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This chapter looks for a deeper affinity between Plato and Hesiod in this study of the myth of the races of man in the Republic. The central idea is that Plato does not just ‘rework’ the Hesiodic narrative of the five races, but reads its contribution to the Works and Days as an antecedent to, and a model for, his own, self-critical practice of philosophy. In this sense, it can ask us to think of Hesiod's races as ‘our own’ too (546e): they set the pattern for our continued philosophical reflection.

This chapter argues that Hesiod shapes the history of his own reception by way of an elaborate biographical narrative, leading his readers from a conception of knowledge as Muse-inspired poetry in the Theogony, to one that centres on the human world and which must be acquired through reflection and personal experience, in the Works and Days. This vision of intellectual progress informed the reception of Hesiod in classical Athens, and may also have had a role in the wider intellectual developments of the 5th and 4th centuries BC.

By analysing the pattern of Hesiodic quotations across Plato's works, this chapter concludes that Plato came to admire and use Hesiod — especially the Works and Days — more as he got older. The Hesiodic corpus, included the Theogony and Works and Days but not the Catalogue of Women and the minor works, just as the only genuine Homeric texts, for Plato, appear to be the Iliad and Odyssey.

This chapter examines the extent to which Hesiodic poetry became associated with specific contexts of reading, from the courts to school-room teaching and philosophical debate. The Theogony and Works and Days acquired a very different Sitz im Leben by the time Plato encountered them. Indeed, their very status as texts ‘in their own right’ (i.e. outside specific contexts of consumption), and the idea of an overarching Hesiodic oeuvre, appear to have become rather less important to many readers than the traditions and institutions of reading that had accrued around specific passages.

Works and Days presents a double social dynamic. The Ascra of Works and Days represents a much less complex form of community than Homer's polis. The two essentially congruent approaches to Works and Days merge the pair of contrasting terms. It is suggested that at the heart of the present inquiry lies the question of which opposition is dominant in Works and Days: that between village and city or that between prosperous and poor. To speak of “Hesiod” is to speak of at least two different phenomena. One is the historical poet who composed Works and Days, and the other is the persona of the poem, the voice that emerges from the fabric of the poem's verses, a textual effect, not a real person. Hesiod has regularly been summoned as a witness to how that transition took place.

This chapter addresses the evidence provided by Hesiod for the internal organization of his community. It explains the organization and priorities of the individual household and the mode of integration of these individual households into more complex structures. The oikos is most closely associated in Hesiod's mind with the hoarding of grain. Relationships between households in Hesiod's Ascra were based on a form of balanced reciprocity. It reviews the statuses that receive explicit acknowledgment from Hesiod. The material basis for status distinctions in Ascra is investigated. It returns to the question of the basileus: Did Ascra have its own, local basileus? The testimony of Works and Days suggests that the ideology of the mesos preserves the values and egalitarianism of the villages, reaching back to the Dark Age, which preceded the rise of the polis.

The evidence from Works and Days leads to the conclusion that Hesiod's Ascra was neither very centralized nor very hierarchized as a community. It is believed that by Hesiod's time the least intensive agricultural regime that could be practically employed was plow cultivation. It then addresses the testimony of Works and Days in isolation, on its own terms, and without regard for its role as evidence for practices elsewhere in Greece. Hesiod gives virtually no evidence at all for crops other than cereals and vines. Hesiod's repeated emphasis upon storage and saving throughout Works and Days supports the hypothesis that he describes a short fallow regime. Moreover, the timing of the various activities of the agricultural year is discussed in order to identify the rhythm of slack and peak seasons. Hesiod's calendar of tasks does display the rhythms of slack and busy season's characteristic of an extensive short fallow regime.

This chapter considers Works and Days as a piece of persuasion. It also explores the idea that Hesiod builds up over the course of Works and Days a powerful appeal for the independence of Ascra as he strives to persuade Perses not to turn to the kings. The rhetorical purpose of Works and Days is clearly expressed in the passage initiating the transition from the series of harangues composing the first major segment of the poem to the agricultural calendar that is its heart. Hesiod's concern with the city is triggered by Perses' threat to resort to the kings of Thespiae for a settlement of their quarrel. The spatial boundary conjured up in the poetry of Works and Days stands as a both a bulwark and a monument for the man of kudos and aretē.

Hesiod’s Dichterweihe famously opens with the following words of censure by the Muses against ‘field-dwelling shepherds’ (Theogony 26–8). Faced with this passage, scholars rarely address the rationale of verse 26, obscured as it is by the celebrated couplet that follows it. To the extent that it has merited attention, the reasons advanced for it are either unsatisfactory or insufficiently developed.2 But the opening words of the Muses are an essential complement of their celebrated anaphoric pronouncement. Their reproach sets the context for it and must be understood in its light.3 With the statement about Muse-inspired truths and lies, the Hesiodic Theogony (and Hesiodic poetry more generally) articulates its aspiration for, and lays claim to, a wider Panhellenic reception than its epichoric competitors.

It is shown that show Hesiod's Ascra is indeed a less complex community than the Homeric chiefdom. The Big Man collectivity stands at the more complex extreme of the range of societies comprehended within the category of a local group. Ascra exhibits traits that span the range from the family-level group to the Big Man collectivity but not beyond. The impression that Hesiod conveys of a weakly developed sense of territorial identity meshes with the embryonic hierarchy and ceremonialism of Ascra. The conquest of Ascra is described. It is observed in Works and Days the onset in embryonic form of a distinctively “peasant” sensibility about the integrity of the village boundary and the obligations interconnecting those living within that boundary, a sensibility that has arisen in direct response to the pressure exerted upon Ascra by the kings of Thespiae.

This chapter examines the meaning of rule in Hesiod’s major works, Theogony and Works and Days, arguing that Hesiod provides a subtle yet sophisticated poetic critique of ruling as distinction. The chapter first examines how the Muses and Memory play both existential and political roles in Hesiod’s thought, then analyzes a politicized theogonic narrative that justifies Zeus’s just ascendance as cosmic ruler. His works depict bottom-up challenges and top-down responsiveness to unjust hierarchical rule that elaborate the centrality of justice as fair, straight decision-making that accounts for the interests and welfare of a broader community. This narrative elucidates how Zeus and justice provide the proper exemplar and criterion for rule. The chapter concludes by examining how changes in the meaning of rule signal an increasingly anthropocentric trajectory in early Greek thought that has long-lasting impact on subsequent Western traditions of political thought.

This chapter presents a case study of the Lexicon’s treatment of a single author, Hesiod. Early Greek poetry in general, and that of Hesiod in particular, presents certain difficulties for the historical approach which do not arise for texts of later periods. The main body of the chapter is divided into three sections, treating different respects in which Liddell and Scott (LSJ), and the historical principle it adopts, may seem problematic for the modern reader of Hesiod. The first section considers the ways in which LSJ conflicts with current beliefs concerning the text and dating of Hesiod. The second outlines some respects in which the historical principle may be inadequate for dealing with early Greek hexameter in general, given more recent scholarship on the nature and semantics of formulaic verse. The third treats more idiosyncratic features of Hesiod’s poetry that are particularly noteworthy for the lexicographer. Throughout, the main focus is on the Theogony and the Works and Days.