page_title: Hesiod
section_title: Works and Days
hierarchical_section_title: Hesiod / Works / Works and Days
caption_attribution_description: English: Image of a page containing the opening lines of Hesiod's Works and Days from a manuscript which includes Works and Days&#160;; The shield of Heracles&#160;; Theogony [1500-1525], originally by Hesiod, with commentaries by John Tzetzes, in Greek. Copied probably in Italy, bound in contemporary limp goatskin. MS Gr 20, Houghton Library, Harvard University
context_page_description: Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. He is generally regarded as the first written poet in the Western tradition to regard himself as an individual persona with an active role to play in his subject. Ancient authors credited Hesiod and Homer with establishing Greek religious customs. Modern scholars refer to him as a major source on Greek mythology, farming techniques, early economic thought, archaic Greek astronomy and ancient time-keeping.
context_section_description: The Works and Days is a poem of over 800 lines which revolves around two general truths: labour is the universal lot of Man, but he who is willing to work will get by. Scholars have interpreted this work against a background of agrarian crisis in mainland Greece, which inspired a wave of documented colonisations in search of new land.
  Work and Days may have been influenced by an established tradition of didactic poetry based on Sumerian, Hebrew, Babylonian and Egyptian wisdom literature.
  This work lays out the five Ages of Man, as well as containing advice and wisdom, prescribing a life of honest labour and attacking idleness and unjust judges (like those who decided in favour of Perses) as well as the practice of usury. It describes immortals who roam the earth watching over justice and injustice. The poem regards labor as the source of all good, in that both gods and men hate the idle, who resemble drones in a hive.  In the horror of the triumph of violence over hard work and honor, verses describing the "Golden Age" present the social character and practice of nonviolent diet through agriculture and fruit-culture as a higher path of  living sufficiently.
caption: Opening lines of Works and Days in a 16th-century manuscript
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