Life & Wisdom Quote by Hesiod

In Hesiod, justice is less a halo than a municipal utility: get the rulings right and the whole civic machine runs. The line stages fairness as infrastructure. “Straight judgements” aren’t lofty ideals; they’re the difference between a city that “flourishes” and one that frays into vendetta, corruption, and famine. He’s writing in an early Greek world where law is not yet an impersonal system but a social performance, delivered by local elites whose decisions can tilt the balance between order and predation.

The key pressure point is “to strangers and to those of the land.” Hesiod is quietly expanding the moral perimeter. It’s easy for a community to treat insiders as fully human and outsiders as expendable; he argues that partiality is not merely cruel but self-sabotaging. If justice can be bent for a foreigner, it can be bent for anyone. The subtext is political: impartial adjudication is how a city advertises its reliability, stabilizes exchange, and prevents the powerful from converting courts into private weapons.

Hesiod’s broader context (think Works and Days) is a didactic warning aimed at rulers and “gift-devouring” judges. Divine order hovers in the background, but the persuasion is strikingly practical. Prosperity isn’t conjured by heroic conquest; it’s manufactured in the courtroom, case by case, through decisions that resist the easy temptations of kinship, bribery, and status. Justice becomes the city’s most productive labor.