Greek poet. Hésiode in Hêsiodos Greek. According to the tradition, Hésiode would have lived in Ascra, in Béotie. Formerly, one saw in him a contemporary of Homère, of which it employs the language and the poetic meter. One locates today his work the most ensured, Work and the Days, about the middle of VIIIe front century J. - C.

One knows his biography only what he says itself to the beginning of this poem: he addresses himself to his Persès brother, who frustrated it his share of heritage, ruined himself and comes to beseech his assistance. Hésiode assists his/her brother, then exhorts it to devote itself with perseverance to agriculture.  

The poem is presented in the form of a calendar, concise and rough, a rustic year. The poet could take as a starting point a technical treaty (for this reason, he would be the direct predecessor of the author of Georgic, Virgile); but, in the roughness of the tone, the continual injunctions with vigilance, a party taken poetic appears. Sometimes, the vision widens in unforeseen comparisons: thus the octopus, taken refuge in the hollow of a rock during the storm, is compared to a delicate young girl who waits, well with the heat in her room, the end of the winter. By the alternation of the didactic passages with genre paintings and accounts mythical, the work of Hésiode constitutes one of the oldest documents on the life and the thought in antiquated Greece. 

Is Hésiode the author of Théogonie which is allotted to him? This genealogy of the gods starts with an interesting cosmogony (theory of the formation of the Universe). Like Work and the Days, it presents a mixture of purely didactic and enumerative elements and tables or narrations picturesque.  

The Shield of Héraklès, in the past allotted to Hésiode, takes as a starting point the description of the shield of Achilles in Iliade. It would be posterior with Work of a good hundred years.  

By the concision, the roughness, the unforeseen one of the images, Hésiode corresponds perhaps more than Homère, although it is posterior for him, to the idea that we have primitive poetry. It is still the first of the three large didactic poets of Antiquity; Virgile and Lucrèce freely could take as a starting point its work, at the same time poetry and teaching.