Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica

Hesiod is the name attached to a body of early Greek didactic and genealogical poetry — chief among it the Works and Days and the Theogony — that stands beside Homer's epics at the founding of Greek literature. The poems themselves offer a few details of a life: a father who left Cyme in Aeolis for poverty's sake and settled at Ascra in Boeotia; a brother, Perses, who cheated Hesiod of his share of their inheritance; a shepherd's calling on Mount Helicon, where the Muses are said to have taught him song; and a prize won at a poetic contest at Chalcis. Later tradition elaborated this modest record into a fuller legend — a poetic duel with Homer himself, and a death by murder near a grove sacred to Nemean Zeus, after which Hesiod's body was said to have been recovered from the sea by dolphins. Modern scholars generally accept the poems' own core details as plausible and place Hesiod in Boeotia in the late eighth or early seventh century BC, while treating the more marvelous elements of his later biography — the visiting Muses, the contest with Homer, the manner of his death — as legend grown up around a poet the record otherwise leaves obscure.