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Hephaistos creates Pandora, as described in Hesiod's Works and Days

Who was Hesiod? In Works and Days, Hephaistos creates Pandora

Who was Hesiod? An early Greek writer

People in ancient Greece learned about the new alphabet way of writing about 750 BC. Right away they used writing to write down the stories and poems that they knew. Homer used the alphabet to write the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The new alphabet
Who was Homer?
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About the same time, a man named Hesiod used the alphabet to write two long poems. (Or at least, both poems have the same name attached to them; we can’t know for sure who wrote them). Historians call this time the Archaic Period in Greece.

Archaic Greece

Greece was getting richer in the Archaic period. People in Corinth and Athens and Thebes were selling Greek pottery and wine and perfume all around the Mediterranean Sea and making a lot of money. Greek people had enough money to build the first stone temples in Greece. And they also had enough money to pay for books of poetry.

More about Archaic Greece
Archaic Greek economy

So Hesiod was happy to write poems and sell them to these new readers. One of these poems is the Theogony and the other is the Works and Days.

Hesiod’s Theogony

Hesiod’s poem Theogony describes the beginning of the world and the birth of the gods. Hesiod combines West Asian stories, like the Babylonian creation story of the Enuma Elish, with Central Asian stories.

What’s the Enuma Elish?

These are stories that the Yamnaya brought with them to Greece. They’re related to the Hittite story of Kumarbi. They involve the Indo-European idea that civilization makes life harder instead of easier, and that in general things are getting worse as time goes on.

Read the story of Kumarbi
Who were the Hittites?
Who were the Yamnaya?

Most of the gods Hesiod talks about have Indo-European names, like Zeus, Poseidon, and Demeter, but Athena may be a version of the West Asian goddess Inanna.

Hesiod’s Works and Days

In the Works and Days, Hesiod describes the life of a farmer (a pretty wealthy farmer) in Greece during this time (the Archaic period). Again, Hesiod combines West Asian ideas about how men should act with ideas from Central Asian Indo-European stories.

From West Asia, Hesiod gets the idea that lending money for interest is bad, and that women are evil and untrustworthy, as in the story of Pandora’s Box. He also tells us that rivers are sacred and people shouldn’t pee in them.

The story of Pandora’s Box

But Hesiod’s ideas about dike – Justice – seem to be related to Indo-European stories we see in India’s Rig Veda.

More about the Rig Veda

Greek literature

Even though Hesiod wove many different stories from different places together to make his poems, once they were written people started to think of Hesiod’s version as the real story.

So Hesiod’s poems, along with Homer, were an important way for all Greek people to begin to think of themselves as one people, instead of separate Athenians, Corinthians, and Spartans.

Looking for a second source to cite? Check out this great article in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Did you find out what you wanted to know about Hesiod’s Theogony and his Works and Days? Let us know in the comments!

Learn by doing: compare Hesiod’s account of the Creation with the Jewish account and the Enuma Elish
More about Homer

Bibliography and further reading about Hesiod:

Theogony and Works and Days by Hesiod, with a translation and introduction by M. L. West (reprinted 1999). A long introduction explains who Hesiod was and what he had to say. Also includes the whole text, translated into English.

Greek Myths and Mesopotamia: Parallels and Influence in the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod, by Charles Penglase (1997). More discussion of the influence of West Asian myths on Greek ones.

More about Homer
Ancient Greece
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