1. Hesiod,
Works and Days

2. Ancient Greece
Archaic Period, 8th-5th century BCE:
Hesiod, Homer, Sappho, Pre-Socratics
Classical Period, 5th and 4th century BCE:
Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Euripides
Hellenistic Period, 3rd-1st century BCE

5. Pierian Muses, bringers of fame: come
Tell of your father, Zeus, and sing his hymn,
Thorough whom each man is famous or unknown,
Talked-of or left obscure through his great will.
With ease he strengthens any man; with ease
He makes the strong man humble and with ease
He levels mountains and exalts the plain,
Withers the proud and makes the crooked straight
With ease, the Thunderer whose home is high.
Hear, Zeus, and set our fallen laws upright
And may my song to Perses tell the truth.

6. Strife is not an only child. Upon the earth
Two Strifes exist; the one is praised by those
Who come to know her, and the other blamed.
Their natures differ: for the cruel one
Makes battles thrive, and war; she wins no love
But men are forced, by the immortals’ will,
To pay the grievous goddess due respect.
The other, first-born child of blackest Night,
Was set by Zeus, who lives in air, on high,
Set in the roots of earth, an aid to men.
She urges lazy men to work:
A man grows eager, seeing another rich
From ploughing, planting, ordering his house;
So neighbour vies with neighbour in the rush
For wealth: this Strife is good for mortal men —
Potter hates potter, carpenters compete,
And beggar strives with beggar, bard with bard. (1-25)

7. When ploughing-time arrives, make haste to plough,
You and your slaves alike, on rainy days
And dry ones, while the season lasts. At dawn
Get to your fields, and one day they’ll be full. …
Make prayers to Zeus the farmer’s god and to
Holy Demeter, for her sacred grain,
To make it ripe and heavy, when you start
To plough, and hold the handles in your hand,
And strike the oxen as they tug the straps.
A slave should follow after, with a stick
To hide the seeds and disappoint the birds.
Good habits are a man’s finest friend, and bad
Are his worst enemy. ( )

8. But at this time,
I love a shady rock, and Bibline wine,
A cake of cheese, and goat’s milk, and some meat
Of heifers pastured in the woods, uncalved,
Or first-born kids. Then may I sit in shade
And drink the shining wine, and eat my fill
And turn my face to meet the fresh West Wind,
And pour three times an offering from the spring
Which always flows, unmuddied, streaming down,
And make my fourth libation one of wine. ( )

9. The gods desire to keep the stuff of life
Hidden from us. If they did not, you could
Work for a day and earn a year’s supplies;
You’d pack away your rudder, and retire
The oxen and the laboring mules. But Zeus
Concealed the secret, angry in his heart
At being hoodwinked by Prometheus,
And so he thought of painful cares for men.
First he hid fire. But the son of Iapetos
Stole it from Zeus the wise, concealed the flame
In a fennel stalk, and fooled the Thunderer. (40-50)