|
Hesiod
Homer and Hesiod are the first names in Greek literature.
It was they who gave the Greeks their gods, according to the historian Herodotus.
Hesiod probably lived around 700 B.C., shortly after Homer, in a Boeotian
village of Ascra -- one of the details of his life he reveals in his works. He worked as a shepherd in the mountains, as a
youth, and then, as a small peasant on a hard land when his father died.
While tending his flock on Mt. Helicon, the Muses
appeared to Hesiod in a mist. This mystical experience impelled him to epic poetry.
Hesiod's major works are Theogony, Works and Days, and Shield of Herakles
(a variation on the Shield of Achilles theme from Iliad, attributed to Hesiod, but probally not by him)
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Homer
Homer (Greek Ὅμηρος Hómēros)
was a legendary early Greek poet and rhapsode and the author of the major Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey, the
comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog-Mouse War"), the corpus of Homeric Hymns, and various other lost or fragmentary
works such as Margites. A few ancient authors credited him with the entire Epic Cycle, which included further poems on the
Trojan War as well as the Theban poems about Oedipus and his sons.
Tradition held that Homer was blind, and various Ionian cities are claimed
to be his birthplace, but otherwise his biography is a blank slate.
|
|
|
|
|