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Homer, Hesiod and the Birth of Western Thought
Before philosophy, there were poets. How Homer’s epics and Hesiod’s myths of the gods set the stage for the moment when Greek thinkers began to ask “why?” without appealing to the gods.
Philosophy did not appear out of nowhere. Before the first philosophers began to explain the world through reason, the Greeks explained it through stories. Two poets above all shaped those stories: Homer, to whom the Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed, and Hesiod, author of the Theogony and Works and Days. To understand how philosophy was born, we must first understand the world it grew out of.
Homer: Gods, Heroes and Human Fate
Homer’s epics, composed around the eighth century BCE, tell of the Trojan War and of Odysseus’s long journey home. They are full of gods who quarrel, take sides and interfere in human affairs. The gods of Homer are powerful, but they are not especially moral. They are jealous, vain and often cruel. Human beings, meanwhile, struggle with honour, grief, loyalty and the knowledge that they will die.
What makes Homer remarkable is not his gods but his humans. Achilles’ rage, Hector’s farewell to his wife and son, Odysseus’s cleverness and longing for home — these are portraits of human beings that still move readers today. In Homer, the deepest questions of human life are already present: what is a good life, what do we owe to others, how should we face death?
Hesiod: Ordering the Gods and Seeking Justice
Hesiod, writing around 700 BCE, tried to bring order to the tangled family of the gods. His Theogony tells how the universe began from Chaos, and how generations of gods came into being and fought for power until Zeus took control. It is a story of origins — an early attempt to answer the question “where did everything come from?”
His Works and Days is more down to earth. Addressed to his brother in a quarrel over their inheritance, it praises honest work and condemns corrupt judges who take bribes. Hesiod insists that justice matters and that injustice will eventually be punished. Already, we can see a concern with how human beings should live together.
Myth asked the great questions first. Philosophy began when people insisted on answering them with reasons.
From Mythos to Logos
Scholars often describe the birth of Greek philosophy as a shift from mythos (story) to logos (reasoned account). The first philosophers, beginning in the sixth century BCE, kept Hesiod’s question — what is the origin of all things? — but changed the kind of answer they would accept. Instead of a family of gods, they looked for natural principles: water, air, an infinite substance, atoms. Instead of accepting stories because they were traditional, they offered arguments that others could examine and criticise.
Some of them turned their criticism directly on the poets. Xenophanes complained that Homer and Hesiod had attributed to the gods everything shameful among humans — theft, adultery and deception. He observed that people imagine gods in their own image, and that if horses could draw, they would draw gods that looked like horses.
What We Can Learn Today
Homer and Hesiod remind us that myths are not foolishness. They were humanity’s first serious attempts to understand the world and our place in it, and they still contain deep wisdom about human nature. But they also show us the value of the step the philosophers took: the decision to stop accepting answers simply because they are old, sacred or beautiful, and to ask instead whether they are true. That step, taken in a few Greek cities more than two and a half thousand years ago, is one every society can still take today.
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