Theogony/Works and Days
Hesiodc. 700 BCEHesiod handed the Greeks their creation story and their work ethic in two poems older than most of Greek literature.
Read this if you…
- want an easy explanation of the gods from the ancient greeks themselves (essentially their source text)
- are interested in the Greeks' poetic view of farming
Skip this if you…
- don't care about original text (you can just google the genealogy of gods instead)
- don't care about a meditation on farming
Why It Matters
Hesiod handed the Greeks their creation story and their work ethic in two poems older than most of Greek literature. The Theogony sorted the gods into a family tree that became the standard version of Greek myth. Works and Days came up with the idea that hard, honest labor is morally worth something, which went on to shape Western culture.
The 
Take
Theogeny- boring but awesome to standardize Greek myth.Works and days- weird mix of mythological, spiritual, and practical approach to farming as the days and seasons pass
Where to go next
- Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. Theogony/Works and Days shaped it. - Hesiod gave the Prometheus myth its first full shape — the fire-theft, the punishment by Zeus, the cosmic order it disrupts - Scholars locate the very starting point of *Prometheus Bound* here in the *Theogony* - Read it first and you see the raw material Aeschylus would later rearrange into tragedy
- The Republic by Plato. Theogony/Works and Days shaped it. - Hesiod is both target and quarry in *The Republic* — Plato censors his war-tales of Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus in Book 2, then quietly raids him in Book 3 - The Noble Lie's gold, silver, and bronze souls are Hesiod's golden, silver, and bronze races reforged — Plato lifts the metallic ladder and bends it to a new use - Where Hesiod told a story of mankind's decline, Plato turns the same metals into a myth that holds a city together
- The Georgics by Virgil. Theogony/Works and Days shaped it. - Hesiod invented the kind of poem Virgil set out to rewrite for Rome — didactic verse about man and the land - *Works and Days* hands down its farming life in day-by-day precepts and hexameter; Virgil takes that template wholesale - Virgil names the debt in the text, calling the *Georgics* an "Ascraean song" — Ascra was Hesiod's home town
- The Symposium by Plato. Theogony/Works and Days shaped it. - Hesiod's cosmogony becomes a debating point in *The Symposium* — Plato's first speaker, Phaedrus, quotes the *Theogony* to argue Eros is the oldest of the gods - "First Chaos came, and then broad-bosomed Earth ... and Love": Phaedrus reads Hesiod's genealogy as proof that desire is primordial, born among the very first powers - The *Theogony* is the authority the praise of love is built on — Plato sends his speaker back to Hesiod to make the case
- Aesop’s Fables by Aesop. Theogony/Works and Days shaped it. - The very first Greek fable on record is buried in Hesiod, not in Aesop - The hawk-and-nightingale of *Works and Days* — the hawk seizing the songbird and lecturing it on power — is the earliest recorded fable in the language - That talking-animal-with-a-moral form is the mold the whole Aesopic tradition would pour itself into
- Metamorphoses by Ovid. Theogony/Works and Days shaped it. - Ovid knew Hesiod's *Theogony* exceedingly well, and the *Metamorphoses* opens by paying the debt - Its creation out of Chaos belongs squarely to the Hesiodic tradition — Ovid begins the world the way Hesiod first taught the Greeks to begin it - Hesiod stands among the principal sources Ovid is drawing on as he sets the cosmos in order before the transformations begin
- The Birds by Aristophanes. Theogony/Works and Days shaped it. - Hesiod fixed the genealogy of the primordial gods — Chaos, Erebus, Night, Eros — and that scaffolding is exactly what Aristophanes loves to dismantle - In *The Birds*, the chorus reruns this cosmogony as comedy, rewinding Hesiod's order to crown the birds as the universe's firstborn and demote the Olympians - The straight-faced authority of the *Theogony* is what makes the parody land — you have to know the official version to enjoy the prank
- The Eclogues by Virgil. Theogony/Works and Days shaped it. - Hesiod's Ages of Man — the long decline from a Golden Age — is the scheme Virgil reaches for when he promises its return - Virgil names the old Ascraean poet inside the *Eclogues*, claiming Hesiod as a pastoral ancestor rather than just borrowing from him quietly - *Works and Days* is the didactic template Virgil would build on again, openly, in the *Georgics*
- The Histories by Herodotus. Theogony/Works and Days shaped it. - Herodotus pays Hesiod the highest compliment in Greek religious history — naming him, alongside Homer, as the man who taught the Greeks their gods - In *The Histories* (2.53), Hesiod's *Theogony* is credited with giving the gods their names, their honors, and their forms - For Herodotus, this isn't a literary debt but a founding fact: the *Theogony* is where Greek theology comes from
- The Frogs by Aristophanes. Theogony/Works and Days shaped it. - Aristophanes honors Hesiod by name — in *The Frogs* (1032–36) Aeschylus lists him among the genuinely useful poets, the one who taught "the working of the land, harvest seasons, plowing": that's *Works and Days* - The play's whole poetic showdown borrows the old Contest of Homer and Hesiod as its skeleton - So Hesiod sits at the root of *The Frogs* twice over — as the model citizen-poet and as the template for its great literary duel
- On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. Theogony/Works and Days shaped it. - Hesiod invented the didactic poem — verse that teaches you how the world is built — and Lucretius is writing squarely in the tradition he founded - *On the Nature of Things* reworks Hesiod's account of early human history, borrowing the Golden-Age coloring of *Works and Days* while quietly stripping out the meddling gods - Read Hesiod first and you'll hear the genre's opening note: the Muse-invocation Lucretius echoes in his own proem, alongside Homer and Ennius
Depicted in Art
Peasants Going to Work
Jean François Millet, 1863
Stacks of Wheat (End of Day, Autumn)
Claude Monet, 1890
Houghton MS Gr 20 - Works and Days, 10
Hesiod / John Tzetzes, 1500
A wild-eyed, gaunt Saturn grips a half-eaten human body and devours its head against a black ground.
Francisco Goya, 1823
Prometheus, torch raised, lights a flame for kneeling early humans gathered around him in a dim grove.
Heinrich Friedrich Füger, 1817
Nude Titans tumble downward in a tangle of limbs as Olympian thunderbolts strike from above.
Peter Paul Rubens, 1638
Prometheus tumbles diagonally across the canvas, chained on his back as a massive eagle, talons in his face, tears at his liver.
Peter Paul Rubens, 1612
Pandora kneels by a brook in a dark forest, carefully lifting the lid of a large jewelled gold chest.
John William Waterhouse, 1896
The vast nude body of Prometheus is stretched across a mountain range, blending into the landscape itself.
Arnold Böcklin, 1885
Saturn wields a curved sickle between the legs of his father Uranus; allegorical figures and elements surround them.
Giorgio Vasari, 1560
Recommended Editions
M.L. West
Oxford University Press · 2008
West spent his career on Hesiod and it shows. The Oxford translation reads cleanly and the intro on the Near Eastern background is doing real scholarly work, not throat-clearing.
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Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“In the beginning there was Chaos.”
“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods.”