This edition contains the collected works of Hesiod including Works and Days, The Shield of Heracles, The Theogeny as well as Homer's Hymns, Epigrams and fragments of the Epic Cycle. Hesiod was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and Homer with establishing Greek religious customs. Modern scholars refer to him as a major source on Greek mythology, farming techniques, early economic thought (he is sometimes identified as the first economist), archaic Greek astronomy and ancient time-keeping. In the Western classical tradition, Homer is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest of ancient Greek epic poets. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.

This volume contains practically all that remains of the post-Homeric and pre academic epic poetry. I have for the most part formed my own text. In the case of Hesiod I have been able to use independent collations of several MSS. by Dr. W.H.D. Rouse; otherwise I have depended on the apparatus criticus of the several editions, especially that of Rzach (1902). The arrangement adopted in this edition, by which the complete and fragmentary poems are restored to the order in which they would probably have appeared had the Hesiodic corpus survived intact, is unusual, but should not need apology; the true place for the Catalogues (for example), fragmentary as they are, is certainly after the Theogony. In preparing the text of the Homeric Hymns my chief debt, and it is a heavy one, is to the edition of Allen and Sikes (1904) and to the series of articles in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (vols. xv.sqq.) by T.W. Allen. To the same scholar and to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press I am greatly indebted for permission to use the restorations of the Hymn to Demeter, lines 387-401 and 462-470, printed in the Oxford Text of 1912. Of the fragments of the Epic Cycle I have given only such as seemed to possess distinct importance or interest, and in doing so have relied mostly upon Kinkel's collection and on the fifth volume of the Oxford Homer (1912). The texts of the Batrachomyomachia and of the Contest of Homer and Hesiod are those of Baumeister and Flach respectively: where I have diverged from these, the fact has been noted.