The Poems of Hesiod

by Hesiod

  led away the daughter of Aietês , the god-reared king, through the will

  of the everlasting gods, after he had accomplished the many dangerous

  contests that the great boastful king, violent and foolish Pelias, the doer

  of violent deeds, placed upon him. When the son of Aison had accomplished

  them, after long suffering, he arrived at IOLKOS, carrying the glancing-eyed

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  daughter of Aietês on his swift ship, and he made her his blooming bride.

  And she bore a son, Medeos, to Jason, shepherd of the people, submitting

  to him in love, whom Cheiron, the son of Philyra, raised in the mountains.783

  So was the plan of great Zeus brought to pass.

  Genealogical Chart 17. Other children of Kadmos and Harmonia.

  Figure 12. The winged Dawn (Eos) pursues the Trojan prince Tithonos, who holds a lyre. Their son will be the great Ethiopian fighter Memnon, famous in the Trojan Cycle. Dawn requested from Zeus eternal life for Tithonos but forgot to ask for eternal youth: He shriveled up like a cicada. Athenian red-figure vase, ca. 470 B.C. Musée du Louvre, Paris (Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithonus#/media/File:Tithonos_Eos_Louvre_G438_detail.jpg)

  Genealogical Chart 18. The children of Dawn (Eos).

  Of the daughters of Nereus,

  the Old Man of the Sea, the shining goddess Psamathê gave birth to Phokos,

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  uniting with Aiakos in the love of golden Aphrodite. And the silver-sandaled

  goddess Thetis, submitting to Peleus, gave birth to Achilles, the breaker

  of men, with a heart like a lion.788

  And nicely crowned Aphrodite gave birth

  to Aeneas, having mixed in sweet love with Anchisês on the peaks of Ida,

  wooded, with many gullies.790

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  Circe, the daughter of Helios, son of Hyperion,

  mixing in love with steadfast Odysseus, gave birth to Agrios and Latinos,

  blameless and powerful. She also gave birth to Telegonos, through the agency

  of golden Aphrodite. And they ruled over all the famous Tyrsenians,

  very far off in a recess of the holy islands.794 The shining goddess Kalypso

  was joined to Odysseus in sweet love and begot Nausithoös and Nausinoös.795

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  Genealogical Chart 19. The descendants of Kalypso, Circe, and Aietês.

  These are the goddesses who slept with mortal men and gave birth

  to children like the gods. And now, O sweet-voiced Muses of Olympos,

  daughters of Zeus who carries the goatskin fetish, sing of the tribe of women!798

  Introduction to the Works and Days

  The first two hundred lines of the Works and Days consist of a proem and the telling of three myths: the myths of Prometheus, Pandora, and the Five Races. The myths of Prometheus and Pandora are connected, as in the Theogony, but the Myth of the Five Races is independent. All three myths, however, refer to an earlier time, the Golden Age, when humans were spared the need to work. The purpose of these myths is to establish the central doctrine that Zeus has established justice in human life on the basis of working for a livelihood.

  The Necessity of Labor and the Myth of the Five Races

  After an invocation to the Muses, who celebrate the power of Zeus, and the mention of a quarrel with his brother, Persês, over the division of their inheritance, Hesiod goes on to say that the gods concealed from humans the means to a livelihood because of Zeus’s anger at being deceived, presumably at the division of the sacrificial meat at Mekonê (see Theogony lines 419–42). Before then, one needed to work but a single day to produce enough for an entire year. When Zeus took away fire in punishment for the deception, Prometheus, the Titan advocating for the interests of mankind, stole fire from heaven. Zeus punished men for his new crime by creating Pandora, who brought the curse of greedy women to the race of men. (Hesiod does not seem bothered by the problem of reproduction without women before this time.) Since Pandora opened the jar of evils, humans have had to work for a living. Certainly the punishment was just, and we must accept it.

