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Updated: June 7, 2025
Besides the Theogony, which treats of the origin of the gods and of nature, his Works and Days relates to the works which a farmer has to do, and the lucky or unlucky days for doing them. It contains doctrines and precepts relative to agriculture, navigation, civil and family life. Hesiod was the first of a Boeotian school of poets.
And as they hear of worship won and works that live in song, they yearn ever more, and are fired to emulation, that they too may be sung and marvelled at by them that come after, and have their Hesiod and their Homer. And when they attain their civil rights, and it is time for them to take their share in governing but all this, it may be, is irrelevant.
As to that, I doubt whether you have so much as heard of Helicon, the reputed haunt of those Goddesses; your youthful pursuits were not those of a Hesiod; take not the Muses' names in vain.
It contains an interesting representation of the feelings, habits, and superstitions of the rural population of Greece in the earlier ages. Respecting the date of Hesiod nothing certain can be affirmed. Modern writers usually suppose him to have flourished two or three generations later than Homer.
For things nobly and usefully made he called works; and such makings he called workings, and doings; and he must be supposed to have called such things only man's proper business, and what is hurtful, not his business: and in that sense Hesiod, and any other wise man, may be reasonably supposed to call him wise who does his own work.
Hesiod indeed said that a woman should marry about fifteen and a man about thirty, but obstetricians have usually concluded that, in the interests alike of the parents and their offspring, the procreative life should not begin in women before twenty and in men before twenty-five.
Upon this single word I shut myself up in my apartment; and in three weeks produced, in the place of Tasso, another act, the subject of which was Hesiod inspired by the muses. In this I found the secret of introducing a part of the history of my talents, and of the jealousy with which Rameau had been pleased to honor me.
It will be observed in what follows that the poet does not strictly adhere to the legend as given by Hesiod, in which it is stated that Pandora, probably under the influence of curiosity, herself raised the lid of the mysterious casket. The poet, instead, attributes the act to Epimetheus, and so relieves Pandora of the odium and the guilt. "Let me see," quoth Epimetheus, "What my touch can do!"
But genius stirs in him, and he is Greek altogether in the deep enthusiasms proper to genius: so presently he leaves Crete and culture, to wander forth among the islands singing. En delo tote Proton ego Kai Homeros aoidoi Melpomen, says Hesiod: "Then first in Delos did I and Homer, two Aoidoi, perform as musical reciters." Delos, of course, is a small island in the Cyclades.
Hence the writers of the various annals of Ireland do not scruple to quote many poems or other tales as authority for the facts of history which they relate. And such also was heroic poetry among the Greeks. The Hellenic philosophers, historians, and geographers of later times always quoted Homer and Hesiod as authorities for the facts they related in their scientific works.
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