Hesiod

A Boeotian shepherd who said the Muses appeared to him on Mount Helicon and gave him a laurel staff. His Works and Days is the oldest surviving manual of how to live: when to plough, when to marry, why justice matters more than the cleverness of judges who eat bribes. He is the proof that the philosophical impulse in the West did not begin in Miletus — it began earlier, on a hillside, with a man counting the stars to know when to plant barley.