Homer and Hesiod are the two great poets of archaic Greece, and the Greeks cited them together. Hesiod lived in Boeotia, around 700 BC, and composed in the same hexameter and the same epic language as Homer, but with another purpose. Instead of narrating heroes and wars, the Theogony tells the origin of the gods and of the world, from Chaos to the reign of Zeus, and Works and Days deals with work on the land and with justice.
The historian Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, gives the formula that fixed the pair: Hesiod and Homer lived some four hundred years before him, and it was they who made the genealogy of the gods for the Greeks, gave the gods their names, divided among them their honors and their arts and showed their forms. Greek religion, in this sense, owed to the two poets its image of the gods.
That is why philosophy attacked them together. Xenophanes accused both of attributing theft, adultery and deceit to the gods, and Plato, in the Republic, censures the myths that Hesiod and Homer told about the gods.
Ancient tradition even imagined a duel between them, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, in which the two compete in a poetry competition. In the legend, the audience prefers Homer, but the king gives the victory to Hesiod, because he sings of farming and peace, and not of war and slaughter.
On Clavis: The Iliad, The Odyssey.