Boeo or Boio () was an ancient Greek poet. Her dates are unknown, but the earliest surviving stories about her date to the third century BC, and Ian Plant suggests a third century date for her. According to Pausanias, Boeo was from Delphi. He reports that Boeo wrote a hymn which told how the Hypoboreans built the temple to Apollo at Delphi, and that the poet Olen was the first oracle there and the inventor of the

hexameter Hexameter is a metrical line of verses consisting of six feet (a "foot" here is the pulse, or major accent, of words in an English line of poetry; in Greek as well as in Latin a "foot" is not an accent, but describes various combinations of s ...

. Both Olen and the Hypoboreans were more usually associated with the sanctuary of Apollo at Delos than Delphi, and the founding of the oracle at Delphi and the invention of the hexameter were traditionally attributed to

Phemonoe In Greek mythology, Phemonoe ( ; ) was a Greek poet of the ante-Homeric period. She was said to have been the daughter of Apollo, his first priestess at Delphi, or of his possible son Delphus, and the inventor of the hexameter verses, a type of poe ...

; the fusion of these two traditions appears to be Boeo's own innovation. Boeo was possibly also credited by

Philochorus Philochorus of Athens (; ; 340 BC – 261 BC), was a Greek historian and Atthidographer of the third century BC, and a member of a priestly family. He was a seer and interpreter of signs, and a man of considerable influence. Biography Philocho ...

as the author of the ''Ornithogonia'' ("The Birth of the Birds"), who in other sources is named

Boios Boios (Βοῖος), Latinized Boeus, was a Greek grammarian and mythographer, remembered chiefly as the author of a lost work on the transformations of mythic figures into birds, his ''Ornithogonia''. ''Ornithogonia'' was translated into Latin by ...

. None of the poem survives, but it may have been the source of some of Ovid's ''

Metamorphoses The ''Metamorphoses'' (, , ) is a Latin Narrative poetry, narrative poem from 8 Common Era, CE by the Ancient Rome, Roman poet Ovid. It is considered his ''Masterpiece, magnum opus''. The poem chronicles the history of the world from its Cre ...

''. W. Robert Connor suggests that the title parodies

Hesiod Hesiod ( or ; ''Hēsíodos''; ) was an ancient Greece, Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer.M. L. West, ''Hesiod: Theogony'', Oxford University Press (1966), p. 40.Jasper Gr ...

's ''

Theogony The ''Theogony'' () is a poem by Hesiod (8th–7th century BC) describing the origins and genealogy, genealogies of the Greek gods, composed . It is written in the Homeric Greek, epic dialect of Ancient Greek and contains 1,022 lines. It is one ...

'' ("the birth of the gods"). Paul Forbes Irving suggests that the ''Ornithogonia'' was either attributed to Boio, or the author adopted the name Boios in reference to her. According to the Byzantine encyclopedia the

Suda The ''Suda'' or ''Souda'' (; ; ) is a large 10th-century Byzantine Empire, Byzantine encyclopedia of the History of the Mediterranean region, ancient Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Soudas () or Souidas (). It is an ...

, Boio was sometimes considered the mother of the epic poet Palaephatus of Athens.

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