Works and Days

As a didactic poem, “Works and Days” features numerous aphorisms. Examples are peppered throughout the text, including: “A man fashions ill for himself who fashions ill for another, and the ill design is most ill for the designer” (44); “Do not put things off till tomorrow and the next day” (49); “Seek no evil gains; evil gains are not better than losses” (47); “Good order is best for mortal men, and bad order is worst” (51); “Observe due measure; opportuneness is best in everything” (57); and “If you speak ill, you may well hear greater yourself” (58). Hesiod also ends the poem with an aphorism: “Well with god and fortune is he who works with knowledge of all this” (61).

Within Hesiod’s aphorisms, he sometimes includes foils, such as “A bad neighbour is as big a bane as a good one is a boon: he has got good value who has got a good neighbour” (47). Another includes: “For a man acquires nothing better than a good wife, and nothing worse than the bad one” (58).

Hesiod addresses two audiences through authorial intrusion, the Muses and his brother Perses. Hesiod addresses the Muses briefly in the poem’s first paragraph during his invocation, when he asks them to attend him as he tells “Perses words of truth” (37). After describing the two manifestations of Strife, Hesiod breaks the narrative to instruct Perses to “lay this down in your heart, and may the Strife who exults in misfortune not keep your heart from work” (37). Hesiod continues this pattern throughout the poem, narrating events concerning gods and mortals then briefly interrupting the narrative, reminding Perses to attend to these words of advice and wisdom.

In the world of Greek mythology as described in Hesiod, gods and goddesses are often personifications of forces that exist in the natural world and the human condition. In the translation, personification is indicated through capitalization (e.g. Strife, Envy, Decency, Moral Disapproval, Oath, Famine, Blight, North Wind), using the pronouns she/he/him/her, and ascribing agency. For example, Hesiod describes two forms of Strife whose “tempers are distinct” (37). The younger Strife is a “brute: no mortal is fond of her” (37). The others Strife, “born of gloomy Night, and the son of Kronos,” is older and “rouses even the shiftless to work” (37). When foretelling the fall of the fifth tribe of men, to which Hesiod belongs, he writes that “Decency and Moral Disapproval will go to join the family of the immortals, abandoning mankind” (42). When explaining the consequences of violence, Hesiod writes that “Oath at once runs level with crooked judgments,” and Right brings “ill to men who drive her out and do not dispense her straight” (43). Famine does not “attend straight-judging men, nor Blight, and they feast on the crops they tend” (43). The North Wind, assigned as male through the pronoun “he,” “blows up on the sea and stirs in up” (52).

Hesiod also uses personification in his fable of the nightingale and the hawk when he ascribes the capacities for speech and reasoning to the hawk. As he carries the nightingale off in his talons, the nightingale weeps, prompting the hawk to admonish her. He informs her that, as the stronger of the two, he can make her his dinner or let her go, depending on his whims. Since the weak are doomed to lose, they must submit without complaint or suffer both insult and injury. 

In literature, an antithesis is something or someone used as the opposite of someone or something else. A notable instance of antithesis in “Works and Days” is Hesiod’s descriptions of Pandora. To punish men, Zeus plots to give them woman, “an affliction in which they will all delight as they embrace their own misfortune” (Line 38). Zeus orders his fellow Olympians to imbue the woman with gifts comprised of their own godly natures, thus Aphrodite bestows beauty, Athena skill at crafts, and Hermes cunning. It is these same godly gifts that make Pandora, as the woman is called, both a delight and a torment to men.