Quotes About Hesiod

False shame accompanies a man that is poor, shame that either harms a man greatly or profits him; shame is with poverty, but confidence with wealth.

He harms himself who does harm to another, and the evil plan is most harmful to the planner.

If Hesiod did write it, then a humble peasant, living on a lonely farm far from cities, was the first man in Greece to wonder how everything had happened, the world, the sky, the gods, mankind, and to think out an explanation. Homer never wondered about anything.

The same was true of two personified emotions esteemed highest of all feelings in Homer and Hesiod: NEMESIS, usually translated as Righteous Anger, and AIDOS, a difficult word to translate, but in common use among the Greeks. It means reverence and the shame that holds men back from wrongdoing, but it also means the feeling a prosperous man should have in the presence of the unfortunate—not compassion, but a sense that the difference between him and those poor wretches is not deserved.

There is no real agreement among scholars as to whether Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries or whether Homer came a hundred or so years later or earlier. How could there be, given that both poets recited and sang in an oral culture.

Hesiod might as well have kept his breath to cool his pottage.

For talk is evil: It is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god." —HESIOD

To Hesiod in Greece in the late seventh century BCE, water was under the special care of the gods and was a purifying gift from them, to be treated with veneration. "Never cross the sweet-flowing water of ever-rolling rivers afoot," he entreated us, "until you have prayed, gazing into the soft flood, and washed your hands in the clear, lovely water."[2]

Admire a small ship, but put your freight in a large one; for the larger the load, the greater will be the profit upon profit.

It is probable that the Phoenician version of the myth of divine sovereignty derives from, or was strongly influenced by, the Hurrian myth. We may presume that Hesiod made use of the same tradition, known in Greece either through the Phoenicians or directly from the Hittites.

Hesiod was virtually a contemporary of Ezekiel. Another of the major sources on the ancient history of the Middle East is, of course, Flavius Josephus

They once taught Hesiod beauteous song, when he was shepherding his sheep below holy Helicon.

And I wish that I were not any part of the fifth generation of men, but had died before it came, or been born afterward. For here now is the age of iron.

In pointing out this parallel, I do not suggest that Hesiod is somehow the Greek equivalent of Moses or that his Theogony is to be granted the same status as Genesis.

As to the age of Hesiod and Homer, I have conducted very careful researches into this matter, but I do not like to write on the subject, as I know the quarrelsome nature of those especially who constitute the modern school of epic criticism.