Works and Days Characters

Hesiod

Hesiod (HEE-see-uhd), an honest and hardworking Greek farmer. His father, a seafaring trader (and presumably a farmer as well), had emigrated from his homeland on the coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in a state of poverty and had sailed across the Aegean Sea to mainland Greece in search of a better livelihood. There, he settled in the district of Boeotia, in the meager village of Ascra on the lower slopes of Mount Helicon, which was sacred to the Muses of poetry. He acquired land, achieved middle-class status and a measure of prosperity, and was able to bequeath an estate of some value to his sons, Hesiod and Perses. A bitter dispute about the inheritance, however, led to litigation and to charges by Hesiod that Perses had attempted to get the better of him by bribing the corrupt barons who functioned as judges. Hesiod, in fact, treats this litigation as the immediate occasion of this thoroughly didactic poem, which is addressed to Perses. Hesiod speaks in the first person and exhorts his brother to forsake his lazy, scheming, and contentious habits and to devote himself to honest living and hard work; these general exhortations are accompanied by explicit instructions about proper conduct, managing a farm, and seafaring. The poem concludes with a straightforward list of propitious and unpropitious days. Hesiod’s advice to Perses is grounded in a firm belief that this is a hard but moral universe in which...