Can anyone link me to some references about when Hesiods poems were first recorded and written down? Was it during his lifetime? and how were they written down? on parchment with a quill pen?
Thank you!
We don't know. We don't have any actual ancient copies prior to the 3rd century or so, and we have no testimony about physical books prior to the 400s BCE. So we have to make deductions and inferences based on other kinds of evidence.
There are scholars who would say the poems were written down at the time they were composed, that is, around 700 BCE for the Theogony, or later for later 'Hesiodic' poems such as the Shield; and those who would say they were transmitted orally for a century or two first. You'll find plenty of references making the 'oral transmission first' argument for Homer, but I don't know that you'll find something similar specifically on Hesiod.
We find tons of reception of Hesiod in literary and philosophical sources in the late 500s BCE onwards, so it's reasonable to imagine that the poems were in physical form by that time. But as I said, there is no testimony at all on the nature of physical books prior to the 400s BCE. Everything that anyone thinks about physical books prior to 500 BCE is, at best, guesswork.
My own take on the available evidence is that no substantial literary works were transcribed until the second half of the 500s. In the case of the Theogony, this would be over 150 years after it reached more-or-less its current form. Part of the reasoning is that there are substantial reason to think the Homeric poems weren't written down until that date: more on that in this older answer of mine. Another part of the reasoning is one of the points that I cite there, that epigraphic evidence indicates a major shift in the voice of written poetry from around 540 BCE onwards. The way I put it in the older post is,
[in earlier times] an inscription isn't a copy of an utterance, but instead the utterance occurs at the time and occasion when it's read; but a manuscript of an epic poem is a copy of a previous utterance. Svenbro shows that this changes around 540 BCE: at that point you suddenly start getting inscriptions conceived as a copy of an utterance. In concrete terms, the shift is from 'I am the grave of so-and-so' to 'This is the grave of so-and-so' in the third person. Again in Svenbro's words: 'from 540 B.C. on, we come across monuments that, although autodeictic, are no longer egocentric'.
That isn't going to be enough to persuade everyone: there are always going to be scholars who can't imagine a well-known poem existing without a written form.
For the record, the standard writing materials prior to late antiquity would be a papyrus (not parchment) scroll, rolled sideways with the text written in columns, and a pen using charcoal-based ink.
On 5th century (and later) reception, usage, and quotation of Hesiod, some particularly relevant references are