In August 2017, during the Charlottesville riots, I was on the Gulf of Corinth for a two-week Ancient Greek seminar with a focus on Hesiod, when the old antagonism between letters and life reared its head again. American academics, musing aloud, wondered why we had chosen Classics over direct engagement: who cares about the minutiae of Dark Age wagon construction now? In Greece the murderously neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, bolstered by the financial and immigration crises, had finished third in the 2015 elections, but commiserations of the Greeks were little comfort. Few of us could recall a time when our own national attempt at Eunomia, good order, seemed so precarious, when the groundwork of achieved civilization felt more like a rug being pulled out from under our feet. (Needless to say, in the interim those anxieties have hardly diminished.)

We might have been heartened to learn that, not twelve hundred kilometers away, the American poet A. E. Stallings was putting the finishing touches on her translation of the Works and Days and forcefully arguing for Hesiod’s enduring value.1Her work offers an implicit rebuke of the old Eliotic “dissociation of sensibility,” or what I will call, less catchily, intellectual expatriation, a learned hyperopia that emphasizes the distance between past and present, object and subject, and resists analogies between them. Though born of conscientiousness, this habit of mind “others” its partisans from their native soil while never quite letting them feel at home in another. Intellectually, it’s like