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Hesiod
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Like Hesiod, Xenophanes was a poet who used the cultural authority of poetry to ground the prophetic authority of his pronouncements. In his work the opposition to the myth becomes prominent, because with his deepened understanding of the human and the divine he saw the form of myth as "an obstacle to the adequate understanding of the order of the soul." The attack on Homer and Hesiod is explicit: "Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and disgrace among men, such as stealing, adultery, and cheating each other." The reason is that human beings conceive gods in their own likeness and image. Against this manlike conception of god Xenophanes poses his own vision of one god supreme among gods and men, not like mortals in body or thought, swaying all things with its thought but at rest in one place, that is, a universal unmoved divinity. For Xenophanes, "the gods did not grant knowledge of all things to mortals from the beginning, but by seeking they find in time what is better." Thereby Xenophanes establishes the charter for philosophy. He makes clear that this search for truth does not end in the human grasp of wisdom or the divine being: "there never was nor will be a man who knows about the gods and all the things I speak of." Xenophanes has carried the Hesiodic conception of Zeus as the supreme god to a very high level indeed. Voegelin puts his contribution to the plumbing of the psyche and the order of being in this way: "[Xenophanes] was a religious genius who discovered participation in a nameless realissimum as the essence of his humanity." In the Milesian transcendence into nature and Xenophanes’ transcendence into the universal, both grounded ultimately in Hesiodic speculation on the myth, Voegelin sees the origins of two species of philosophical transcendence, the "physiology" of Aristotle and the "theology" of Plato, which continue into modern philosophy.
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Excellent critical analyses of Hesiod's writings are in Werner Wilhelm Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol. 1 (trans. 1939; 2d ed. 1945), and Friedrich Solmsen, Hesiod and Aeschylus (1949). Useful for general historical background and cultural interpretation of the poems is Andrew Robert Burn, The World of Hesiod (1936; 2d ed. 1967). See ... Alfred Eckhard Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-century Athens (1911; 5th rev. ed. 1931), and Chester G. Starr, The Origins of Greek Civilization (1961).
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In it, following the Muses’ instructions, Hesiod recounts the history of the gods, beginning with the emergence of Chaos, Gaea (Earth), and Eros. Gaea gives birth to Uranus (Heaven), the Mountains, and Pontus (the Sea); and later, after uniting herself to Uranus, she bears many other deities. One of them is the Titan Cronus, who rebels against Uranus, emasculates him, and afterward rules until he in turn is overpowered by Zeus. This story of crime and revolt, which is the central subject of the Theogony, is interrupted by many additional pedigrees of gods. Elsewhere, in addition to mythical family relations, Hesiod presents new ones that are the product of his own speculation. Thus, the names of the 50 sea maidens (the Nereids) fathered by the sea god Nereus indicate various qualities of the Sea.
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Hesiod had depicted the cosmos as a process which had a beginning, perhaps out of nothing, and which consisted of divine persons proliferating in generations guided by Eros and intergenerational conflict. The growth was a kind of physis peopled by mythological beings which often were conceived of as both persons and principles, qualities, or objects such as Dike, Bia (Force) and Selene (the Moon). The compactness of myth was beginning to grow transparent to a higher order of differentiation in Hesiod’s speculation, but his work raised many questions which it was the task of subsequent thinkers to tackle. Hesiod offered no theory of the hyle or matter of being. His account of the beginning of the cosmic evolution was unmotivated, and it was not even clear if things came to be by arising from nothing or differentiation from a primordial unity. The first thinkers to begin to work on advancing the analysis of being after Hesiod are the Ionian physicists.
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Hesiod is ... credited with writing the Theogony (Genealogy of the Gods), a poem in which the large and amorphous body of Greek myths is systematized and expanded to include the newer divinities unknown in the Homeric poems. The Theogony recounts the creation of the world out of chaos, the birth of the gods, and descriptions of their adventures. The closing portion contains a list of the daughters of Zeus, the father of the gods, and mortal women. It forms the introduction to a lost poem, the Catalogue of Women, which in the fragments that survive traces the exploits of heroes born to mortal women. Of other works by Hesiod only titles and fragments remain, and even these, most scholars believe, were probably written by Hesiod's imitators, who were called the Hesiodic school. In this group are the didactic poem “Maxims of Cheiron,” the genealogical poem “Aegimius,” and the mythical poems “Marriage of Ceyx” and “Descent of Theseus to Hades.”
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Hesiod is ... credited with composing Works and Days, the earliest example of didactic poetry—that is, poetry meant to be instructive rather than entertaining. The work reflects Hesiod's experiences as a Boeotian farmer and is interspersed with many episodes of allegory and fable. In a simple, moralizing style Hesiod stresses the importance of hard work and righteousness. He gives practical advice on how to live, providing hints and rules on husbandry and charting a religious calendar with propitious and unpropitious days for certain farming tasks. The main theme is moral decay: Hesiod traces the history of the world through five stages, from the Golden Age to his own age of iron, which according to Hesiod was characterized by suffering and lawlessness. Of other works by Hesiod only titles and fragments remain, and even these, most scholars believe, were probably written by successors and imitators who are known collectively as the Hesiodic school.
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Hesiod