Laudator Temporis Acti

P. Walcot (1931-2009), Greek Peasants, Ancient and Modern: A Comparison of Social and Moral Values (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), pp. 9-10:

Those who write on the Works and Days are scholars, far removed from the kind of rural background which will alone set Hesiod's poem in the correct perspective. To understand Hesiod's outlook on life, first the mind must be stripped of the debris of academic debate; secondly, and this I would stress is absolutely crucial, we must leave far behind the values of a sophisticated and complex culture to which the morality and motives of the peasant, a term I use of Hesiod in the sense that for him 'agriculture is a livelihood and a way of life, not a business for profit' (our p. 13), appear contradictory and even perverse. I am much in sympathy with the Dutch reviewer of a recent book on the structure of the Works and Days who passed the following comment:

In my youth I heard our Calvinistic Dutch farmers on winter nights grumbling about matters of inheritance, blaming laziness, jesting, theologising, preaching penitence ('personal invective' of course included) and discussing details of farming. This is the way of the poet of the Erga. The 'problems' some scholars find in his sequence of thoughts and the solutions they propose have as much to do with his mentality as a lecture-room with a cow-shed.¹

¹ A. Hoekstra, Mnemosyne 4, 19 (1966), p. 407.