Hesiod
Greek poet (fl. c. 700 BCE), a native of Boeotia, where his father had settled after emigrating from Aeolis in Asia Minor for economic reasons, and who presents himself in his work as a farmer engaged in cultivation and livestock-raising, which makes him, alongside Homer, one of the two great foundational poles of archaic Greek epic poetry, though of a radically different character: whereas Homer sings the heroic deeds of legendary heroes, Hesiod versifies on divine cosmogony, everyday agricultural labour and moral justice. In his Theogony, Hesiod offers the first surviving systematic account of the origin of the gods and the cosmos in the Greek tradition, narrating the succession of divine generations from primordial Chaos to Zeus's victory and the definitive establishment of his Olympian order, a work that exerted a decisive organising influence on all later Greek mythology by fixing in writing a coherent divine genealogy against the diversity of earlier local oral traditions. His other great work, Works and Days, addressed to his brother Perses following a dispute over their father's inheritance, combines detailed practical advice on agriculture, navigation and the organisation of the calendar with a profound ethical reflection on the value of honest labour, justice and the denunciation of the corruption of the 'bribe-devouring kings' who administered local justice unfairly, including the myth of the five ages of man —gold, silver, bronze, heroes and iron— describing humanity's progressive decline from an original golden age to the moral and material harshness of the poet's own present. Hesiod is regarded as the first Greek poet to speak explicitly of himself in the first person, offering concrete biographical details about his life and circumstances, which also makes him a pioneering figure in the emergence of an individual, personal poetic voice within the Western literary tradition.