Works and Days

Justice, Labor, and the Human Condition — A New Translation with Introduction

The oldest surviving philosophy of work, justice, and what it means to live in hard times.

Nearly three thousand years ago, a Boeotian farmer named Hesiod sat down to tell his brother the truth: that the gods have hidden the good life from mortals, that work is the price of survival, and that justice — fragile, cosmic, indifferent to power — is the only thing standing between civilization and collapse.

Works and Days is one of the founding texts of Western literature — and one of the least read. While Homer sang of heroes, Hesiod sang of the field, the season, the neighbor's debt, and the corrupt judge. His poem gave the Greek world its myth of Prometheus and Pandora, its Five Ages of Man, its first sustained argument that justice is not merely a human convention but a force woven into the structure of the cosmos — and its first honest reckoning with what it means to live in an age of iron.

This new translation restores the poem's voice: urgent, didactic, at times bitter, at times magnificent. Where other editions reduce Hesiod to classroom excerpts, this one presents the complete poem as a living argument — from the fable of the hawk and the nightingale to the agricultural calendar, from the myth of Pandora's jar to the auspicious and inauspicious days that close the work.

What's inside:

A complete verse translation of Works and Days, faithful to the Greek while written in accessible, literary English. A substantial introduction exploring the poem's philosophy of labor, its treatment of justice and power, the ambiguity of Hope in Pandora's jar, and the meaning of decline in the myth of the Five Ages. A biographical essay on Hesiod — the first named author in the Western tradition to speak about himself as an individual. Line references and section headings for easy navigation.

Why read Works and Days now?

Because in an era of economic anxiety, political corruption, and the feeling that the world is getting worse, Hesiod's poem speaks with uncanny directness. His question — how do you live a decent life when the system is rigged? — has not been answered in three millennia. His answer — work, measure, timing, and the stubborn insistence on justice even when the powerful laugh at it — remains the most honest response the ancient world produced.

A companion to Theogony and an essential source for anyone who has read Stephen Fry's Mythos, Madeline Miller's Circe, or Emily Wilson's Odyssey and wants to go deeper — back to the voice that spoke before the heroes, about the life the heroes never lived.

Henry Bugalho is a Brazilian philosopher, writer, and translator based in Spain, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and the author of over thirty books on philosophy, classical literature, and political analysis.