Theogony and Works and Days

Summary

Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses. The Theogony, about a thousand lines long, opens on Mount Helicon, where the Muses appear to Hesiod as a shepherd, tell him they can speak falsehoods that resemble truth as well as truth itself, and breathe a divine voice into him. The poem then sets out the generations of the cosmos. First comes Chaos, then Earth, Tartarus and Eros; Earth bears starry Heaven, and from their union come the Titans, the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handers. Because Heaven hides his children within Earth, she gives a flint sickle to her youngest son Cronos, who ambushes and maims his father and separates him from Earth; Aphrodite rises from the sea foam that follows. Cronos in turn swallows his own children by Rhea until Rhea gives him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes and hides the infant Zeus in Crete. Grown, Zeus frees his siblings and the Hundred-Handers, defeats the Titans in a ten-year war, shuts them in Tartarus, overcomes the monster Typhoeus, and distributes honours among the gods. A central episode tells how Prometheus tricked Zeus over the sacrifice at Mecone and stole fire, and how Zeus answered by having the first woman fashioned. The poem closes with Zeus's marriages, beginning with Metis and Themis, and a list of goddesses who bore children to mortal men. Works and Days, some 830 lines, is addressed to Hesiod's brother Perses, who has taken more than his share of their inheritance with the help of bribe-taking lords. Hesiod distinguishes a good Strife, which spurs men to work, from a bad one that breeds quarrels; tells the story of Pandora's jar, from which every evil escapes but Hope; describes the five races of men, golden, silver, bronze, the heroes and the present iron age; and gives the fable of the hawk and the nightingale before praising Justice as the daughter of Zeus. The second half is a farmer's year keyed to the rising and setting of stars such as the Pleiades and Sirius, with advice on ploughing, harvest, winter, sailing and marriage, followed by maxims and a calendar of lucky and unlucky days. Evelyn-White's prose translation appeared in the Loeb Classical Library in 1914. The library file holds the Hesiodic part of that volume: his introduction, Works and Days, Theogony, the fragments of the Catalogue of Women and other lost poems, and The Shield of Heracles; the Homeric Hymns from the same volume have their own record.

Top Lessons

• Order won out of conflict

  The Theogony presents the cosmos as a story of succession: Heaven is overthrown by Cronos, and Cronos by Zeus, until Zeus ends the cycle by swallowing Metis and sharing honours among the gods. For Hesiod, the present order of the world is good because it rests on Zeus's victory and his fair distribution of rights.

• Work as the road to goodness

  Works and Days answers Perses' greed with a theology of labour: the gods have hidden the means of life, so men must earn their bread by toil in the right season. Hesiod turns farming into a moral discipline, in which diligence, foresight and good neighbourliness are the marks of a just man.

• Justice and the crooked judges

  Hesiod complains of lords who swallow bribes and give crooked judgements, but he insists that Justice is the daughter of Zeus and that the city that judges straightly will flourish. The fable of the hawk and the nightingale shows the claim of mere strength, which the poem then rejects for men, though it allows it among beasts.

• Hope, decline and the human condition

  The stories of Pandora and the five races explain why life is hard: evils and diseases have been loosed upon the earth, and the iron race lives by toil and sorrow. Yet Hope stays within the jar, and Hesiod says even the iron age will have some good mingled with its evils.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Hesiod writes centuries before Greek medicine became a craft with its own texts, so his poems show the older frame in which illness is sent by the gods rather than explained by nature. In the Pandora story, diseases escape the jar and wander among men by day and night without a voice, so that they arrive unannounced; the line is often cited as the earliest Greek statement that disease is ubiquitous and unpredictable, and the plain observation that men grow old quickly in misery sits beside it. Hunger and famine run through Works and Days as the farmer's constant fear, and Zeus is said to spare the just city from famine and plague. The farming calendar notes the effects of the seasons on the body, such as the dog-days when Sirius parches head and knees and men are feeblest, which anticipates the seasonal attention of later Hippocratic writings such as Airs, Waters, Places, though Hesiod gives no theory. The Theogony names Sleep and Death as twin children of Night, the one gentle and the other pitiless, and makes Mnemosyne (Memory) the mother of the Muses, whose song brings forgetfulness of grief. Modern readers sometimes connect that passage with the consoling power of poetry and music in mourning; this is an interpretation, not Hesiod's own language of treatment.

• Works and Days, ll. 90-105

  Before Pandora men lived free from heavy sickness; after the jar is opened, silent diseases roam by day and night.

• Works and Days, ll. 225-247

  The just city knows no famine; the unjust city suffers famine and plague sent by Zeus, and its women bear no children.

• Works and Days, ll. 582-596

  High summer, when Sirius parches head and knees and Hesiod prescribes shade, food and diluted wine.

• Theogony, ll. 75-103

  The Muses, daughters of Memory, give a song that lets a grieving man forget his sorrow.

• Theogony, ll. 211-225 and 758-766

  Night bears Death, Sleep and the tribe of Dreams; later Sleep and Death dwell together beneath the earth.