Hesiod and his world

Recent interest in Hesiod has tended to concentrate on three broad aspects of his poems: their language, structure and myth. By contrast, their value as historical documents has been persistently underrated. This is a striking omission, as by general consent we have in the Works & Days a written source, giving detailed information about life in the early archaic period, for which virtually no other documentary evidence exists. Yet by comparison with the repeated and painstaking investigation of Homer as history, or even the poetry of Solon, Hesiod has been largely ignored. Although it would be unrealistic to pretend that historians have never shown any interest in the Works & Days (see section VI), the use they have made of the poem has generally been either perfunctory and descriptive, or selective and focussing on isolated points. Typical of the former category is the treatment of Hesiod in the textbook on geometric Greece by Coldstream (1977). In his introduction, Coldstream warns the reader that the evidence for the ninth and eighth centuries is predominantly archaeological, but he does add a qualification (18): ‘On the other hand, Hesiod's Works & Days offers an authentic picture of a farmer's life in Boeotia at the close of the eighth century’, and in a later chapter (313): ‘The hard life of a geometric farmer is vividly described by the poet Hesiod.’