Motherhood Quote by Hesiod

Time isn`t a neutral backdrop in Hesiod; it has moods, preferences, and a temper. When he writes, "A day is sometimes our mother, sometimes our stepmother", he turns the smallest unit of lived experience into family drama: nurturing one moment, punitive the next. The line works because it doesn`t moralize in abstractions. It gives fate a household face, the kind ancient listeners would recognize immediately: a mother who feeds you without being asked; a stepmother who can withhold, resent, or demand payment in obedience.

Hesiod is a poet of hard seasons and harder lessons. In Works and Days, he speaks to a world where survival hinges on weather, timing, and labor, where the gods can bless or ruin the harvest with the same casual authority as a parent deciding dinner. The day becomes a capricious guardian: it can "mother" you with good winds, a productive field, a lucky meeting; it can "stepmother" you with blight, debt, insult, injury. That split captures the emotional truth of agrarian life, where effort matters but never fully controls outcomes.

The subtext is a warning against entitlement. If the day were always a mother, you could trust it, coast on its care. If it were always a stepmother, you could at least plan for cruelty. Hesiod suggests the more destabilizing reality: time is inconsistent, and wisdom means working anyway, storing up provisions, reading signs, staying humble before forces that feel personal even when they aren`t.