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Works and Days
Works and Days
The Works and Days is Hesiod’s didactic-agrarian poem, addressed to his brother Perses in the aftermath of an inheritance dispute. Where the Theogony gives the order of the divine powers from above, the Works and Days reads that order from below — in the obligations of the human cultivator under the gaze of Zeus and his daughter Dike.
shirley-sullivan identifies justice as the poem’s central preoccupation: “Justice is of great concern to Zeus. She is his daughter. He listens to reports of injustice, himself observing as well perverse human behaviour and sending many watchers to observe human beings. Zeus rewards those who are just and punishes the unjust not only individually, but both as a family and as members of a city” (Sullivan 1995, p. 186). The unjust man brings ruin upon his household and his city; the just man prospers.
The poem’s great structural figure is the myth of the five races — gold, silver, bronze, heroes, iron — which Vernant reads not as a simple chronological decline but as a cycle whose endpoints are pure Dike and pure hubris: “In the age of gold, everything was order, justice, and joy: this was the reign of pure dike. By the end of the cycle, in the latter part of the age of iron, everything will be abandoned to disorder, violence, and death: this will be the reign of pure hubris” (Vernant 1983, pp. 60–61). The myth also contains the figures of Pandora and Prometheus, the twin archaic images of the human condition under the gods.