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 LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 University of California. 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 GEORGE MOREY RICHARDSON. 
 
 Received, ^August, 1898. 
 Accession No. 78 6 OJL Class No. 
 
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Ancient Classics for English Readers 
 
 EDITED BY THE 
 
 REV. W. LUCAS COLLI In S, M.A. 
 
 HESIOD AND THEOGNIS 
 
CONTENTS OF THE SERIES. 
 
 HOMER : THE ILIAD, . ' . . . By the Editor. 
 HOMER : THE ODYSSEY, . . By the Same. 
 
 HERODOTUS, ... By George C. Swayne, M.A. 
 CAESAR, ...... By Anthony Trollope. 
 
 VIRGIL By the Editor. 
 
 HORACE, . . . . .By Theodore Martin. 
 
 .AESCHYLUS, By the Right Rev. the Bishop of Colombo. 
 XENOPHON, . . By Sir Alex. Grant, Bart., LL.D. 
 
 CICERO By the Editor. 
 
 SOPHOCLES, ... By Clifton W. Collins, M.A. 
 PLINY By A. Church, M.A., and W. J. Brodribb, M.A. 
 
 EURIPIDES ... By William Bodham Donne. 
 
 JUVENAL, . . . . By Edward Walford, M.A. 
 ARISTOPHANES, . . . . . .By the Editor. 
 
 HESIOD AND THEOGNIS, By the Rev. James Davies, M.A. 
 PLAUTUS AND TERENCE, ... By the Editor. 
 TACITUS, .... By William Bodham Donne. 
 
 LUCIAN, ....... By the Editor. 
 
 PLATO By Clifton W. Collins. 
 
 THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY, . . .By Lord Neaves. 
 
 LIVY By the Editor. 
 
 OVID, By the Rev. A. Church, M.A. 
 
 CATULLUS, TIBULLUS, & PROPERTIUS, ByJ. Davies, M.A. 
 DEMOSTHENES, . . By the Rev. W. J. Brodribb, M.A. 
 ARISTOTLE, ... By Sir Alex. Grant, Bart., LL.D. 
 
 THUCYDIDES, By the Editor. 
 
 LUCRETIUS, . . . . By W. H. Mallock, M.A. 
 PINDAR, ... By the Rev. F. D. Morice, M.A. 
 
HESIOD AND THEOGNIS 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. JAMES DAVIES, M.A. 
 
 LATE SCHOLAR OF LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 TRANSLATOR OF 'BABRIUS' 
 
 PHILADELPHIA : 
 
 J. B. LITPINCOTT COMPANY. 
 
 H/^ 
 
7 3 60 2. 
 
P/A3go( 
 
 At 
 
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 H-A-^j 
 
 PEEFACE. 
 
 The life of Hesiod, remote from towns, and far away 
 up the gulf of time, and Ms ^pioetry devoid of sensation 
 and excitement in its almost impersonal didacticism, 
 place the writer who deals with them at a disadvan- 
 tage, as compared with one whose theme is an ancient 
 epic, or a Greek or Roman historian. He lacks, in a 
 ^reat measure, the choice of parallels by aid of which 
 he may abridge the distance between the shadowy 
 past and the living present. He cannot easily per- 
 suade himself or his readers to realise, in the inspired 
 rustic of Ascra, " a heart once pregnant with celestial 
 fire," when he reflects how foreign to the wildest 
 dreams of an English ploughman would be the reduc- 
 tion to verse of his rural experiences, or, still more, 
 of his notions about the divine governance of the 
 universe. Yet this is scarcely an excuse for over- 
 looking the possible contemporary of Homer, the poet 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 nearest to him in claims of antiquity, even if we grant 
 that his style is less interesting, and his matter not so 
 attractive. Indeed one argument for including Hesiod 
 in the serie^ of ' Ancient Classics for English Headers' 
 may be found in the fact that nine Out of twelve stu- 
 dents finish their classical course with but the vaguest 
 acquaintance with his remains. Such, therefore, ought 
 to be as thankful as the unlearned for an idea of 
 what he actually or probably wrote. And it is this 
 which the larger portion of this volume endeavours 
 to supply. The poet's life has been compiled from 
 ancient and modern biographies with a constant eye 
 to the internal evidence of his extant poetry, for which 
 the editions of Paley, Goettling, and Dubner, have 
 been chiefly studied. For illustrative quotation, use 
 has been chiefly made of the English versions of 
 Elton, good for the most part, and, as regards the 
 Theogony, almost Miltonic. For the ' Works and 
 Days,' the little-known version of the Elizabethan 
 George Chapman a biographical rarity made accessible 
 by Mr Hooper's edition in J. E. Smith's Library of 
 Old Authors has been here and there pressed into 
 our service. A parallel or two to Hesiod's ' Shield of 
 Hercules,' from Homer's Shield of Achilles, belong to 
 an unpublished version by Mr Eichard Garnett. But 
 to no student of Hesiod are so many thanks due as to 
 Mr F. A. Paley, whose notes have been of the utmost 
 use, as the most successful attempt to unravel Hesiodic 
 
PREFACE. vii 
 
 difficulties and incongruities. Whatever difference of 
 opinion may exist upon his views as to the date and 
 authorship of the Homeric epics, there can be none as 
 to the high value of his edition of Hesiod, which may 
 rank with his iEschylus, Euripides, and Propertius. 
 
