The Oxford History Of The Classical World

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1
Near Helicon he stopped, in a poor place, the best he could:
In Ascra, bad in winter, worse in summer, never good.

(Works and Days, 637-40)


Ascra is in Boeotia, and Hesiod's father had settled far from home. Hesiod also tells us that he was made a
singer when he met the Muses under Mount Helicon and they gave him a staff and breathed song into
him; that he went to the funeral celebrations of one Amphidamas of Chalcis, on Euboea across the strait,
and in the singing competition won a prize, a tripod, which he dedicated to the Muses; and that he had a
brother named Perses. Perses, however, is a problem, and we shall have to come back to him. In addition
to giving us these facts, Hesiod has a strong personality, which also marks off his work from the epic. In
place of aristocratic withdrawal we find a speaker who is argumentative, suspicious, ironically humorous,
frugal, fond of proverbs, wary of women.


His two poems, Theogony and Works and Days, are traditionally classed as didactic. They are in
hexameters, like Homer, and Hesiod describes himself as a singer; it is natural to suppose that these
poems, too, develop out of an oral tradition. Some think that Hesiod himself was the first to write his
songs down. They contain highly poetical passages, but in general M. L. West's phrase 'Hesiod's
hobnailed hexameters' is pretty fair. The Theogony was composed first. At the beginning Hesiod presents
his credentials, telling how the Muses inspired him and told him to 'sing of the blessed deathless gods, and
first and last to sing of themselves'. Hesiod fulfils this instruction by starting at the very beginning, with
Chaos (something like 'Yawning Space', not 'Disorder)'), then Gaia/Earth, the broad seat of gods and men,
and Tartara beneath the earth, and Love. Gaia/Earth gives birth to Uranus/Heaven-the double names are
an attempt to convey the double aspect of these beings, who are both the natural objects and also
anthropomorphic personalities. Thus Uranus is 'starry', but also he begot children on Gaia and then 'hid
them away at their birth in a cleft of Earth and would not let them into the light; and he exulted in his evil-
doing'.


The beginning of the gods is the beginning of the world, and theogony includes cosmogony. Earth is the
first requisite, since everything else is placed by reference to it, either on it or under it. Heaven, as we
have seen, is secondary to Earth, but is a good partner, being of comparable size; and since Earth, out of
which things come to birth, is obviously a mother, Uranus/Heaven must be a father. The world is then
built up and furnished by a series of sexual unions which produce offspring. That incidentally explains
why Love is given such a very early position. Love has no children of his own, but he is the principle of
procreation which is to create the world. The idea is a simple one, but we can see Hesiod developing it:
one thing can be the 'offspring' of another in several different senses.


The children of Night will serve as an example. Night gave birth to black Doom and Death, and to Misery
and Retribution and Strife (and other disagreeables), and to Sleep and the tribe of Dreams, and to Deceit
and Affection, and to Day and Ether, and to the Hesperides. Death is dark and inactive, like night; misery
and retribution are dark and deadly; sleep happens in the night; deceit perhaps started out as simply one of
the unpleasantnesses, but suggested seduction-and love-play happens at night; day comes to birth, visibly,
from night, and Ether is the sky left bright by night's departure; the Hesperides simply live in the west,

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