  The myths of Prometheus and Pandora assume a continuity, then, between an earlier, workless age and the present age, in which work is a necessity. There was no gap between the two eras. At first man lived in a paradise, without the need to work; then Prometheus deceived Zeus, causing his anger and his removal of fire; then Prometheus recovered fire; then Zeus retaliated by having Pandora created, thus bringing into being the malevolent tribe of women, their attendant evils, and the need to work for a living. First there was sin, then punishment. It is a continuum from a life of grace to an accursed existence.

  In the Myth of the Five Races, by contrast, each age comes to a complete end before the next begins. First was the Golden Race, but it disappeared beneath the earth and was gone. Then came the Silver Race, not a descendant of the Golden one but of a separate origin; it too disappeared. Then came the Bronze Race, Heroic Race, and Iron Race, which all came into being independently. The notion that once humankind lived carefree in a paradise and subsequently fell into the horror of the modern world through sinful behavior is widespread, as, for example, in the biblical myth of the Garden of Eden.

  The Myth of the Five Races, wherein these races are named after different metals (except for the Race of Heroes), is not Greek in origin, but it has clear antecedents in the myths of Persia and India. For example, in the Persian (Zoroastrian) tradition the creator god, Ahura Mazda, sent Zarathustra a dream in which he saw a tree with four branches—of gold, silver, steel, and iron. The branches foretell the four ages to come. In the Golden Age, a true religion prevails, and all demons are expelled. True religion is strong in the Silver and the Steel Age too, but in the Iron Age demons will master the world, and as in Hesiod’s account, evil will prevail. Men will lie, cheat, and steal; fathers will hate their sons; brothers will hate brothers; and humans will live in poverty. The righteous will receive no respect.

  Similarly, in the dream of Nebuchadnezzar interpreted by Daniel (Daniel 2.31–43), there was a man made of four metals: his head of gold, his breast and arms of silver, his waist and hips of brass, his legs of iron, and his feet of iron and clay. Daniel explains that the metals refer to a succession of kingdoms.

  Hesiod has adapted this Eastern story, or one like it, to his own purposes, but he has inserted the Age of Heroes into the metallic sequence to account for the time in which the Theban and Trojan wars took place. These wars were the principal topics of Greek epic. The sequence does not reflect a progressive degeneration, except for the contrast between the Golden Race and subsequent races: The Silver, Bronze, and Iron races all show distinctive faults. In many ways the Heroic Race is better than the Bronze, which precedes it. Introduced as an alternative to the myths of Prometheus and Pandora, the Myth of the Ages underlines Hesiod’s warning to Persês that Zeus has ordained work as a necessity for humankind.

  Once humans lived without the necessity for labor, when Kronos and the Titans ruled the world, in the days of the Golden Race. Then the earth produced abundant food by itself. When Zeus and his Olympians came to power, the Golden Race came to an end; the Silver Race arose, and Zeus decreed that men must work. Men of the Silver Race lived to be one hundred years old in the houses of their mothers, like childish simpletons. Their mothers cared for them as for children. When they reached maturity at age one hundred, they did not live much longer, because they could not refrain from violent behavior. In their few years as adults, they suffered many afflictions because of their folly and pugnacity. They did not sacrifice to the gods because they had nothing to sacrifice, neither growing crops nor tending animals. An angry Zeus sent them beneath the earth, where they function as underworld protective spirits, but of a secondary rank when compared with the spirits of the Golden Race.

  Next Zeus created the Bronze Race from ash trees, not inferior or superior to the Silver Race but me
rely different. Unlike the idle and childish Silver Race, the Bronze Race was vigorous and active. Apparently Zeus imposed on them the same need to work for a living, but instead of working they turned to rapine and war. They ate no bread but only meat, no doubt from herds that they had plundered. They met the same fate as the Silver Race. They destroyed one another through violence and went down to the House of Hades.

