 Although Orion has a few lines in both Homeric poems and in the Works and Days , most of the stories about him are recorded in incidental allusions and in fairly obscure later writings . No great poet standardized the legend . The ancient sources for Orion 's legend are mostly notes in the margins of ancient poets ( scholia ) or compilations by later scholars , the equivalent of modern reference works or encyclopedias ; even the legend from Hesiod 's Astronomy survives only in one such compilation . In several cases , including the summary of the Astronomy , although the surviving work bears the name of a famous scholar , such as Apollodorus of Athens , Eratosthenes , or Gaius Julius Hyginus , what survives is either an ancient forgery or an abridgement of the original compilation by a later writer of dubious competence ; editors of these texts suggest that they may have borne the names of great scholars because they were abridgments , or even pupil 's notes , based on the works of the scholars . 
