Works and Days
Works and Days (Erga kai hēmerai), Greek poem in 828 hexameters by Hesiod; the ‘works’ are the activities of the farming year, the ‘days’ (from line 765 onward) are an almanac of days in the month that are favourable or unfavourable for different activities. No reason is given for the category of a particular day except for the implication that Zeus has ordained it so. Lucky or unlucky days are scarcely mentioned again until Hellenistic times.
The chief themes of the poem are justice and the need for hard work. After an invocation to the Muses the poet addresses his brother Persēs, urging him to a reconciliation of their quarrel (see HESIOD). To explain why men have to work hard and act justly he uses myth: Prometheus and the story of Pandora, the five ages or generations (Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron), and the fable of the hawk and the nightingale, illustrating the unjust use of power; the whole is blended with proverbs, moral maxims, and threats of divine anger. In the remaining two thirds of the poem Hesiod gives Perses instructions on how to work as a farmer, which are mostly an enumeration of the tasks of the various seasons with some practical advice, for example on how to construct a plough; there is a fine descriptive passage on the rigours of winter (504–35), balanced by a picture of the farmer enjoying the languorous heat of summer (582–96). There follow some brief advice on sea trading, a collection of proverbial maxims about religious and social conduct, and the almanac of lucky and unlucky days. The poem is a work of exhortation and instruction, for which parallels exist, but in Near Eastern literature rather than in Greek; the poems of Phocylidēs and Theognis are comparable in tone, but much more limited in scope. Works and Days is given unity chiefly by the personality of the author. Whether the circumstances of its composition are real or imaginary, the poem represents the life-experience of a cautious and conservative farmer, inured to hardship and adversity, suspicious of pleasure, and no lover of women, but one who by reflection had come to believe that the conditions of life were divinely and justly ordained.
