The Works and Days

In 1912, the celebrated Parisian publisher Edouard Pelletan commissioned from the engraver Paul Emile Colin a hundred and forty illustrations for a new translation by Paul Mazon of Hesiod's Works and Days. The Works and Days is the extended poem that began the pastoral tradition of Europe. It is a collection of pieces of advice from Hesiod to his brother, full of details of the life in Boeotia around 700 BCE, but it also includes the first written account of Prometheus and Pandora, and introduces Myth of the Five Ages for the first time as well. In this mimotyped edition of the original, Evelyn-White's famous translation has been substituted for that of Mazon's, to present the elegance of the Pelletan edition to a modern English reading audience