Hesiod: shepherd, farmer...

...and "genius" inventor of Greek mythology

Edith Hamilton never had that much love for Hesiod, the poet who wrote the earliest stories we have of Greek mythology.

“Hesiod was a poor farmer whose life was hard and bitter,” Hamilton explains in her most famous work, Mythology. “If Hesiod did write [his poem the Theogony, or the Generations of the Gods], then a humble peasant, living on a lonely farm far from cities, was the first man in Greece to wonder how everything had happened: the world, the sky, the gods, mankind, and to think out an explanation.”

How much skepticism is barely concealed in those few words!

You can tell that Hamilton herself didn’t believe that Hesiod was a poor farmer, or that if he was, he couldn’t have thunk up all that stuff about the divinities all on his own.

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

Hamilton doesn’t pursue her thought, because it would have undermined her thesis—that the Greeks were truly a miracle of mankind, a miraculous people who produced a genius out of their poor peasantry.

In fact, the real story of Hesiod is infinitely more exciting, layered, and, in its own way, miraculous.

As is true of many events and people in the ancient Mediterranean world, we can’t be sure that Hesiod existed as one specific guy, whether a poor farmer or not.

But the “I” narrator of Hesiod’s poems claims clearly enough that he, Hesiod, is a real person with a real family and a real biography.

His father (traditionally named “Dios”) was a merchant who originally lived in Cyme, a town on the coast of Asia Minor, now Turkey. Early on, maybe before Hesiod was born, Dios emigrated from Cyme and settled in Ascra, a town in Boeotia (Be-OH-shah, central Greece), near Mount Helicon.

Both these details are extremely suggestive. Of what, you will soon see.

Hesiod himself says he did not follow in his father’s footsteps, only traveling by boat once to a poetry contest in Chalcis of Euboea (You-BE-ah), an important merchant town to the east of Ascra.

Yet, funnily enough, in that same Works and Days poem, Hesiod has quite a bit of advice for his brother Perses, the one to whom the poem is addressed, about sailing—how and when to do it, and how to care for boats.

And the single boat journey to Chalcis? Boeotia is separated from Euboea and Chalcis by a strait of water that today at its narrowest is about 130 feet wide. In ancient times it was never much more.

That wasn’t a journey; it was a ferry ride.

So all this doesn’t really add up.

The most famous detail from Hesiod’s life comes at the beginning of the Theogony, where he claims that he was watching sheep on the slopes of Mount Helicon near Ascra when he was visited by the nine Muses, the goddesses of poetic inspiration.

Why they should have visited him rather than someone else Hesiod never considers. But they give him a beautiful wooden staff, breathe their knowledge of the origins of the divinities into him, and command him to spread that knowledge far and wide.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice once said.

What I conclude from these data is that Hesiod was a pretty sly fellow who picked and chose his biographical details to paint a picture of himself as a humble shepherd and delegate of the Muses rather than what he was, a very skilled, professional traveling poet.

Here is the one detail that, for me, trumps all the others: his father was a merchant who lived in Greek Anatolia.

This place is the site par excellence for the transmission of stories about the gods from West Asia (Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon and Israel, and Mesopotamia) to Greece.

Hamilton was right to be skeptical about Hesiod’s life circumstances. Hesiod wasn’t a singular genius who just thought things up on his own. He came from a family that traveled the Aegean Sea and most likely points eastward, and that would’ve been exposed to large numbers of famous stories about the gods.

Hesiod knew seafaring; you can tell from his poem the Works and Days. And I would be very surprised if he didn’t spend a lot of time traveling by sea, telling his tales to anyone who would pay.

And you, Perses, remember the proper season for all work, especially that concerned with sea-faring. Give your praises to small boats, but put your goods in a large one. The cargo is greater and the gain will be greater too, if the winds keep their evil blasts away. Whenever you turn your senseless heart to merchandising and wish to escape debts and joyless poverty, I, though not very skilled in sea-faring or in ships, will show you the measures of the loud-resounding sea.

Hesiod, Works and Days.

A good number of the stories he creates have parallels in West Asian mythology. The most important is found in what was traditionally called the Succession Myth, a common West Asian story about divine fathers and their sons who overthrow them.

Hesiod’s tale about Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus and the succession of power between them comes directly from the West Asian Succession Myth.

So it makes perfect sense that Hesiod would have been from what is called an East Greek family, from a town (Cyme) that would’ve been situated very near other peoples, cultures, and story traditions.

And what about Ascra, and Mount Helicon?

His family might indeed have settled there, but whether they did or didn’t, Hesiod determined (or was told) that Mount Helicon was the home of the Muses, and so he needed to be near them in order to be given the necessary inspiration for his poems.

That incident of being commissioned by the Muses meant that he was, as some folks still say, a “legit” poet.

Too legit to quit.

What’s more, it was to his advantage to obscure some of the more mundane details about his life and where he got his ideas for poems, so that people would admire him more, and presumably, enable him to make a living as a poet. He didn’t like Ascra (“harsh in winter and stifling in summer, never good”) and he thought being a merchant was too iffy. But to be a poet? Not a bad gig, if you can get it.

Yes, a sly fellow. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Edith Hamilton’s idea of the Greek miracle, in Hesiod’s case, wasn’t exactly what she thought it might be.

It was even more miraculous.