A Peasant on Helicon: a Study of Hesiod and his Society

Peter Green introduces Hesiod, a Boeotian farmer who, towards the end of the eighth century B.C., wrote his poem known as The Works and Days. His cantankerous, radical, earthy views present a remarkable contrast to the stylised grandeur of the contemporary Homeric vision of Greek society.

Peter Green | Published in History Today Volume 9 Issue 11 November 1959

During the past century, our knowledge of early Aegean history has grown almost beyond recognition. Knossos stands in something more than its original glory—“a poor thing, but Minoan,” Sir Arthur Evans remarked of his imaginative handiwork—and the shaft-graves at Mycenae have yielded up their golden treasures. Specialists in Egyptology or Hittite studies have helped to fill in blank spaces on the map of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Thanks to social and economic studies, such as Mr. M. I. Finley’s The World of Odysseus, we now have a pretty clear idea of how Homeric society functioned. But between the high heroic age and the beginnings of properly documented Greek history—that is, from about 1000 B.C. to 700 B.C.—fall what are very properly known as the Greek Dark Ages; and about them we know little more than we ever did.

This period of anarchy and cultural decline has thrown up no startling archaeological treasures, unless we count Proto-Geometric pottery¹; for our knowledge of it we still depend, basically, on two sharply contrasting literary texts.