Hesiod serves as a major source for knowledge of Greek mythology, of farming techniques, of archaic Greek Astronomy and of ancient time-keeping.
As with Homer, legendary traditions have accumulated round Hesiod. Unlike Homer, some biographical detail has survived: the few details of Hesiod's life come from three references in Works and Days; some further inferences derived from his Theogony. Hesiod lived in Boeotia. His father came from Cumes in Aeolia, which lay between Ionia and the Troad in southwestern Anatolia, but crossed the sea to settle at Ascra, "a cursed place, cruel in winter, hard in summer, never pleasant" (Works, 640). Hesiod's patrimony there, a small piece of ground at the foot of Mount Helicon, occasioned a Lawsuit with his brother Perses, who won; some scholars have seen Perses as a literary creation, a foil for the moralizing of the Works and Days that Hesiod directed to him.
The Muses traditional lived on Helicon, and they gave Hesiod the gift of poetic inspiration one day while he tended sheep. In another biographical detail, Hesiod mentions a poetry contest at Chalcis in Euboea where the sons of one Amiphidamas awarded him a tripod (ll.654-662). Plutarch first identified this passage as an interpolation into Hesiod's original work, based on his identification of Amiphidamas with the hero of the Lelantine War between Chalcis and Eretria, which occurred around 705 BC. The account of this contest inspired the later tale of a competition between Hesiod and Homer.
Two different, yet early, traditions record the site of Hesiod's grave. One, as early as Thucydides, reported in Plutarch, the Suda and John Tzetzes, states that the Delphic oracle had warned Hesiod that he would die in Nemea, and so he fled to Locris, where he was killed at the local temple to Nemean Zeus, and buried there. This tradition follows a familiar ironic convention: the oracle that turns out to be true, after all.
The other tradition, first mentioned in an Epigram of Chersios of Orchomenus written in the 7th century BC (within a century or so of Hesiod's death) claims that Hesiod lies buried at Orchomenus, a town in Boeotia. According to Aristotle's Constitution of Orchomenus, when the Thespians ravaged Ascra, the villagers sought refuge at Orchomenus, where, following the advice of an oracle, they collected the ashes of Hesiod and placed them in a place of honour in their Agora, beside the tomb of Minyas, their eponymous founder, and in the end came to regard Hesiod too as their "hearth-founder" (οἰκιστής / oikistês).
Later writers attempted to harmonize these two accounts.
Legends that accumulated about Hesiod came from several sources: a treatise "The poetic contest (Ἀγών / Agôn) of Homer and Hesiod"; a Vita of Hesiod by the Byzantine grammarian John Tzetzes; the entry for Hesiod in the Suda; two passages and some scattered remarks in Pausanias (IX, 31.3–6 and 38.3–4); a passage in Plutarch Moralia (162b).
This work lays out the five Ages of Man, as well as containing advice and wisdom, prescribing a life of honest labour and attacking idleness and unjust judges (like those who decided in favour of Perses).
Tradition also attribures the Theogony to Hesiod, although the authorship remains uncertain. Theogony resembles Works and Days very closely in style and substance considering the purposely different subject-matter.
The Theogony concerns the origins of the world (cosmogony) and of the gods (theogony), beginning with Gaia, Nyx and Eros, and shows a special interest in Genealogy. Embedded in Greek myth there remain fragments of quite variant tales, hinting at the rich variety of myth that once existed, city by city; but Hesiod's retelling of the old stories became the accepted version that linked all Hellenes.
Hesiod's works survive in Alexandrian papyri, some dating from as early as the 1st century BCE. Demetrius Chalcondyles issued the first printing (editio princeps) of Works and Days, possibly at Milan, probably in 1493. In 1495 Aldus Manutius published the complete works at Venice.