Hesiod
HESIOD (Gr., Hēsiodos; fl. c. 730–700 BCE) was one of the earliest recorded Greek poets. The earlier of his two surviving poems, Theogony, is of interest to students of Greek religion as an attempt to catalog the gods in the form of a genealogy, starting with the beginning of the world and describing the power struggles that led to Zeus's kingship among the gods. The cosmogony begins with Chaos ("yawning space"), Earth, and Eros (the principle of sexual love—a precondition of genealogical development). The first ruler of the world is Ouranos ("heaven"). His persistent intercourse with Earth hinders the birth of his children, the Titans, until Kronos, the youngest, castrates him. Kronos later tries to suppress his own children by swallowing them, but Zeus, the youngest, is saved and makes Kronos regurgitate the others. The younger gods defeat the Titans after a ten-year war and consign them to Tartaros, below the earth, so that they no longer play a part in the world's affairs.
This saga of successive rulers is evidently related to mythical accounts known from older Hittite and Babylonian sources. Hesiod's genealogy names some three hundred gods. Besides cosmic entities (Night, Sea, Rivers, etc.) and gods of myth and cult, it includes personified abstractions such as Strife, Deceit, Victory, and Death. Several alternative theogonies came into existence in the three centuries after Hesiod, but his remained the most widely read.
Hesiod's other poem, Works and Days, is a compendium of moral and practical advice. Here Zeus is prominent as the all-seeing god of righteousness who rewards honesty and industry and punishes injustice.
Also attributed to Hesiod was a poem that actually dated only from the sixth century BCE, the Catalog of Women, which dealt with heroic genealogies issuing from unions between gods and mortal women. It enjoyed a status similar to that of the Theogony, but it survives only in fragments.
Bibliography
Hesiod's theological thinking is explored in a careful and sensitive way by Friedrich Solmsen in Hesiod and Aeschylus (Ithaca, N.Y., 1949). There is much fresh insight in the chapter on Hesiod in Hermann Fränkel's Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy (Oxford, 1975). The divine genealogies and the Oriental background to the "succession myth" are fully discussed in my book Hesiod: Theogony (Oxford, 1966). For a discussion of the other poems, see my Hesiod: Works and Days (Oxford, 1978) and The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Its Nature, Structure, and Origins (Oxford, 1985).
New Sources
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