had stolen fire from heaven and given it to mortals. Pandora opens the jar she carries
unleashing all the ills of life onto the world with the exception of Hope which remains
trapped under the lid. He follows this with an account of the degeneration of the ages
from the golden through the silver and bronze to the iron age of the present. The
generation before the present iron age contains ‘the godlike heroes’, some of whom
lost their lives in the expedition to Troy for Helen’s sake (ll. 157, 159). But the age of
heroes is past. The vision of the present iron age sets the overall mood and tone of the
poem, here represented in the couplet version of George Chapman made in 1616:
Ill-lunged, ill-livered and ill-complexioned Spite
Shall consort all the miserable plight
Of men then living. Justice then and Shame
Clad in pure white (as if they never came
In touch with those societies) shall fly
Up to the gods’ immortal family
From broad-wayed earth, and leave griefs to men
That (desperate of amends) must bear them all.
(translating ll. 197–200)The only salvation is hard work and toil, which the justice of Zeus can reward.
Hesiod’s instructions are addressed through Perses to those farmers who can afford
to have a slave or hire a worker. It is evident in fact that Perses has more than one
slave and owns the land that he has inherited from their father, so despite all the
emphasis on the need to work hard to avoid poverty, the poem represents a world
of the moderately well-to-do peasant farmer, a kind of middle class. Nevertheless in
comparison with Homer this is a voice from lower down the scale and one that
distrusts kings whom the poet castigates for often offering crooked judgements.
Further reading
Whitley, James, The Archaeology of Ancient Greece, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Shelmerdine, Cynthia W., The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age,Cambridge
University Press, 2008.
Osborne, Robin, Greece in the Making1200–479, second edition, Routledge, 2009.
Schofield, Louise, The Mycenaeans, The British Museum Press, 2007.
Morris, Ian and Powell, Barry, A New Companion to Homer, Brill, 1997.
Fowler, Robert (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Finley M. I., The World of Odysseus, Chatto and Windus, 1956.
Parry, Adam, The Making of Homeric Verse: Collected Papers of Milman Parry, Oxford University
Press, 1970.
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