Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Hesiod turns from the hawk-and-nightingale *ainos* to exhort Perses and the kings toward Justice (*Dike*). Violence (*hubris*) is a bad road for the lowly; the better path is to go after Justice. Dike, when dragged from her path by bribe-swallowing men who give crooked judgments, follows weeping to the city and the haunts of the people, clothed in mist, bringing ill to those who drove her out. Those who give straight judgments to locals and strangers alike see their city flourish: peace nourishes the young, Zeus never marks out war, famine and ruin stay away, the earth bears, mountains carry oak acorns and bees, sheep are heavy with wool, women bear children like their parents, and they do not sail because the land provides. But for those who practice hubris and wicked works, Zeus the wide-sounding son of Cronus marks out justice. Often a whole city suffers for one bad man: famine, plague, barren women, armies ruined, walls breached, ships lost at sea. Zeus’s eye sees all and notices all; if he wills, he watches even these matters. The Thirty Thousand immortal watchers of Zeus over the nourishing earth, clothed in mist, roam everywhere watching judgments and wicked deeds. Dike is a maiden, daughter of Zeus; whenever anyone harms her with crooked scorn, she sits at once beside her father Zeus and speaks of the unjust mind of men, so that the people pay for the follies of kings who, devising ruin, bend judgments askew. Hesiod closes the Justice block by contrasting the man who knows himself, the man who heeds good counsel, and the useless man who neither thinks nor listens—then returns to work as the mortal answer. Catalogue this as the Hesiodic Justice-city theology: Dike as Zeus’s daughter and reporter, the flourishing just polis versus the cursed unjust one, distinct from Night’s genealogical Eris and from the bird-fable.