One approaches Hesiod's discourse on the two erides—or, if I am correct, the duplicitous nature of eris—with some trepidation, since the scholarship on this passage has been voluminous and rewarding. But the passage, which Hesiod launches into immediately after the formal prologue of the Works and Days (11-26), may yet have more to teach us. It is, as Richard Hamilton has recently shown, programmatic for the entire poem; it may also be a definitive statement on the archaic construction of competition and conflict. In it Hesiod urges his brother explicitly (as he does implicitly throughout the poem) to stop coming after him for their father's patrimony and do some productive work; however this simple message is embedded in traditional allusions, poised between intense ambiguities and (like all good archaic poetry) fraught with the resonance of larger issues. All this has made it difficult to achieve scholarly consensus about the meaning of the passage. A close and helpful parallel is provided in the Works and Days itself by the brief discussion of the two functions of aidōs (317-19), helpful primarily because it is in fact one principle with two functions that Hesiod describes there; but to put into relief more of the complexity of 11-16 we need to look at two other archaic passages that offer some perspective on the application of dualistic logic to conflict and related issues.