And as I choose I'll let you go, or have you for my meat.'(205 ff.)
Having reached this point, Hesiod tells his brother 'Don't you try to behave violently: a small man can't
get away with it'. That suggests the perils of wrongdoing in general, which extend to the whole
community; so he addresses the kings, urging them to turn to justice (248 ff.); the eye of Zeus sees
everything; then back to Perses - he should forget violence and be mindful of justice. 'For Zeus made it
right for fishes and beasts and birds who fly to eat each other, for they have no justice; but to men he has
given justice ...' That, as the emphasis on the birds helps to show, is the moral of the fable: the kings have
treated me as animals treat each other, without thought of right and wrong. But with the difficulty of
managing both his targets, it is Perses in the end who gets the moral meant for the kings.
Some parts of the poem are more closely organized than others. There are passages in which Hesiod slides
from thought to thought. 'Be pious and offer sacrifice - invite neighbours to eat of the meat - neighbours
are important - invite those who invite you - give to those who give to you - giving is good, violent taking
is bad - even in small things - small acquisitions do add up - it's good to build up stores - think ahead - but
misplaced economy can be mean - don't stint on wages; trust and mistrust can each be fatal - don't trust a
woman - as for having children, one son is best - but Zeus may provide for several and still make you rich
- if you want to be rich, here is the Farmer's Year.' That would be a rough summary of the connections of
thought from line 336 to line 383. They are there, but you can miss them.
Other passages are poetical in a more ambitious sense. The Prometheus stories in both poems are well
told. The battle of gods and Titans, and Zeus' fight with the monster Typhoeus (Theog. 674-712, 820-68),
aim at the grandiose; more attractive to most readers will be the description of winter (Works 504-35),
with the wild animals cowering, the old man bent like a hoop by the wind, the young girl staying at home
and protecting her beauty, and 'the boneless one gnawing his foot in his fireless house and gloomy lair' (a
riddling allusion to the octopus); and of summer, when 'women are lewdest and men are feeblest', but one
can enjoy a picnic in the shade of a rock (Works 482-96).
The poems are by their nature rather formless, and the end was especially vulnerable to addition. The
Works peters out into a rather random list of taboos (724-59), then a list of lucky and unlucky days of the
month (765-828), after which in antiquity there followed a treatment of bird-omens. It is hard to know
how much of this is by Hesiod. The Theogony as we have it leads directly into the most important of the
other works sometimes ascribed to Hesiod, the long Catalogue of Women or Ehoiae. We now have very
considerable fragments of this poem, which organized the heroic Greek genealogies back to Deucalion
and the Flood. It cannot be by Hesiod; for example, it includes the story of Cyrene, but Cyrene was not
founded until 630 or so. Some passages are quite picturesque, but as mythical narrative it is no rival to
Homer. Its subject-matter was in the fifth century turned into prose by mythical historians like Acusilaus
and Pherecydes. A short epic called the Shield of Heracles survives under Hesiod's name; it is a rather
lurid production. Of the ten other poems ascribed to Hesiod by one ancient writer or another, none of
them perhaps on any substantial grounds, we know too little to say anything significant.