Works and Days

Book Club | August 2016: Pandora

Dear fellow readers, As you are enjoying the hot days of summer, you are invited to take a seat under the shade and read the Book Club selection and discuss it with your fellow readers to cool down! We will be reading Hesiod's Works and Days, section: 'Pandora', lines 53–105; and Theogony, section: 'Prometheus: Pandora and the Lineage of Women', lines 570–616. Read more

Errant Brothers

I was reading Gregory Nagy's translation of the Sappho Brothers poem (“But you are always saying, in a chattering way, that Kharaxos will come in a ship full of goods”), and it made me think of Works and Days, in which Hesiod seems to have a similar concern about his brother Perses (“my father and yours, you inept Perses, used to sail around in ships, lacking a genuine livelihood.”) I… Read more

Hesiodic Advice on Oinops

In our initial discussions we concentrated on the Homeric epics and identified some of the themes that appear in our focus passages. When we viewed together the main subjects surrounding the words appearing with oinops—pontos, ‘sea’, and bous, ‘ox’, we started to see a connection with seasonality, so we decided to look in more detail at the two oinops passages in Hesiodic Works and Days. Read more