page_title: Hesiod
section_title: Hesiod's Greek
hierarchical_section_title: Hesiod / Hesiod's Greek
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: 1: Hesiodi Carmina praecipua lectionis varietate et indicibus locuplentissimis instruxit Thomas Gaisford. - Lipsiae&#160;: in bibliopolio Kuehniano, 1823. - XIV, 290 p. . Frontespizio
context_page_description: Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. He is generally regarded as the first written poet in the Western tradition to regard himself as an individual persona with an active role to play in his subject. Ancient authors credited Hesiod and Homer with establishing Greek religious customs. Modern scholars refer to him as a major source on Greek mythology, farming techniques, early economic thought, archaic Greek astronomy and ancient time-keeping.
context_section_description: Hesiod employed the conventional dialect of epic verse, which was Ionian. Comparisons with Homer, a native Ionian, can be unflattering. Hesiod's handling of the dactylic hexameter  was not as masterful or fluent as Homer's and one modern scholar refers to his "hobnailed hexameters". His use of language and meter in Works and Days and Theogony distinguishes him also from the author of the Shield of Heracles. All three poets, for example, employed digamma inconsistently, sometimes allowing it to affect syllable length and meter, sometimes not. The ratio of observance/neglect of digamma varies between them. The extent of variation depends on how the evidence is collected and interpreted but there is a clear trend, revealed for example in the following set of statistics.
  Hesiod does not observe digamma as often as the others do. That result is a bit counter-intuitive since digamma was still a feature of the Boeotian dialect that Hesiod probably spoke, whereas it had already vanished from the Ionic vernacular of Homer. This anomaly can be explained by the fact that Hesiod made a conscious effort to compose like an Ionian epic poet  at a time when digamma was not heard in Ionian speech, while Homer tried to compose like an older generation of Ionian bards, when it was heard in Ionian speech. There is also a significant difference in the results for  Theogony and Works and Days, but that is merely due to the fact that the former includes a catalog of divinities and therefore it makes frequent use of the definite article associated with digamma, oἱ.
  Though typical of epic, his vocabulary features some significant differences from Homer's. One scholar has counted 278 un-Homeric words in Works and Days, 151 in Theogony and 95 in Shield of Heracles. The disproportionate number of un-Homeric words in W & D is due to its un-Homeric subject matter. Hesiod's vocabulary also includes quite a lot of formulaic phrases that are not found in Homer, which indicates that he may have been writing within a different tradition.
caption: Title to an edition of Hesiod's Carmina (1823)
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