Archaic Age
Ascra was a small, hardscrabble village beneath Mount Helicon—Hesiod himself called it wretched in winter, harsh in summer, and good at no season—settled by his father, who had emigrated from Aeolian Cyme. There, around 700 BCE, Hesiod composed the Theogony, which set in order the genealogy of the Greek gods, and the Works and Days, a poem of farming, justice, and toil addressed to his quarrelsome brother Perses. Standing alongside Homer at the headwaters of Greek literature, this obscure village thus gave the Greeks their first systematic account of the divine cosmos and of the moral order of human labor.