Hesiod named himself a poet when Homer stayed masked
Hesiod, active roughly 750–650 BC near 700 BC, left complete works including Theogony—the gods’ births and Zeus’s rise—and Works and Days. Western critics call him the first written poet to stage himself as a persona inside his songs. A quarrel with brother Perses frames the farming wisdom poem.
Works and Days lays out the five Ages of Man and tells the Pandora story alongside its practical advice. Ancient writers credited him and Homer with fixing Greek religious custom, and scholars now mine him for mythology, farming methods, early economic ideas, astronomy and the reckoning of time. The name itself defies analysis; its second half may mean road or voice.
Epic left Homer no room to talk about himself, but Hesiod’s instructional poems are full of personal detail. His father had moved from Cyme in Anatolia to Boeotia, against the usual colonial current. Hesiod disliked the sea yet once crossed to Euboea for the funeral games of Amphidamas of Chalcis, winning a tripod for song. He says the Muses met him while he tended sheep on Mount Helicon and gave him a laurel staff rather than a lyre, a hint he was no trained rhapsode. Despite grumbling about poverty, the farm he describes has servants, a seasoned ploughman and teams of oxen and mules.
The voice is argumentative, suspicious, wryly funny, thrifty and fond of proverbs, and openly hostile to women. He probably wrote or dictated the poems, and Pausanias was shown a lead tablet engraved with the Works. Two traditions place his grave: one says the Delphic oracle warned him off Nemea, so he fled to Locris and was killed at a temple of Nemean Zeus; another puts his tomb at Orchomenus.
Late fifth-century Greeks ranked their oldest poets as Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, then Homer, before Homer was promoted to first. Mentions of the Delphi sanctuary and Black Sea rivers suggest he wrote no earlier than about 750 BC.
Source: Hesiod
