Works and Days

What It Is

Around 830 lines of Greek hexameter from about 700 BC, addressed by Hesiod to his brother Perses and, over his shoulder, to anyone else prepared to listen. It is the other half of Hesiod. The Theogony sets out the order of the gods; this sets out the order a human being has to live inside.

It is a didactic poem, unembarrassed about wanting to teach you something. Inside it: moral argument, warnings about corrupt judges, a calendar for the farming year, advice on when to sow and when to sail and whom to marry, myth, and a closing section on which days of the month are lucky. The registers change without warning. That is the form, not a defect.

What startles is the subject. Not heroes, not kings, but working life: debt, hunger, weather, neighbours, the temptation to take what is not yours. It is short. An hour or two.

Why It Matters

This is the founding text of the idea that work is honourable and that justice is something ordinary people are owed. Hesiod addresses the powerful directly and tells them what he thinks of them. No earlier voice in Western literature speaks from below with this much authority.

Its images have furnished the Western imagination ever since. The oldest and most durable pictures the West has of how humanity ended up in its present condition come from this poem, and they went into Roman poetry, into Christian thought, and into every later argument about progress and decline.

It is also the ancestor of a literary line. Virgil's Georgics is modelled on it, and behind Virgil stands every later book about farming, seasons, land and honest labour, down to Thoreau, Wendell Berry and Seamus Heaney. If you have ever felt there is something morally serious about doing your own work properly, Hesiod got there first, and he said it better.

Before You Read

Easy to read, harder to sit still for. Give it a single sitting of an hour or two.

Expect the poem to lurch. It moves from myth to scolding to weather to household economy and back, and a reader hunting a linear argument will be frustrated. Read it the way you would listen to an old man who knows what he is talking about and is not going to organise it for you.

The closing section on lucky and unlucky days is commonly skimmed, and some scholars doubt it belongs to the poem at all. Read it for the flavour of the ancient farming year, or move lightly over it.

Which Translation to Read

• M. L. West (Oxford World's Classics) — recommended. The most reliable Hesiod in English, from the scholar who knew the text better than anyone, and it comes with the Theogony in the same volume plus the agricultural and legal context you need in the notes. For most readers this is simply the sensible choice. The cost: West translates for accuracy rather than for music. The poetry is the thing you are furthest from here. View on Amazon →
• A. E. Stallings (Penguin Classics, 2018). A poet's verse translation, formally alive and often funny, and by a distance the best-sounding Hesiod in English. It was a TLS book of the year and shortlisted for the Runciman Award. Take it if you want to enjoy this poem rather than consult it. The cost: her formal choices sometimes carry her a good way from the literal Greek, and the volume contains Works and Days alone, so you will need the Theogony elsewhere.
• Stanley Lombardo (Hackett, 1993). Plainspoken and physical, printed with the Theogony and an introduction by Robert Lamberton. A strong middle path. The cost: less apparatus than West, less music than Stallings.

Take West if you want Hesiod entire and want to be sure of him, Stallings if you want to be delighted, Lombardo if you want both poems in a cheap paperback. Glenn Most's Loeb puts the Greek on the facing page.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it as a working man's poem, not a philosophical treatise. Its authority comes from the fact that the man writing it had callused hands and a grievance.

Slow down for the mythical passages. They run to only a few pages, they are the most famous thing in the book, and they repay a third reading.

Do not expect consistency. Hesiod contradicts himself about strife, about women, about whether life is worth the trouble. The contradictions are the poem thinking.

Read the introduction first here: West's is context, not commentary. And read the Theogony alongside it, in either order. Hesiod is one poet with two poems, and you will not know what you have until you have both.