The Calydonian Boar Hunt on the neck of the Francois Vase (see illustration on p. 94). An epic occasion
introducing many important heroic figures. Atalanta (white-skinned, to the left) struck the first blow but
Meleager, before the boar, kills it. The Dioscuri, behind it, share a spear.
Another thing Hesiod has continued to think about is the Prometheus myth. In the Works he wants a
general explanation for the hardness of life and the necessity of work: that, too, is given by the same
myth. This time the mood is even gloomier: the Father of gods and men 'laughed aloud' as he promised
condign punishment for men (59), and the woman - Pandora is now her name-is not just a calamity in
herself, concealing beneath her seductive appearance 'the mind of a bitch and a heart of deceit' (67); she
takes the lid off a great jar in which diseases and ills of every sort had hitherto been locked away. So now
the world is full of them. 'You cannot make a fool of Zeus' (105). We think of Eve, also saddled with the
responsibility for all that is unsatisfactory in the world.
That story, though elliptically told at some points, goes with a swing. It is typical of Hesiod that at the end
of it he is temporarily stuck for a way to go on with his poem, and can only say 'Now if you like I'll tell
you another story', this I time a version of the decline from the Golden Age of lost Paradise, by way of
increasingly inferior Silver and Bronze Ages, to the awful Iron Age in which we have the misfortune to
live. This is another eastern idea: Hesiod has rudely adapted it to Greek notions about the past by inserting
the age of heroes, who could not be left out, between the Bronze Age and our own. The heroes are, as
they have to be, 'better and more virtuous' than the berserkers of the Bronze Age, and that spoils the
elegant shape of the tale; but Hesiod, we feel, finds it hard to force his thoughts into shape, and he has to
accept such inconcinnities.
Also typical of Hesiod is the way in which, in the opening 300 lines of the Works, he wavers between
addressing Perses and addressing the 'kings'. He has things to say to both. 'I will tell a fable to the kings',
says he, and tells of the hawk who caught the nightingale.
The nightingale wept piteously, but harsh was the reply:
'You fool, a stronger has you now; no use to wail and cry.
You'll come where I shall carry you, for all you sing so sweet;