The other poem attributed to Hesiod or his school which has come down in great part to modern times is _The Theogony_, a work of grander scope, inspired alike by older traditions and abundant local associations. It is an attempt to work into system, as none had essayed to do before, the floating legends of the gods and goddesses and their offspring. This task Herodotus (ii. 53) attributes to Hesiod, and he is quoted by Plato in the _Symposium_ (178 B) as the author of the _Theogony_. The first to question his claim to this distinction was Pausanias, the geographer (A.D. 200). The Alexandrian grammarians had no doubt on the subject; and indications of the hand that wrote the _Works and Days_ may be found in the severe strictures on women, in the high esteem for the wealth-giver Plutus and in coincidences of verbal expression. Although, no doubt, of Hesiodic origin, in its present form it is composed of different recensions and numerous later additions and interpolations. The _Theogony_ consists of three divisions--(1) a cosmogony, or creation; (2) a theogony proper, recounting the history of the dynasties of Zeus and Cronus; and (3) a brief and abruptly terminated heroogony, the starting-point not improbably of the supplementary poem, the [Greek: katalogos], or "Lists of Women" who wedded immortals, of which all but a few fragments are lost.[1] The proem (1-116) addressed to the Heliconian and Pierian muses, is considered to have been variously enlarged, altered and arranged by successive rhapsodists. The poet has interwoven several episodes of rare merit, such as the contest of Zeus and the Olympian gods with the Titans, and the description of the prison-house in which the vanquished Titans are confined, with the Giants for keepers and Day and Night for janitors (735 seq.). The only other poem which has come down to us under Hesiod's name is the _Shield of Heracles_, the opening verses of which are attributed by a nameless grammarian to the fourth book of _Eoiai_. The theme of the piece is the expedition of Heracles and Iolaus against the robber Cycnus; but its main object apparently is to describe the shield of Heracles (141-317). It is clearly an imitation of the Homeric account of the shield of Achilles (_Iliad_, xviii. 479) and is now generally considered spurious. Titles and fragments of other lost poems of Hesiod have come down to us: didactic, as the _Maxims of Cheiron_; genealogical, as the _Aegimius_, describing the contest of that mythical ancestor of the Dorians with the Lapithae; and mythical, as the _Marriage of Ceyx_ and the _Descent of Theseus to Hades_.