The Ionian school of epos produced a number of poems founded on the legends of the Trojan war, and intended as introductions or continuations to the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. The grammarian Proclus (A.D. 140) has preserved the names and subjects of some of these; but the fragments are very scanty. The _Nostoi_ or _Homeward Voyages_, by Agias (or Hagias) of Troezen, filled up the gap of ten years between the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_; the _Lay of Telegonus_, by Eugammon of Cyrene, continued the story of the Odyssey to the death of Odysseus by the hand of Telegonus, the son whom Circe bore to him. Similarly the _Cyprian Lays_ by Stasinus of Cyprus, ascribed by others to Hegesias (or Hegesinus) of Salamis or Halicarnassus, was introductory to the _Iliad_; the _Aethiopis_ and the _Sack of Troy_, by Arctinus of Miletus, and the _Little Iliad_, by Lesches of Mytilene, were supplementary to it. These and many other names of lost epics--some taken also from the Theban myths (_Thebais_, _Epigoni_, _Oedipodea_)--serve to show how prolific was that epic school of which only two great examples remain. The name of _epic cycle_ was properly applied to a prose compilation of abstracts from these epics, pieced together in the order of the events. The compilers were called "cyclic" writers; and the term has now been transferred to the epic poets whom they used.[1] Hesiodic epos. The epic poetry of Ionia celebrated the great deeds of heroes in the old wars. But in Greece proper there arose another school of epos, which busied itself with religious lore and ethical precepts, especially in relation to the rural life of Boeotia. This school is represented by the name of Hesiod. The legend spoke of him as vanquishing Homer in a poetical contest of Chalcis in Euboea; and it expresses the fact that, to the old Greek mind, these two names stood for two contrasted epic types. Nothing is certainly known of his date, except that it must have been subsequent to the maturity of Ionian epos. He is conjecturally placed about 850-800 B.C.; but some would refer him to the early part of the 7th century B.C. His home was at Ascra, a village in a valley under Helicon, whither his father had migrated from Cyme in Aeolis on the coast of Asia Minor. In Hesiod's _Works and Days_ we have the earliest example of a didactic poem. The seasons and the labours of the Boeotian farmer's year are followed by a list of the days which are lucky or unlucky for work. The _Theogony_, or "Origin of the Gods," describes first how the visible order of nature arose out of chaos; next, how the gods were born. Though it never possessed the character of a sacred book, it remained a standard authority on the genealogies of the gods. So far as a corrupt and confused text warrants a judgment, the poet was piecing together--not always intelligently--the fragments of a very old cosmogonic system, using for this purpose both the hymns preserved in the temples and the myths which lived in folklore.