Hesiod
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Everyone boasts that the most divine of poets, Homer and Hesiod, are said to be his particular countrymen." --Contest of Homer and Hesiod, White translation |
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Hesiod (Greek: Hesiodos) was an early Greek poet and rhapsode best-known for the Theogony. He presumably lived around 700 BC. Hesiod and Homer are generally considered the earliest Greek poets whose work has survived since at least Herodotus's time and they are often paired. Scholars disagree about who lived first, and the fourth-century BCE sophist Alcidamas' Mouseion even brought them together in an imagined poetic agon, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod. Aristarchus first argued for Homer's priority, a claim that was generally accepted by later antiquity.
Hesiod's writings serve as a major source on Greek mythology, farming techniques, archaic Greek astronomy and ancient time-keeping.