Greek poet Hesiod took many lines of thought and knowledge—myth, fable, personal experience, practical understanding—and wove them into one great whole. He did as much with the origins of the Greek gods in the Theogony, and then did the same in creating his manual of moral and practical advice, Works and Days. Here, Stephanie Nelson’s translation of Works and Days is paired with Richard S. Caldwell’s take on the Theogony. Along with introductory essays, these comprehensible versions of Hesiod’s two best-known poems make it easy for readers to see why Hesiod’s writings continue to resound through the ages

The Works and Days, like the Theogony, originates in a tradition of oral poetry that began long before Hesiod. Like the Theogony, with its ties to Near Eastern succession myths, the Works and Days also has connections to the Near East, here to a tradition of "wisdom literature" that flourished in Asia Minor. And like the Theogony the Works and Days operates by bringing together various elements of its tradition in such a way as to bring out a single underlining meaning. In the Theogony Hesiod’s material, the genealogies and stories of the gods, was relatively uniform and the poem’s underlying theme, the coming to dominance of Zeus through both force and intelligence, was fairly direct. The Works and Days is in many ways more ambitious. Here Hesiod (assuming, as seems likely, that a single poet was responsible for the poem) has brought together myth, fable, personal experience, moral precepts, proverbs, agricultural advice, advice on sailing, what are to us superstitions about crossing rivers, cutting one’s fingernails etc. and advice on lucky and unlucky days. In many ways the disparate nature of the evidence seems to be the point, since the underlying theme is how the will of Zeus informs all of human experience with a single underlying meaning.

The meaning itself is similar to that of Achilles’ description in the Iliad of the two jars at Zeus’ threshold, one of good, one of evils. From these Zeus sometimes gives human beings only evils, and sometimes evil mixed with good (24.527-33). We notice that Achilles leaves out the possibility that human beings might receive good unmixed with evil. This is also Hesiod’s point: in looking at farming, in looking at human relations, in looking at economics or crossing rivers or the best days for being born or shearing sheep or getting married, for human beings there is no good without evil and no profit without hardship. Such is the will of Zeus for human beings in our present condition.