Life & Wisdom Quote by Hesiod

A line like this doesn’t just sneer at women; it performs a kind of cultural self-defense for a patriarchal world that feels perpetually vulnerable. Hesiod is writing in archaic Greece, in poems that double as survival manuals for anxious men: how to farm, how to inherit, how to keep order in a household where property and lineage are everything. In that setting, “trust” is never purely emotional. It’s economic. It’s genealogical. It’s about control.

The phrasing is absolutist on purpose. “Whoever” turns a private grievance into a universal law, and “deceivers” doesn’t accuse one person of lying; it casts deception as the category women belong to. That move matters. It transforms a fear (being manipulated, cuckolded, financially drained) into a moral fact, which then justifies restrictions: guard the household, police female sexuality, keep women indoors, keep decision-making male. Misogyny here isn’t only hatred; it’s a policy argument.

The likely backdrop is Hesiod’s Pandora tradition: the first woman as a divine trap, beautiful packaging for disaster. That myth externalizes male suffering by pinning it on an “origin” that’s conveniently gendered. If work is hard, if desire makes men reckless, if inheritance is uncertain, blame the seductive interloper. The subtext is almost plaintive: the world is rigged with temptations, and men need a story that makes their losses feel inevitable rather than self-inflicted.

It “works” because it’s compact and contagious: a proverb-shaped permission slip to treat suspicion as wisdom.