in English, Hesiod, one of the earliest poets of Greece, was a native of Ascrea in Boeotia. His era is nearly as uncertain as that of Homer, whose name is very frequently associated with his in the classics. Herodotus fixes it at about 400 years before his own time, thus making it about the middle of the 9th century B.C. Velleius Paterculus places him about 120 years after Homer, and that opinion has been very generally adopted by modern scholars; his floruit may be thus approximately placed about the middle of the 8th century B.C. Of the personal history of the poet very little is known. His father was a native of Cumae in Æolis, who emigrated with his son Perses to Ascrea, where the future poet was born. He seems to have been a man of humble rank and small means, for his younger son was, at an early age, sent to tend flocks on Mount Helicon. On his father's death he became involved in a law-suit with his brother Perses about the division of the little patrimony. The suit went in favour of Perses, and Hesiod, in disgust at what seemed to him the injustice of the Ascrean judges, retired to Orchomenus, branding his native town as "miserable in the cold, intolerable in the heat, bad always." He spent the remainder of his life in that city, and his tomb was long after pointed out there. Plutarch records a tradition that he met his death at the hands of some youths who had suspected him (quite unjustly, as afterwards appeared) of having dishonoured their sister. This, however, is perhaps only one of the many tales told about the manner of Hesiod's life and death by Tzetzes, Proclus, and others, to which no credence can safely be attached. The works that pass as Hesiod's, though their genuineness is gravely doubted, are three in number,—The Works and Days; the Theogony; and The Shield of Hercules. In the time of Pausanias, the first only of these was believed by the people of Ascrea and its neighbourhood to have been really the work of their countryman. The introduction, Hesperides and many interspersed passages, they regarded as later interpolations. Many parts of the poem, however, are undoubtedly Hesiod's, and there is equally little doubt, that as these now stand, they have been tagged together by a connecting narrative of a later date. The poem itself, which is in a didactic vein, professes to be a series of advices on political, ethical, agricultural, and domestic matters from the poet to his elder brother Perses. It is written in a very unpretending homely style, and accorded so ill with the warlike taste of the time, that Cleomenes the Spartan called its author the poet of Helots. Despite all its want of unity and plan, however, the poem, in its genuine parts at least, is valuable to us from the light it throws on the domestic manners of the early Greeks. The Theogony is now admitted, on all hands, to have been the work of a bard posterior to Hesiod, though a member of the Hesiodic school. It professes to describe the creation of the world, the birth of the gods, and the origin of the heroes. Whence Hesiod obtained the materials for his Theogony can only be conjectured. Herodotus affirms that he merely collected and systematized the local legends that had existed in various parts of Greece long before his day. But he also awards him the honour of having formed the mythology of Greece as it was now finally accepted, by having impersonated in his gods qualities and attributes that had formerly existed merely in the abstract. This, whether true or not, had given birth to the theory that the sources from which the author of the Theogony drew his materials, were philosophical, and not purely mythological speculations, and that in them may be detected the germs that afterwards flowered into the Greek philosophy. The Shield of Hercules is an inferior imitation of Homer's magnificent description of the Shield of Achilles. It is believed to have formed part of another poem ascribed to Hesiod, entitled Eoece, or Catalogi Mulierum, giving an account of the most famous of the mythical heroines. Parts of this work are attributed to writers long posterior to Hesiod.

The works of Hesiod were first printed at Milan in 1493, and two years later by Aldus at Venice. Of subsequent editions, the best are those of Daniel Heinsius, Amst., 1667; Robinson, Oxford, 1737; Gaisford, Oxford; and best of all, Dindorf, Leipzig, 1825, and C. Götting, Gotha and Erfurt, 1831.