'Hesiod' is the kind of hypocrite who calls others 'dipshit' and worse, but gets all bent out of shape (10/21, 8:00:05 PM) if someone (Jim Treacher) calls him 'Hayseed'. He seems to be unaware that the original Hesiod, the Greek poet who wrote around 700 B.C., was an agricultural poet. If you were to ask any classicist what ancient poet would most plausibly be called 'hayseed', most would say Hesiod without hesitation. The true and original Hesiod composed two epic poems, the Theogony (note spelling), on the genealogies of the gods and the origin of the cosmos, and the Works and Days, which is for the most part an agricultural manual, full of advice on when to plant your crops and how to build a wagon (the latter a horribly difficult passage -- diagrams hadn't been invented). Texts and translations of both works are available at Tufts University's invaluable Perseus project. In the Works and Days, Hesiod boasts of how he "crossed the wide sea at Aulis" (651) to go to the funeral games of Amphidamas on Euboea, where he won first prize for his poetry, most likely by singing his Theogony. The strait at Aulis is all of 70 yards across, and Hesiod must have "crossed the wide sea" by taking a ferry boat. The entire journey from the hick town of Askra to the games in Euboea was around thirty miles each way. In short, the Hesiod whose name our modern troll has borrowed was himself a total hick, a hayseed. Too bad the modern Hesiod's epithets are so much less accurate than Treacher's.