Hesiod is the earliest Greek poet who speaks about himself in his poems. Works and Days says that his father left Aeolian Cyme in Asia Minor because of poverty and settled at Ascra, a village under Mount Helicon in Boeotia, and that Hesiod once sailed to Chalcis in Euboea and won a tripod for song at the funeral games of Amphidamas. The Theogony tells how the Muses met him while he was shepherding lambs on Helicon and gave him a laurel staff and a divine voice. He is usually dated around 700 BC; whether he lived before, after or alongside the poet of the Iliad was already debated in antiquity and remains unsettled. The translator, Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1884-1924), was an English classical scholar and Egyptologist whose Loeb volume Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica appeared in 1914.
Frequently Cited
“Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door”
“Badness can be got easily and in shoals: the road to her is smooth, and she lives very near us. But between us and Goodness the gods have placed the sweat of our brows: long and steep is the path that leads to her, and it is rough at the first”
Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses.