Works and Days

notes

Hesiod's Works and Days is the companion piece to the Theogony, composed around 700 BCE. Where the Theogony organises the cosmos by tracing the genealogy and succession of the gods, Works and Days organises human time by articulating the ethics of labour, the consequences of justice and injustice, and the agricultural calendar of the Boeotian farmer's year. It is addressed to Hesiod's brother Perses, who has apparently bribed local judges to steal part of the family inheritance and is living recklessly on his windfall. The text contains three mythological narratives of foundational importance. The first is the Prometheus story, amplified from the Theogony: Prometheus steals fire, Zeus creates Pandora in revenge, and Pandora opens the jar that releases all evils into the world. The second is the Myth of the Ages — the progression from Gold to Silver to Bronze to Heroes to Iron — which is the most systematic ancient Greek account of historical decline and the first formulation of the idea of a golden age in the past. The third is the fable of the hawk and the nightingale, the earliest surviving Greek fable, which introduces the theme of might versus right. The Myth of the Five Ages is of exceptional importance in the history of ideas. It provides the first literary formulation of what we call "historical pessimism" — the idea that the human condition has deteriorated from an original state of happiness and simplicity. The model is not cyclical (as in many ancient Near Eastern cosmologies) but linear and declining. The Iron Age — Hesiod's own — is characterised by labour, suffering, broken family bonds, injustice rewarded, and the eventual departure of Justice (Dike) and Shame (Aidos) from the earth. This narrative has been enormously influential in Western thought, from Plato's account of political decline to Ovid's retelling, to Enlightenment and Romantic ideas of lost natural innocence. The agricultural calendar in the second half of the text is one of the most important sources for our knowledge of ancient Greek farming practice: when to plough, when to prune the vines, when to harvest, what conditions govern each agricultural action. The calendar is organised not by months but by the rising and setting of star-groups and by the calls of birds, which is characteristic of pre-literate or semi-literate farming cultures that read the sky and the natural world rather than a formal calendar. The translation follows H.G. Evelyn-White's 1914 Loeb Classical Library edition, which is public domain.