Who created the World?
How did it?
What is expecting from us?
What would be after death?
These questions are some of the most favourable questions ever asked in human history? Many people from different cultures and beliefs had answered them. Their answered had shaped the world while world was shaping their answers. Many people designed their lives according to these answers. Some of them run to the battles with their big axes in order to enter Valhalla, while on the other side of the earth the others offer their only cow to gods in order to protect themselves from earthquakes or sacrifice themselves in order to feed orphan tiger babies. As we mentioned as answers shaped the world, world and the environmental knowledge gathered by men shaped the answers.
Objective was the same. Men tried to solve
“How universe is working and what should I do to protect myself?”
Sumerians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese, Turkic, Incas or Vikings found different answers even probably there are lots of them influence in each other. Among them one is the most known, influential (famous especially by the help of Hollywood) is the mythology of Greek people. Zeus – Athena – Chaos – Geo – Hercules – Aphrodite etc.
Of course these answers and tales are not the product of a single man but conventional. Narrated tales from father to son throughout the ages had been reached in its final forms. However we have just two records about them. Thanks to great Greek poets who probably lived between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time Homer and Hesiod. Even Homer is more famous than Hesiod, I present Hesiod in this milestone. Later Homer is going to be available by his legendary poems as milestone.
Hesiod is a major source on Greek mythology and many other daily and administrative live on Greece in antique age. He was born in Ascra, though we have not got enough information about his life, there are several poems and writings that have succeed to survive till today. Legend about himself says that he was the son of poor peasant and he was inspired by Muse on the hill of Helicon.
First of all the most important work of Hesiod is Theogony where he narrates the origins of the world (cosmogony) and of the gods (theogony), beginning with Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus and Eros, and shows a special interest in genealogy.
The other poem which consists 800 lines is Works and Days. The most exciting part of this poem is his partition of ages. He divided the history into 5 ages. Golden – Silver – Bronze – Heroic and the last is Iron Age. From Cronus (father of Zeus) to the age of Hesiod. Periodization is an ordinary method for narrating the history, and it was not used in Greek only but many others. However the interesting part of it is the similarity of Hesiod's look to his own age with any ordinary conservative individual's look to our age. As almost every conservative man, Hesiod discredited his own age though it seems very very old for us (-650 BC) whereas praised virtue of old ages.
Moreover, Hesiod describes daily routines of any peasant in his Works and Days.