  Now Zeus made the Heroic Race, interrupting the sequence of metals, a race “more just, more righteous, the godly race of Heroes, who are called half-gods, the race before our own upon the boundless earth” (137–38). These were the men who fought at Troy and Thebes. To Hesiod and other Greeks these men had in fact existed several generations before their own time. They were superior to men of the Bronze Race or the Iron one, those of Hesiod’s own time. They tilled the fields and tended flocks, as Zeus’s ordinance required. So Odysseus plowed the fields of ITHACA; his father, Laertês, tended his vineyard, and Anchisês, the Trojan father of Aeneas, kept his flocks on Ida. The Heroic Race even continued their labors when some were translated to the Isles of the Blest, where the rich land bore three crops a year. Yet the heroes perished at Troy and Thebes, fighting for Helen and the flocks of Oedipus. In this sense the heroes were like the Bronze Race. Both are in fact remembrances of an actual historical period that we still call the Bronze Age, roughly between 1400 and 1000 B.C., when MYCENAE, THEBES, and TROY were ascendant.

  The Race of Heroes was different from the other races, however, in that not all who lived at this time were heroes, but only the kings and great warriors. Although at death some men went to the Isles of the Blest, the majority of common men and women survived into the days of the Iron Race. Descendants of the heroes were alive in Hesiod’s day, when prominent families claimed the Trojan and Theban fighters as their ancestors, as Hesiod knew perfectly well. Nor did the Race of Heroes end in total destruction, as had the earlier races.

  The Race of Heroes represents Hesiod’s attempt to fit the world of Greek legend, familiar to him and his contemporaries, into a metallic scheme that he inherited from Eastern culture. The time of the Race of Heroes is not so much a separate age as the beginning of the Iron Race. Thus Hesiod does not tell us that the Iron Race was a creation of the gods on OLYMPOS (as were the Gold and Silver races) or of Zeus (as were the Bronze Race and the Race of Heroes). He has divided the fourth and final age into two parts: an earlier and better, and a later and worse.

  Zeus laid the same injunction, to work, on the Iron Race as he had on the Silver and Bronze races, but humans again refused to obey, avoiding work and turning to crime and fraud to obtain their livelihoods. This is what Persês has done in the unequal division of his and Hesiod’s inheritance. The Age of the Iron Race is Hesiod’s own. Honest men of integrity still exist, but conditions will soon deteriorate. One day Zeus will destroy this race too, as he has destroyed earlier ones.

  The Bronze Race engaged in communal violence, with tribes and communities locked in bloody war, but the Iron Race is characterized by crimes of dishonesty. Brother betrays brother; sons betray parents; men lie, steal, cheat, and swear false oaths (lines 165–70):

  Nor will

  there be any thanks for one who keeps his oath, or is just or good,

  but men will celebrate more the doer of evil deeds and violence.

  Justice will be what you can get away with, and there will be no shame.

  The evil man will harm the better, slandering him with crooked words

  and swearing an oath upon it.

  The Iron Race makes war, and in some respects shares the vices of the Silver and Bronze races. They did not respect the gods. The Silver Race seized one another’s property and treated their kinsmen like strangers; and for the Bronze Race, might made right.

  The Iron Race will end when babies are born with gray hair at the temples, reversing the circumstances of the Silver Race, when humans lived for a hundred years and then grew quickly old, acting violently against one another. When Zeus will act to destroy the depraved men of the Iron Race, they will become at birth as the Silver Race was in old age. Whereas the myths of Prometheus and Pandora describe the origin of the necessity for work, the Myth of the Races explains the consequences of failure to obey this ordinance. Work is the foundation of Justice, under whose protection come happiness, prosperity, and wealth. Those who live without work and turn to violence, injustice, and impiety will incur Zeus’s anger and come to an end. Thus were the Silver and Bronze races destroyed, and so will the Iron Race one day suffer a similar fate.

  Good and Bad Strife

  Such is the central thesis of Works and Days: A refusal to work will lead to the injustice that rouses Zeus’s destructive anger. The principle has been effective from the time of Zeus’s ascendancy. But in leading one’s life, one meets with two kinds of Strife (Eris): the good Strife and the bad. Good Strife leads to a peaceful competition in labor that is beneficial (lines 20–24):

  She rouses even the shiftless

  to accomplishment. For when a man who is not working

  sees another who has grown rich, who is eager to plow

  and to plant and to place his house in order, this neighbour

  works to rival his neighbor who hastens to wealth.

