Works and Days

• 1. Introduction

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  Works and Days runs to 828 lines of dactylic hexameter, and at its heart sits a family quarrel. The ancient Greek poet Hesiod composed it around 700 BC, and he addressed it to his own brother, Perses. The two had inherited a farm together. Perses, by Hesiod's account, wasted his share, then came back for more, dragging the dispute before the law and bribing the lords to rule in his favor. From that grievance grows something far larger than a property fight. Hesiod decided that handing Perses money would be useless, since his brother would only spend it again. Better, he reasoned, to teach him the virtues of work and pass on wisdom that could generate a living. What follows is part farmer's almanac, part moral lecture, and part mythology. Why do the gods keep an easy life hidden from humankind? Why must mortals toil? Hesiod answers with two of the most enduring stories in Greek thought, and with a personal plea to a brother he believed had lost his way.

• 2. A Quarrel Between Brothers

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  Perses claimed more than his fair share of the inheritance, and he secured it by influencing what Hesiod calls bribe-devouring kings, the dōrophagoi basileis. The poem contains a sharp attack on unjust judges of exactly this kind. Hesiod depicts them pocketing bribes even as they hand down their crooked verdicts. Hesiod describes himself as the heir of a farm bequeathed to Perses and to him together. The brothers had divided this patrimony once already, yet Perses returned for what belonged to Hesiod after squandering his own wealth. Rather than fight, Hesiod implores his brother to settle their fraternal discord through what he calls the justice of Zeus. He urges Perses to stop frequenting the arguments in the agora and to focus instead on working for his livelihood. This was not abstract advice. Hesiod believed wisdom, unlike property, could not be wasted, and he set out to give his brother the only inheritance no bribed judge could steal.

• 3. The Two Strifes

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  There was not one Eris, or Strife, but two, and Hesiod opens his poem proper by correcting his own earlier work, the Theogony. One Eris is blameworthy. She provokes wars and disagreement among mankind. The other is commended by all who know her, because she compels men to work honorably, rivaling one another in useful competition. This distinction reframes the entire poem. Hesiod encourages Perses to avoid the bad Eris and not let her persuade him toward quarrels and lawsuits. The good Strife is the engine of Hesiod's whole argument, the force that turns envy of a neighbor into honest labor. From this idea of productive rivalry, the poem turns to the older question of why labor is necessary at all.

• 4. Pandora's Jar

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  Before Pandora arrived, man had lived free from evils, toil, and illness. The story explains why the immortals keep an easy livelihood hidden from mankind. After Prometheus stole fire, Zeus instructed the gods to build an evil for humankind, and that evil was Pandora. Prometheus warned his brother Epimetheus never to accept gifts from the gods, yet Epimetheus took Pandora from Hermes all the same. She had been given a jar containing all the curses that now afflict the human race. She opened it, releasing every contents but one. Elpis, meaning Hope or Expectation, remained behind. In the earlier Theogony, Pandora and the tribe of women had been sent as a plague upon man, punishment for Prometheus deceiving Zeus over a divided feast. Here in Works and Days, Hesiod moves straight to the theft of fire and the reckoning that followed. The jar, once opened, could not be closed, and so the poem turns to a second account of how the human condition decayed.

• 5. The Five Ages

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  Five ages of mankind define the Hesiodic scheme: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age, and the present age of Iron. The race of gold lived in the time of Cronus, an age of plenty and peace, when the earth gave all their needs of its own accord and rivalries were unknown. These men never aged, and when they died it was as though they slept. When their age ended, they became guardians of mankind, protecting people and granting them wealth. The Silver Age was far worse in stature and temperament. Its people lived as children with their mothers for a hundred years, then came of age only to die quickly, suffering for their foolishness. They fought one another and refused to obey the gods, so Zeus, angered by their impiety, destroyed them, though they are honored as chthonic blessed mortals. The Bronze Race was fearsome and warlike, with weapons, houses, and armor all of bronze, for black iron did not yet exist; they fell at each other's hands. The race of heroes was more just and noble, demigods who fell in war at Thebes and Troy, then were carried after death to the Isles of the Blessed to live in plenty like the Golden Age. Hesiod laments that his own lot is the Iron Age, marked by toil and hardship. He predicts Zeus will destroy this race too, when men are born gray-haired and all moral and religious standards are ignored, when Aidos and Nemesis abandon the earth and leave ills with no defense against them.

• 6. The Hawk And The Nightingale

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  A hawk flying high in the air held a nightingale in its talons, and Hesiod tells this fable directly to the kings. The smaller bird was shrieking and crying as the hawk gripped it. The hawk answers the nightingale's cries from above, the predator speaking down to its helpless prey. Hesiod aims this fable squarely at the bribe-taking lords he condemned earlier, the kings who decided unjustly for Perses. The image of a powerful bird lecturing the creature in its grip carries the poem's warning about power without justice. From the world of kings and fables, the poem descends to the soil, where Hesiod's instruction becomes practical and exact.

• 7. The Farmer's Almanac

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  Superstitions related to running a productive farm fill the next long section of the poem. Hesiod gives general advice for success, such as never putting off work for the next day. He gives instructions on what to tell slaves and indications, drawn from Greek mythology, on the right time to harvest certain plants. He marks the seasons when a farmer should go sailing. Traditional customs follow, with verses on when one should marry and on avoiding items said to contain mischief, including uncharmed pots. The final section concerns the auspicious days of the month. Hesiod names which days are likely to prove prosperous and which to avoid for actions such as shearing, sowing, or procreating. Like the Theogony, the whole poem had begun with a hymnic invocation to the Muses, though a much shorter one, ten lines against the Theogony's hundred and fifteen. Hesiod called on the Pierian Muses to sing of their father Zeus and his control over the fates of mankind, the god who easily strengthens the meek and oppresses the strong, who straightens the crooked and withers the many. To that same Zeus Hesiod made his appeal: Hearken, seeing and hearing, and through justice put straight the laws; and may I speak the truth to Perses.

• 8. A Poem Carried Forward

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  Scholars have read Works and Days against a background of agrarian crisis in mainland Greece, a pressure that drove colonial expeditions in search of new land. That historical strain sits beneath Hesiod's almanac of when to sow, when to sail, and when to harvest. The poem has traveled far from its origins in the centuries since. George Chapman produced a metrical translation printed in 1618, and Thomas Cooke followed with another in 1743. In more recent times Richmond Lattimore translated it in 1959, Dorothy Wender in 1976, Daryl Hine in 2008, Kimberly Johnson in 2017, and A. E. Stallings in 2018. Each new edition keeps a brother's quarrel alive, the dispute that opened the poem and gave Hesiod his reason to write it. The Hope sealed inside Pandora's jar still waits there, the one thing that did not escape, for every reader who comes to the poem next.