Tout au long de son poème Les Travaux et les Jours, Hésiode réaffirme et soutient la croyance de son public dans la réalité du surnaturel, c’est-à-dire les dieux de l’Olympe, dont le poète prend clairement au sérieux le pouvoir, au vu des sombres avertissements qui scandent la dernière partie de l’œuvre, sous la forme d’un calendrier. Using these strategies, Hesiod imbues WD with belief in divine influence in the world, past and present. To encourage a positive conclusion, Hesiod creates an analogy between abstract concepts, such as Strife, and the anthropomorphic gods of myth. Otherwise, the poet tends toward vague language, leaving his audience to come to their own conclusion about the influence of the divine.

When speaking of the gods’ influence in his own time, Hesiod remains firm on the fact of the gods’ continued intervention only in concrete, mundane phenomena experienced by each of his audience members. Hesiod constructs a story world familiar to his audience in order to bolster the credibility of the supernatural events, both mythical and contemporary, that he reports. Drawing on S.I. Johnston’s recent The Story of Myth, as well as the work of folklorists K. Hänninen and G. Bennett, I outline the techniques Hesiod employs to render believable the influence of the divine in both the distant past and the contemporary period. Throughout the Works and Days ( WD ), Hesiod reaffirms and promotes his audience’s belief in the reality of the supernatural - that is, the gods of Olympus, whose power the poet clearly takes seriously, given the somber warnings that populate the final calendrical portion of the piece.

Hesiod dionysus hades