Hesiod

Early Greek poet, believed to have lived around the year 700 B.C. From the 5th century B.C. there was debate about the priority of Hesiod or Homer. Most modern scholarship agrees that Homer lived before Hesiod.

Hesiod lived in Boeotia and regularly visited Mt Helicon, the mythological home of the Muses, who, he says, gave him the gift of poetic creation one day while he was out tending sheep.

He also tells us in his poetry that he was on the losing end of lawsuits with his brother Perses over their inheritance, though it is possible Perses is a literary creation, a foil for the moralizing of the Works and Days.

The two surviving poems accepted as authentic are the Theogony and the Works and Days. The Theogony concerns the origins of the world and the gods. Works and Days is a poem of advice and wisdom, prescribing a life of honest work and attacking idleness and unjust judges (like those who decided in the favor of Perses). Hesiod is a major source both for knowledge of Greek mythology, farming techniques and for archaic Greek astronomy and time-keeping.

See also: Theogony, Homer