In Works and Days, Hesiod (without mentioning Homer) claims he won a poetry contest, receiving as the prize a tripod, which he dedicated to the Muses of Mount Helicon.
A tripod, believed to be Hesiod's dedication-offering, was still being shown to tourists visiting Mount Helicon and its sacred grove of the Muses in Pausanias' day, but has since vanished.
Friedrich Nietzsche deduced[4] that it must have an earlier precedent in some form, and argued that it derived from the sophist Alcidamas' Mouseion, written in the fourth century B.C.
It then describes the contest itself, which consists of challenges and riddles that Hesiod poses, to which Homer improvises masterfully, to the applause of the on-lookers, followed by their recitation of what they considered their best passage and the awarding of the tripod to Hesiod; this takes up about half the text and is followed by accounts of the circumstances of their deaths.
An edition with Greek text and English translation (on facing pages) by Hugh Evelyn-White was published in 1914 as part of the Loeb Classical Library volume titled Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, and is now in the public domain and available online.