Work and Days

Hesiod

• Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781625581334
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Fiction
• Index: Literature

Work and Days is a didactic poem of some 800 verses written by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod around 700 BC. At its center, the Works and Days is a farmer's almanac in which Hesiod instructs his brother Perses in the agricultural arts. Scholars have seen this work against a background of agrarian crisis in mainland Greece, which inspired a wave of colonial expeditions in search of new land. In the poem Hesiod also offers his brother extensive moralizing advice on how he should live his life.

Translator’s Note

I had wanted for a long time to do a translation of the Works and Days but had been deterred by some of the special features of the poem that make for difficulties in translating it. When Stephanie Nelson asked me to do a poetic version, so that, at least on the Greek side of her book on the Works and Days and Vergil’s Georgics, the reader might have between the covers an English translation to refer to, the temptation proved too much for my misgivings. This was especially true because the manuscript of the book, which I knew well, seemed to present the Hesiodic poem in much the same

fashion as I saw it, I thought that the translation might give some further illumination to the argument of the book and the book to the translation.

All the same, let me lay before the reader, especially the Greekless reader, some of the difficulties, as I see them, of making an English translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days. Some of the trouble comes from the likeness to Homer and the remarkable difference. Both Homer and Hesiod wrote highly stylized poems, in a literary language — a version of ionic — which was almost certainly never spoken. It is designed

for literature, and especially for the hexameter line, After Homer and Hesiod it was used by the pre-Socratic philosophers and by Herodotus — in prose. The translation must take account of this formalized style. Again, the later Greeks, from the fifth Century on, put Hesiod and Homer together as the beginners of their Greek culture, jointly, and they comment much less on the differences between the two. Aristophanes in the Frogs declares that both of them gave the Greeks much of their technical knowledge — Homer of how to train men of war, Hesiod of how to farm- This certainly looks rather like some sort of comic absurdity. Perhaps both authors do contribute “useful” technical information, but it is very far-fetched to claim that drill and formations in war are really even much a byproduct of Homer as seen in the fifth Century. I believe also that the ostensible didacticism of Hesiod in teaching his brother

Verses how to farm is not seriously didactic. This is one of the points on which I agree with Stephanie Nelson.

Another very significant statement about the two poets comes from Herodotus when he says that it is pointless to ask whether the Greek gods were eternal or where they came from, because everything the Greeks know about the gods has been given them by Homer and Hesiod, again as the two originators without distinction between them. Certainly both Homer and Hesiod are writers with the deepest commitment to religion. The lliad and the Odyssey both live altogether in the context of man and God and their interaction. But what we learn from Homer — in the sense in which Herodotus speaks of what we know about the Greek gods — is not from the dubious quotation of the worship of Athene at Troy but from such passages as the encounter of Achilles and Priam at the end of the lliad, which is quite certainly fictionalized. As, it seems to me, most of the accounts of con versat ions between the gods are fictionalized. What we get from Homer, from a religious perspective, is something uncommonly like a tragic sense of man in his world of gods, fate, and himself.

It may be that when Herodotus mentions both Homer and Hesiod as the source of our information about the Greek gods he is thinking, in Hesiod’s case, mostly of the Theogonjt the “birth of the gods.” But he was certainly also thinking of the Works and Days, with its competing myths of the origin of men and gods, and Hesiod’s description of contemporary farming as the creation of Zeus, with farming as the natural field for Zeus’ judgment of men’s success or failure. Again, Nelson’s emphasis on the religious and moral side of the Works and Days seems to me especially valuable.

In these various ways it is the similarity of Homer and Hesiod that stands out. But when one comes to try to render Hesiod into English for English readers, it is the amazing difference that strikes one, I do not believe that Hesiod in the Works and Days is truly didactic, any more than Homer is directly didactic as historian or as theologian. There is in Hesiod’s poem a loving intensity of detail true enough. But there are such gaps of more or less importance in the general instruction as makes it overwhelmingly unlikely that the whole represents a serious effort at instruction on ‘’how to do it.” When he does get to the account of the farm er ‘s year one can see that the

description of farming practice is the occasion of the poetry and the heart of it. It is not there as part of a lesson. For what e ver reason, Hesiod has decided that his approach to farming will be in the form of a personal story of himself and his brother Perses who had cheated him in a lawsuit arising from his father’s will The farming descriptions are ostensibly to teach Perses how to do the job right— on the assumption that Perses never really knew how to farm properly. It is a flimsy enough pretext, but the pretext does not matter much. (There are recent theories that this sort of poem is based on Wis-

dom literature and the precedents in Mesopotamia.) At any rate, Hesiod’s feeling about farming, with all its elaborate intensity, had to be conveyed by him in this personal setting. Homer worked on stories arising from the Tro jan War, Often later Greeks

see him as a poetic historian. It is now right ly stressed that the evidence of the details indicates that Homer did not in faet know iTiuch about how that war was fought. He certainly inherited characters and scenes involving these characters that had been the subject of many other minstrels before his time. But at a certain moment he wrote a big, overarching story that combined much of the current stories and created characters that are fictionalized versions of what his tradition had given him. I would suggest that Hesiod, from whatever source, came to feel that his sort of epic poem would concern farming. Under his hånd it acquired its special personality from a story that was either his own or something specially close to his understanding. It may very well be, also, that his gener...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Translator’s Note