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===''Works and Days''===
{{Main|Works and Days}}
[[File:Houghton MS Gr 20 - Works and Days, 10.jpg|thumb|Opening lines of ''Works and Days'' in a 16th-century manuscript]]
''Works and Days'' is a poem of over 800 lines which revolves around two general truths: labour is the universal lot of Man, but he who is willing to work will get by. Scholars have interpreted this work against a background of agrarian crisis in mainland [[Greece]], which inspired a wave of documented [[Greek colonies|colonisation]]s in search of new land.{{citation needed|date=August 2020}}

''Works and Days'' may have been influenced by an established tradition of [[didactic]] poetry based on Sumerian, Hebrew, Babylonian and Egyptian wisdom literature.{{citation needed|date=April 2023}}

This work lays out the five [[Ages of Man]], as well as containing advice and wisdom, prescribing a life of honest labour and attacking idleness and unjust judges (like those who decided in favour of [[Perses (brother of Hesiod)|Perses]]) as well as the practice of usury. It describes immortals who roam the earth watching over justice and injustice.<ref>Hesiod, ''Works and Days'' 250: "Verily upon the earth are thrice ten thousand immortals of the host of [[Zeus]], guardians of mortal man. They watch both justice and injustice, robed in mist, roaming abroad upon the earth." (Compare Symonds, ''Studies of the Greek Poets'', p. 179.)</ref> The poem regards labor as the source of all good, in that both gods and men hate the idle, who resemble [[Drone (bee)|drones]] in a hive.<ref>''Works and Days'' 300: "Both gods and men are angry with a man who lives idle, for in nature he is like the stingless drones who waste the labor of the [[bees]], eating without working."</ref> In the horror of the triumph of violence over hard work and honor, verses describing the "Golden Age" present the social character and practice of [[vegetarianism|nonviolent diet]] through agriculture and fruit-culture as a higher path of living sufficiently.<ref>Williams, Howard, [http://www.ivu.org/history/williams/hesiod.html ''The Ethics of Diet – A Catena''] (1883).</ref>