Hesiod, the earliest didactic poet of Greece of whom we have any knowledge, was born in Ascer, a small village at the foot of Mount Helicon. As he himself informs us, in his boyhood he tended flocks on the mountain. On the death of his father he became engaged with his brother, Perses, in a lawsuit as to the division of their patrimony. His brother bribed the 'kings' or judges, and thus gained unjust possession of the property, which, however, he soon dissipated. But Hesiod prospered, and when Perses in his poverty applied to him for aid Hesiod gave him the good advice which forms the larger part of his Works and Days. According to a passage (if genuine, 646-662) in the same poem, Hesiod attended the funeral games of Amphidamas at Chalcis, in Eubœa, and there recited a hymn of his composition which gained him the prize. It was probably for some such festival that he composed the Theogony. Where or how Hesiod died we do not know. The only data we possess for fixing the time at which Hesiod lived are those contained in his works, for although Herodotus makes Hesiod contemporary with Homer, he can have had no sufficient evidence to go upon. The poems of Hesiod show acquaintance with a wider geographical horizon, especially westwards, than do those of Homer; the language is in a later stage, the digamma more frequently neglected; and, finally, in Hesiod there are unmistakable imitations of Homer. We may therefore safely conclude that Hesiod was later than Homer—possibly belongs to the end of the 8th century B.C.
The Works and Days is generally considered to consist of two originally distinct poems, one containing the good advice to his brother, preaching up honest labour and denouncing corrupt and unjust judges; the other, the real Works and Days, containing advice as to the days lucky or unlucky, proper or improper, for the farmer's work. The Theogony teaches the origin of the universe out of Chaos, the creation of earth and hell, of night and day, sea and sky, sun and moon, and the history of the gods. Bœotian tradition denied that the Theogony was the work of Hesiod, but Herodotus affirms it (ii. 53), and the internal testimony and the similarity of the language of the Theogony and the Works and Days confirms Herodotus. On the other hand, the Shield of Heracles, which has been preserved, and the Catalogue of Women and the Eœa, which have not, were not genuine. The corrosive criticism which has been poured on the Homeric poems has also been applied to the Hesiodic; and here too the critics are not agreed whether the unity of the poems is the work of the original composer, and has been disturbed by interpolations, or is the work of some late editor harmonising lays originally unconnected. The dialect (Old Ionic) in which the Hesiodic poems are composed has also been attacked. Fick maintains that the Theogony was composed in the Delphic dialect, the Works and Days in ancient Æolic, and that they were subsequently rewritten in artificial Ionic.
Hesiod wrote not to please the imagination, but to improve the mind. Homer told tales, the tale of Troy, of Achilles, of Odysseus, 'lies like unto the truth,' as Hesiod would say. Hesiod's object was to tell the truth. His poetry is not very poetical, but it has its interest. In the first place, it is what the Greeks learned by heart as children and quoted as men for their moral guidance. In the next place, the Works and Days gives us an invaluable picture of the village-community as it existed in Greece in the 8th century B.C., and of the 'kings' of Homer as they appeared to the villagers. Finally, the Theogony is of the utmost importance to the comparative mythologist. The first edition of Hesiod appeared at Milan, 1493; other editions, Schömann (1869), Fick (1887). See also Gruppe, Die griech. Kulte u. Mythen, i. 567-612.