Works and Days, and a Religion of the Right Moment

The Works and Days is addressed to a brother, Perses, in a quarrel over an inheritance that Perses is said to have won by bribing the lords, and the whole poem is bent toward the argument that this cannot stand. Zeus watches. Justice sits beside him as a person and reports crooked judgements, and thirty thousand immortal watchers walk the earth wrapped in mist keeping account of what men do. The five ages, gold, silver, bronze, the age of heroes and the iron present, describe a decline, and the men of the golden race did not simply die: they became spirits who guard mortals and give wealth. Pandora and her jar are told here as the answer to the trick at Mekone, and the point is not curiosity but that the punishment arrives looking like a gift.

The last part of the poem is a calendar. Certain days of the month are fit for certain work and others are not, and the poem lists them flatly, without argument or reason given. That is what makes the work a religious document rather than a farming manual. Right action means doing the correct thing at a moment which is already marked, and the marking is not something anyone negotiates. The Muses who met Hesiod on Helicon told him at the outset that they know how to say many false things resembling true ones, and true things when they choose to, which is an unusual warning for a poet to put in his own mouth.