Works and Days

Extract

For antiquarians Hesiod is no doubt a more useful poet than either Homer or Euripides. He differs from Homer in having a definite character and even an approximate date; from both Euripides and Homer in dealing with the concrete, everyday facts of contemporary life. It is from him, for instance, that we have our earliest account of a plough made artificially with separate pieces of wood; Homer never troubled his head with such banal matters, but here is a chance for the antiquarians to make merry. The Works and Days above all other works is the antiquarian's thesaurus.

But if we subtract Hesiod's descriptions of ploughs, his list of days and similar paragraphs which are admittedly boring, we are left with a good three-fourths of the Works and Days still intact. For example, we have the three λòγoi with which the poem begins. Here, if we expect the glitter of Homer, the ‘surge and thunder of the Odyssey’, we shall be disappointed; but we shall find that monstrous familiarity with the gods, and that astonishing intimacy with the universe before man's creation, which only Greek literature can show us. Shelley indeed, as Francis Thompson observed, had in some degree this Greek characteristic— ‘the universe is his box of toys… he dances in and out of the gates of heaven’—but only Hesiod and Aeschylus in the Prometheus have yet succeeded in opening up the full prospect of eternity. Hesiod knows the origin of everything, divine and human; he had the effrontery to write a Theogony, and knew the exact life history of the second sort of Strife: ‘she was born of dark gloomy Night, and high Zeus, who dwells in heaven, set her in the roots of earth’ (Works and Days, 11. 17–19).