Where to Buy
Affiliate links coming soon. Purchases will help support this project.
Read / Listen Free
Works and Days
7.5Hesiod
Hesiod's seventh-century BC practical-wisdom poem — the Five Ages of Man, agricultural instruction, and the first European work of moral didactic verse; a direct model for Virgil.
GBM Assessment (Score: 7.5/10)
Works and Days is the first European work of practical wisdom literature, blending moral instruction with agricultural guidance. Its account of the Five Ages of Man established a lasting frameworks for understanding human decline, and its didactic tradition directly influenced Virgil's Georgics and the broader moral literature of the Western world.
Rooted in the agricultural landscape of Boeotia, Works and Days includes the myth of Pandora and offers a vision of justice and labor that shaped the Greek moral imagination. The poem's influence on the tradition of didactic and moral literature extends through Roman poetry and into the modern era. It remains required reading in the Princeton Classics curriculum.
Archaic Greece, c. 750-700 BC
Greece emerges from its Dark Age. City-states form. Colonization spreads Greek settlements from the Black Sea to Sicily. The Olympic Games begin (traditionally 776 BC). Homer composes the Iliad and Odyssey from centuries of oral tradition, giving Europe its founding literary works. Hesiod provides the first systematic Greek theology. Rome is a cluster of huts on the Palatine Hill.
Awards & Adaptations
Required at Princeton Classics.
Recommended Edition
H.G. Evelyn-White (Loeb 1914)
