Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet, conventionally named alongside Homer as a major representative of the early Greek poetic tradition. Publicly available information about his life is limited: neither his dates nor the details of his career are known, and the biographical traditions that circulated in later antiquity are largely legendary and cannot be treated as reliable history. The works transmitted under his name are chiefly the Theogony and Works and Days. The Theogony gives a systematic account of the genealogies of the gods and the origins of the cosmos, supplying Greek myth with a genealogical framework; Works and Days turns to farming, labor, and everyday ethics, offering advice and maxims in a plain, didactic style. Other works attributed to him include the Shield of Heracles. Writing mainly in hexameter verse, he attends to divine order and human livelihood, and has had a lasting influence on later Greek mythography, poetic tradition, and agricultural literature.
