Before Greek mythology existed as stories, Hesiod wrote the source.

The Theogony and Works and Days are not merely ancient poems. They are the infrastructure of Western imagination: the texts that first gave names to the gods, ordered the cosmos from primordial Chaos, and asked how a human being ought to live. Every Greek mythology retelling, every novel about Zeus or Hades or Prometheus, every epic that has shaped modern fiction traces its ancestry to this voice. To read Hesiod is not to read an origin — it is to stand at the origin.

This new translation by Henry Bugalho presents the complete surviving Hesiodic corpus — not the familiar two poems alone, but the full body of work attributed to Hesiod and his tradition, gathered in a single critical edition with an original philosophical introduction that reads Hesiod as a systematic thinker who pursued the questions of philosophy before philosophy had a name.

The Theogony — the birth of the gods, the genealogy of the cosmos, the story of how order emerged from primordial Chaos through successive divine generations to Zeus's final, permanent sovereignty over gods and mortals alike.

Works and Days — an address to his brother Perses and, through him, to all humanity: the myths of Prometheus and Pandora, the five ages of man from Gold to Iron, and a vision of justice, labor, and moral endurance that remains urgently contemporary.

The Shield of Heracles — a meditation on representation itself, structured around a legendary shield in the manner of Homer's own great ekphrasis: the way art captures and contains a world in the moment before it vanishes.

The Catalogue of Women (Ehoiai) — surviving only in fragments, an entire mythological vision of the heroic age organized through the feminine line: the women who bore the heroes, who connected mortals to gods, and who are here gathered as far as the surviving record allows.

✦ This edition presents the complete surviving corpus of the Hesiodic tradition in a single volume.

This edition also includes:

✦ A new translation by Henry Bugalho, writer, philosopher, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts ✦ The Poet Who Made the World Thinkable — an original critical introduction in four essays examining Hesiod's biography and mystery, his relationship to Homer, the philosophical vision of the complete corpus, and the nature of thought before abstract argument existed ✦ The Minor Works and Fragments: the Great Ehoiai, the Melampodia, the Wedding of Ceyx, the Astronomia, the Precepts of Chiron, the Descent of Pirithous, and the Aegimius ✦ The Contest of Homer and Hesiod — the legendary document in which the two founding voices of Greek civilization meet in competition, and the question is asked: which poet taught humanity more? ✦ Critical notes and textual apparatus throughout

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Greek mythology books, classical literature, and ancient history ✦ Philosophy, cosmology, and the foundations of Western thought ✦ Complete critical editions of Homer, Virgil, and the epic tradition ✦ The original sources behind every Greek mythology retelling

"Hesiod is not a person but a voice — and that voice speaks across centuries."