Hello everyone –
Spring is a great time to (re)discover the magic and music of poetry! Here’s a reading suggestion for you, which combines agriculture with mythology and the sciences with the humanities!
“The Greek Poet Hesiod: An Ancient Artist and Agriculturalist”
By Rob Chappell, M.A., Assistant to the Honors Dean
Reprinted from Cursus Honorum XIII: 1 (Fall 2013)
Translations from Greek by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1914 – Public Domain)
The practice of agriculture and the art of poetry are as old as human civilization itself, and many writers of the ancient Mediterranean countries composed works of poetry dealing with agricultural subjects. One of the earliest agricultural poets known to us is Hesiod, a Greek sage who flourished in the eighth century BCE. He is best remembered for two major poems that he composed: the Works and Days and the Theogony (Birth of the Gods).
The Works and Days is an agricultural almanac in verse, addressed to Hesiod’s brother Perses, who managed their family farm. The poem goes through the cycle of the four seasons, explaining what kind of agricultural work needs to be done at any given time of year. Since Hesiod and his contemporaries lived long before the invention of atomic clocks and desktop calendars, the poet described how to keep track of time by watching the stars:
“When the Pleiades, Atlas' daughters, start to rise, begin your harvest; plough when they go down. For forty days and nights, they hide themselves, and as the year rolls round, appear again when you begin to sharpen sickle-blades; this law holds on the plains and by the sea, and in the mountain valleys, fertile lands far from the swelling sea.” -- Works and Days: Lines 383 ff.
In addition to agricultural advice and astronomical lore, the Works and Days also includes retellings of some famous Greek myths (e.g., “The Five Ages of Humankind” and “Pandora’s Box”), along with witty proverbial sayings, which ensured its popularity among rural and urban audiences alike for centuries to come.
The Theogony contains traditional stories about the beginning of the world and the origins of various members of the Greek pantheon in a brilliant synthesis of epic mythology and philosophical allegory. The poem opens with the tale of how Hesiod, while still a shepherd, became a poet:
“From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing, who hold the great and holy mount of Helicon. … Thence they arise and go abroad by night, veiled in thick mist, and utter their song with lovely voice. … One day they taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon. … They plucked and gave me a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvelous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime.”
-- Theogony: Selections from Lines 1-35
Hesiod’s poems are wonderful food for thought, not only because they are highly edutaining, but also because they show that at an early stage in the development of Western civilization, the arts and the agricultural sciences were very closely linked together in the seamless web of everyday life. Hesiod, the master poet of his age, grew up on his family’s farm, worked as a shepherd, and earned national acclaim as a poet (although he probably didn’t quit his “day job” as a shepherd). J
Across a gulf of 27 centuries, Hesiod presents us with a timely challenge: to “think outside the box” of our individual academic disciplines to create a holistic worldview that satisfies both the mind and the heart.
Further Reading
· Works by and about Hesiod are available from
Until next time –
Rob :)
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