Theogony/Works and Days by Hesiod
Published 2012 · 144 pages · 39,600 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Poetry, Religion & Spirituality, Nonfiction
How hard is Theogony/Works and Days to read?
Theogony/Works and Days scores 40 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
- In translation the poems carry long lists of divine and place names and archaic farming terms. The diction is plain next to Ulysses or Moby-Dick, closer to the spare compression of Pedro Paramo.
- Sentence structure: 35 out of 100
- Hesiod's lines are short, paratactic and formulaic, built from simple declarative units and genealogies. Even in poetic translation they read far more simply than Lolita or Anna Karenina.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- The Theogony deals in cosmic origins and the Works and Days in justice and fate, but both anchor ideas in concrete myths, gods, plows and seasons. That puts them near The Road in concreteness with a mythic overlay.
- Information density: 60 out of 100
- The Theogony packs hundreds of names, genealogies and episodes into a few thousand lines. Works and Days adds an almanac of days and tasks, giving density near Flights.
How Theogony/Works and Days is regarded
Theogony/Works and Days holds a literary regard score of 89 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.