 For the three chapters about Theognis, which com- 
 plete this volume, the translation and arrangement of 
 Mr John Hookham Frere have been used and followed. 
 In some instances, where Gaisford's text seemed to 
 discourage freedom of paraphrase, the editor has fallen 
 back upon his own more literal versions. On the 
 whole, however, the debt of Theognis to Mr Hookham 
 Frere, for acting as his exponent to English readers, 
 cannot be over-estimated ; and we tender our thanks 
 to his literary executors for permission to avail our- 
 selves of his acute and lively versions. These are 
 marked F. Those of Elton and Chapman in Hesiod 
 are designated by the letters E and C respectively, 
 and the editor's alternative versions by the letter 
 D affixed to them. 
 
. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 HESIOD. 
 
 CHAP. I. THE LIFE OF HESIOD, . 
 II. THE WORKS AND DAYS, 
 
 III. hesiod's PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 IV. THE THEOGONY, .... 
 V. THE SHIELD OF HERCULES, 
 
 VI. IMITATORS OF HESIOD, 
 
 PAOl 
 
 1 
 
 21 
 56 
 70 
 95 
 111 
 
 THEOGNIS. 
 
 CHAP. I. THEOGNIS IN YOUTH AND PROSPERITY, , 129 
 
 n II. THEOGNIS IN OPPOSITION, .... 141 
 
 m III. THEOGNIS IN EXILE, . , , , 154 
 
H E S I O D. 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 THE LIFE OF HESIOD. 
 
 Of materials for a biography of the father of didactic 
 poetry there is, as might be expected, far less scarcity 
 than is felt in the case of the founder of epic. Classed 
 as contemporaries by Herodotus, Homer and Hesiod 
 represent two schools of authorship the former the 
 objective and impersonal, wherein the mover of the 
 puppets that fill his stage is himself invisible ; the 
 latter the subjective and personal, which communicates 
 to reader and listener, through the medium of its verse, 
 the private thoughts and circumstances of the indi- 
 vidual author. Homer, behind the scenes, sets the 
 battles of the Iliad in array, or carries the reader 
 with his hero through the voyages and adventures of 
 the Odyssey. Hesiod, with all the naivete of reality, 
 sets himself in the foreground, and lets us into confi- 
 dences about his family matters his hopes and fears, 
 his aims and discouragements, the earnests of his suc- 
 a. c. vol. XV. A 
 
2 HE SI OB. 
 
 cess and the obstacles to it. But notwithstanding the 
 expiicitness natural to his school of composition, he 
 has failed to leave any record of the date of his life 
 and poems. Eor an approximation to this the chief 
 authority is Herodotus, who, in discussing the Hellenic 
 theogonies, gives it as his opinion that " Hesiod and 
 Homer lived not more than four hundred years before " 
 his era, and places, it will be observed, the didactic 
 poet first in order of the two. This would correspond 
 with the testimony of the Parian marble which makes 
 Hesiod Homer's senior by about thirty years ; and 
 Ephorus, the historian of the poet's fatherland, main- 
 tained, amongst others, the higher antiquity of Hesiod. 
 There was undoubtedly a counter theory, referred to 
 Xenophanes, the Eleatic philosopher, which placed 
 Hesiod later than Homer ; but the problem is in- 
 capable of decisive solution, and the key to it has 
 to be sought, if anywhere, in the internal evidence 
 of the poems themselves, as to "the state of man- 
 ners, customs, arts, and political government fami- 
 liar to the respective authors." Tradition certainly 
 conspires to affix a common date to these pre-eminent 
 stars of Hellenic poetry, by clinging to a fabled 
 contest for the prize of their mutual art ; and, so far 
 as it is of any worth, corroborates the consistent be- 
 lief of the ancients, that Hesiod flourished at least 
 nine centuries before Christ. As to his parentage, 
 although the names of his father and mother have not 
 been preserved, there is internal evidence of the most 
 trustworthy kind. In his ( Works and Days ' the 
 poet tells us that his father migrated across the iEgean 
 
