Hesiod's cosmonomy

Hesiod's two most famous surviving poems, the Works and Days and the Theogony, are dated from the late eighth to the early seventh century BC. Thus, they are either nearly contemporary with the Homeric epics (in the form that we have generally come to know them) or, more likely, proximate by fifty to one hundred years. It was seen earlier that in the Homeric verses the words of the nemō family (and other related words) were used, to one degree or another, within the complex milieux of feasting-‘sacrificial’ distribution/ sharing, but also apportionment of land and grazing practices, perceived here as immanent in socio-economic-worship practices in an economy that relied heavily on herding (as well as farming). In particular, in the Hesiodic tradition, this complexity coexists with an economy that is described as significantly agricultural. In Hesiod's Works and Days, we are evocatively no longer in the land of heroes. The heroes had perished in war (W.D. 156–65) amidst wider social and economic changes. This is a harsher era, we are told, in which hard manual work dominates and individual farmers must struggle for subsistence, although Hesiod in part is probably idealising the conditions of his time.

The grain-giving goddess Demeter is ever watchful (W.D. 299f) during a period that is said to be largely farming-based by Necessity. Askra, Hesiod's south-western Boeotian village, is most likely a pre-state polis, a fortified village comprising modest oikoi supporting a society that is to a significant extent agrarian. Hesiod himself tells us that he is a shepherd (Th. 23) and farmer, as well as a poet. He is said to have been pasturing his sheep on a (most likely) bright summer's day on Mount Helicon, when the Muses gave him a rod, a branch of flowering laurel, and breathed into him a divine voice (Th. 30–2) which, he tells us, inspired the Theogony. Similarly, in the Work and Days, the poet is guarding sheep and working the farm while composing and reciting poetry. Hesiod, like most small-scale farmers of his time, must have possessed and farmed a small parcel of land, as well as maintaining a flock of (probably) sheep and goats.