Works and Days is addressed to someone. His name is Perses, and he is Hesiod's brother. The two of them split their father's land, and Hesiod says Perses came out ahead by bribing the local kings, whom he calls gift-eaters. That is the background. Everything after it is one long, grumpy, oddly tender speech from one brother to another, and the speech says roughly: stop chasing other people's money and go and work.
There are two Strifes, actually
Hesiod opens by correcting his earlier poem. In the Theogony there was one Strife. Now he says there are two. One feeds wars and quarrels. The other drives a lazy man to look over at his neighbor's well-kept field and think, I should plant something too. He clearly prefers the second. I think that is the most generous idea in the poem. Envy of your neighbor can make you a better farmer, if you let it push you toward work and not toward his barn.
Pandora and the jar
This is where the first woman finally gets a name. Angry about the stolen fire, Zeus has the gods build a woman. Hephaestus shapes her from earth and water, Athena teaches her weaving, Aphrodite gives her charm, and Hermes puts lies and a thieving nature in her. She is called Pandora, which means all gifts. Prometheus had warned his brother Epimetheus, whose name means afterthought, never to accept a gift from Zeus. He accepted her anyway.
Then comes the jar. Pandora lifts the lid, sicknesses and troubles escape, and Hope stays behind under the lip. A small correction while we're here: it was a jar, a pithos, not a box. The box comes from a sixteenth-century translator who swapped one word for another, and the mistake stuck.
What is Hope doing in there? Hesiod never says whether she is the one good thing saved or one more evil kept from us. People have argued about it for two thousand years. I lean toward the second reading, because a little later he says hope is no good friend to a man with nothing in the larder. That is my reading, not a settled one.
Five ages, or really six
Hesiod tells of the ages of mankind, gold, silver, bronze, and then iron, and in the middle he squeezes in a fifth, the race of heroes, which doesn't fit the metals at all. The golden race lived like gods with no sorrow and became guardian spirits after they died. The bronze race destroyed itself in war and went down to Hades without a name. The heroes fought at Thebes and at Troy, and some of them were sent to the Isles of the Blessed.
Then there is the iron age, which is his own. Children who don't honor their parents. Strength passing for justice. He says he wishes he had died before it or been born after it, and he predicts the end will come when babies are born with gray hair at the temples. I find it bleakly funny that every generation seems to think it lives in the iron age.
A hawk, and a daughter of Zeus
To warn the kings, he tells what may be the first fable in Greek literature. A hawk carries a nightingale off in its claws and says it can eat her or let her go, whichever it pleases, because it is stronger. Hesiod doesn't explain it. He doesn't need to.
Right after that he gives the other side. Justice, Dike, is a daughter of Zeus, and when men judge crookedly she sits beside her father and tells him. Cities with honest judges flourish. Here the gods are not a family drama. They are a moral order, and a slightly nervous one.
The farmer's year
The second half of the poem is a calendar. Plow when the Pleiades set, in the late autumn, and harvest when they rise again. Sail only in the safe weeks of summer. He lists which days of the month are lucky for what, and the advice gets wonderfully specific. Don't cross a river without washing your hands in it and praying. Don't set the wine jar down any old way. He has firm opinions about where you may relieve yourself and which way you should face while you do it.
Some of this sounds like superstition. I think it is what religion looks like when you are poor and the weather decides whether you eat. Every ritual is a way of paying attention.
What the gods are for here
In the Iliad the gods fight a war from the sidelines. In this poem they are closer to labor law. Zeus sends the rain and watches the cheats. Work is the one way a person can line up with the order of things. And Hesiod doesn't ask why the gods are unfair, as other poets do. He asks how to live on a bad farm in a bad village. He says his own, Ascra, is awful in winter, hard in summer and never good. That is the voice of someone telling you a hard truth and saying it to help you.