Hesiod

Hesiod is the earliest Greek writer to speak about himself, so his life, unlike Homer's, has a few fixed points. His father had been a sea-trader from Cyme in Asia Minor who gave up the sea and settled in Ascra, a village at the foot of Mount Helicon in Boeotia, a place Hesiod describes as bad in winter, harsh in summer and never good. There, while he was pasturing lambs on the mountain, the Muses appeared to him, gave him a staff of laurel and breathed a divine voice into him; so he tells it at the start of the Theogony.

When the father died, Hesiod's brother Perses took more than his share of the farm by bribing the local lords, whom Hesiod calls 'gift-eating kings', and then squandered it. The Works and Days is addressed to this brother, part reproach and part handbook, and it is the only ancient poem whose starting point is a family quarrel over an inheritance.

He mentions one journey: he crossed to Chalcis on Euboea for the funeral games of a nobleman, won the poetry contest with a hymn and dedicated the prize tripod to the Muses of Helicon. Later legend turned this into a contest with Homer himself. Nothing certain is known of his death; a late story says he was murdered in Locris and that dolphins carried his body to shore. Modern scholars place him around 700 BC, give or take a generation.

The Θεογονία (Theogony) is the story of how the world and the gods came to be: first Chaos, then Earth, Tartarus and Eros; Earth bears Sky, and their son Cronus castrates his father with a sickle; Cronus swallows his own children until Rhea hides the baby Zeus in Crete; Zeus and the Olympians defeat the Titans and the monster Typhon, and Zeus divides the world. Woven in are Prometheus' trick with the sacrificial meat, the theft of fire and the making of the first woman as punishment. It is the nearest thing the Greeks had to a sacred book about origins.

Έργα και Ημέραι (Works and Days) is a sermon to Perses on justice and work. It explains why life is hard: Pandora opened a jar and released all evils, keeping only Hope inside; and the human race has declined through five ages, gold, silver, bronze, the heroes and the present iron age, in which Hesiod wishes he had not been born. Then comes practical advice: when to plough and reap, how to build a wagon, when the sea is safe, how to choose a wife, which days of the month are lucky. The tone is that of a shrewd, grumbling farmer who believes that Zeus sees everything.

A third poem under his name, the Ασπίς Ηρακλέους (Shield of Heracles), is probably later. His hexameters are plainer than Homer's, full of proverbs and lists, and gave the Greeks their standard version of the gods' family tree.

Herodotus wrote that Homer and Hesiod together gave the Greeks their gods, and Greek children still meet Hesiod's stories first: the third-grade history book is pure mythology, with Cronus swallowing his children, the war of the Titans and Pandora, all in his version. The κουτί της Πανδώρας, Pandora's box, is an everyday Greek expression, though in Hesiod it is a jar, and so is χρυσή εποχή, the golden age. You can walk the Valley of the Muses below Helicon, near the modern village of Askri, where the sanctuary he endowed with his tripod has been excavated. The line 'work is no disgrace, idleness is' is quoted in Greek schools and sermons. Six of his myths are retold on this site, from A1 Pandora to the C2 Theogony.

• He is the first Greek poet to name himself: 'the Muses once taught Hesiod fine song as he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon'.
• Pandora's 'box' is a mistranslation that spread in the Renaissance; Hesiod wrote πίθος, a large storage jar.
• Works and Days ends with a calendar of lucky and unlucky days of the month, including the right day to geld a boar and the day on which to be born a boy.
• His poem contains the oldest fable in Greek literature, the hawk and the nightingale, older than Aesop.