  Good Strife arouses even the lazy man to compete with a neighbor who earns his riches by plowing and harvesting crops. Zeus has placed good Strife in the roots of the earth. But the bad Strife drives men to war and to pursue fraudulent lawsuits presided over by gift-devouring elders, such as those pursued by Persês, Hesiod’s own brother. It is this very bad Strife that characterizes the Iron Race.

  Work is the foundation of Justice. The just city flourishes. Its crops are rich, and hunger and catastrophe never come; but the unjust city suffers famine and disease. In the just city, men plant crops and tend their flocks. They stay away from violence and unjust deeds. In the unjust city, men do not work the fields and therefore must commit crimes to increase their wealth. This is the wrong kind of work, hated by Zeus.

  In nature there are no laws, and there is no Justice. Thus the hawk may seize the nightingale and devour it, because the nightingale is weak and the hawk is strong, but in the world of men Justice will prevail. Men must work the fields to generate wealth, not simply take what they can from others. It is the responsibility of the elders in the community to enforce this morality.

  Hesiod turns to his brother, Persês. There are two kinds of roads, Persês, he tells him: the rough road and the smooth. At first the road to excellence is rough, steep, long, and filled with sweat—that is the road of work. The road to evil, on the other hand, is short and smooth. If he cannot himself find the true road, Hesiod tells his brother, he should at least follow one who can (lines 257–60):

  But you, Persês,

  of a divine lineage, labor ever-mindful of my advice, so that Hunger

  will hate you, and the reverend well-crowned Demeter will love you

  and fill your barn with things to eat.

  Work provides not merely a livelihood but actual wealth (lines 265–68):

  Men’s flocks become abundant, and they become

  rich through labor, and by working men become much dearer

  to the deathless ones. Work is not at all a disgrace, but not working

  is a disgrace.

  Work brings the respect and envy of other men; not working brings shame and poverty. Persês must turn away from enriching himself at others’ expense and follow Hesiod’s example. He must not seize another’s property: “Grab is a bad girl” (line 304).

  Hesiod reviews how wealth is obtained unjustly, in a manner typical of the bad behavior of the Iron Race: robbery, lies, ill treatment of guests and suppliants, disrespect for elders, adultery, abuse of orphans. There is a right form of work and a wrong, just as there are two kinds of Strife. Right work leads to honest wealth; wrong work seeks to deprive others of their goods. The culmination of right work is sacrifice to the gods, which implies that one has enough wealth to
support this sacred act. In return the gods will reward one with still more wealth, so that the man who works can buy a neighbor’s estate, not sell his own.

  In the first half of Works and Days, Hesiod explains why work is the foundation for Justice under the rule of Zeus. In the remainder of the poem he gives instruction on how Zeus has made it possible for men to work successfully. Nature is like a book filled with signs of appropriate activity so that one’s labor will be successful—the rising of stars and constellations, the behavior of various animals—if only one can learn to read this book. Hesiod teaches us how to read the book of nature in his farmers’ and sailors’ calendars and in his listing of lucky and unlucky days, with which the poem ends. In the religious sphere, too, he alerts us to appropriate responses. In the social world, he advises on morally correct forms of competition and association. He ends the poem by proclaiming (lines 696–98):

  That man is happy and rich who

  knows all these things and does his work without offense to the deathless

  ones, observing the omens of birds and avoiding transgression.

  Wisdom Literature

  Hesiod’s poems were in origin oral deliveries, taken down by dictation in the eighth or ninth centuries B.C. on the island of EUBOEA or in nearby BOEOTIA. Though composed in Greek hexameters, they owe their origin to Eastern literatures. The stories of the origins of the present world order as told in the Theogony, and the advice for living according to Justice as given in the Works and Days, are of Eastern origin.