Hesiod (c. 700 BCE) in conjunction with Homer, is one of those almost legendary early Greek Epic poets. His works are not of comparable length to Homer's. Hesiod's poems are not epic because of their length, but because of their language.

Hesiod is often paired with his near contemporary Homer as one of the earliest Greek poets whose work has survived. He is considered the creator of didactic poetry (instructive and moralizing poetry), and his writings serve as a major source on Greek mythology (“Theogony”), farming techniques, archaic Greek astronomy and ancient time-keeping (“Works and Days”).

Little can be said about Homer. Ancient Greek tradition, as well as a study of the language and style of the poems, indicates that he probably lived and wrote sometime in the eighth or ninth centuries B.C., but no more definite date can be determined. In ancient times, seven different cities claimed the honor of having been his birthplace. None of these assertions can be validated. However, Homer may have come from the island of Chios, on the western coast of Asia Minor — in earlier times, a family of the same name lived there and claimed him as an ancestor, and devoted themselves to the recitation of his works. Whether he came from Chios or not, it is highly probable that Homer was a native and resident of some part of Eastern Greece or Asia Minor, for the dialect he used in his works is that of the Asian Greeks.

Homer (c. 750 BCE) is perhaps the greatest of all epic poets and his legendary status was well established by the time of Classical Athens. He composed (not wrote, since the poems were created and transmitted orally, they were not written down until much later) two major works, the Iliad and the Odyssey; other works were attributed to Homer, but even in antiquity their authorship was disputed. In conjunction with Hesiod, Homer acts as a great pool of information for the Greeks about their gods. Homer is the earliest poet in Western culture whose works have survived intact.

Homer is traditionally held to be the author of the ancient Greek epic poems “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”, widely thought to be the first extant works of Western literature. He is considered by many to be the earliest and most important of all the Greek writers, and the progenitor of the whole Western literary tradition. He was a poetic pioneer who stood at a pivotal point in the evolution of Greek society from pre-literate to literate, from a centuries old bardic tradition of oral verse to the then new technique of alphabetic writing.

Pindar was one of the most famous ancient Greek lyric poets, and perhaps the best known of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece. He was regarded in antiquity as the greatest of Greek poets and the esteem of the ancients may help explain why a good portion of his work was carefully preserved (most of the other Greek lyric poems come down to us only in fragments, but nearly a quarter of all Pindar's poems survive complete). He is particularly known for his epinicia (or victory odes) in honour of notable personages and winners of athletic games.