s genitals, and flung them behind him to fly where they