THE LIFE OF IIESIOD. 3 
 
 from Cyme in iEolia, urged by narrowness of means 
 and a desire to better his fortunes by a recurrence to 
 the source and fountain-head of his race ; for he sailed 
 to Boeotia, the mother-country of the iEolian colonies. 
 There he probably gave up his seafaring life, taking to 
 agriculture instead ; and there unless, as some have 
 surmised without much warranty, his elder son, 
 Hesiod, was born before his migration he begat two 
 sons, Hesiod, and a younger brother, Perses, whose 
 personality is too abundantly avouched by Hesiod to 
 be any subject of question. Though not himself a 
 bard, the father must have carried to Boeotia lively 
 and personal reminiscences and souvenirs of the heroic 
 poetty for which the iEolic coast of Asia Minor was 
 then establishing a fame ; and his own traditions, to- 
 gether with the intercourse between the mother and 
 daughter countries, cannot but have nursed a taste for 
 the muse in Hesiod, which developed itself in a dis- 
 tinct and independent vein, and was neither an offset 
 of the Homeric stock, nor indebted to the Homeric 
 poems for aught beyond the countenance afforded by 
 parity of pursuits. The account given by Hesiod 
 of his father's migration deserves citation, and may 
 be conveniently given in the words of Elton's transla- 
 tion of the ' Works and Days : ' 
 
 " witless Perses, thus for honest gain, 
 Thus did our mutual father plough the main. 
 Erst from iEolian Cyme's distant shore 
 Hither in sable ship his course he bore ; 
 Through the wide seas his venturous way he took, 
 No revenues, nor prosperous ease forsook. 
 
4 HESIOD. 
 
 His wandering course from poverty began, 
 The visitation sent from Heaven to man. 
 In Ascra's wretched hamlet, at the feet 
 Of Helicon, he fixed his humble seat : 
 Ungenial clime in wintry cold severe 
 And summer heat, and joyless through the year." 
 
 E. 883-894. 
 
 An unpromising field, at first sight, for the growth of 
 poesy; but, if the locality is studied, no unmeet 
 "nurse/' in its associations and surroundings, "for a 
 poetic child." Near the base of Helicon, the gentler 
 of the twin mountain - brethren towering above the 
 chain that circles Boeotia, A sera was within easy reach 
 of the grotto of the Libethrian nymphs, and aftnost 
 close to the spring of Aganippe, and the source of the 
 memory-haunted Permessus. The fountain of Hippo- 
 crene was further to the south ; but it was near this 
 fountain that the inhabitants of Helicon showed to 
 Pausanias a very ancient copy of the ' Works and 
 Days' of the bard, whose name is inseparably associated 
 with the neighbourhood. Modern travellers describe 
 the locality in glowing colours. "The dales and 
 slopes of Helicon," says the Bishop of Lincoln, in 
 his ' Greece, Pictorial, Descriptive, and Historical,' * 
 '' are clothed with groves of olive, walnut, and almond 
 trees; clusters of ilex and arbutus deck its higher 
 plains, and the oleander and myrtle fringe the banks of 
 the numerous rills that gush from the soil, and stream 
 in shining cascades down its declivities into the plain 
 between it and the Copaic Lake. On Helicon," he 
 adds, "according to the ancient belief, no noxious 
 * P. 253, 254. 
 
TEE LIFE OF I1EX10D. 5 
 
 herb was found. Here also the first narcissus bloomed. 
 The ground is luxuriantly decked with flowers, which 
 diffuse a delightful fragrance. It resounds with the 
 industrious murmur of bees, and with the music of 
 pastoral flutes, and the noise of waterfalls." The solu- 
 tion of the apparent discrepancy between the ancient 
 settler's account of Ascra and its climate, and that of 
 the modern traveller, is probably to be found in the 
 leaning of the poet Hesiod's mind towards the land 
 which his father had quitted, and which was then 
 more congenial to the growth of poetry a leaning 
 which may have been enhanced and intensified by 
 disgust at the injustice done to him, as we shall pre- 
 sently see, by the Boeotian law-tribunals. It is, in- 
 deed, conceivable that, at certain seasons, Ascra may 
 have been swept by fierce blasts, and have deserved 
 the character given it in the above verses ; but the 
 key to its general depreciation at all seasons is more 
 likely to be hid under strong personal prejudice than 
 found in an actual disparity between the ancient and 
 the modern climate. At any rate, it is manifest, from 
 Hesiod's own showing, that the home of his father's 
 settlement had sufficient inducements for him to make 
 it his own likewise ; though from the fact that the 
 people of Orchomenus possessed his relics, that Boeotian 
 town may dispute the honour of his birth and residence 
 with Ascra. The latter place, without controversy, is 
 entitled to be the witness of the most momentous in- 
 cident of his poetic history to wit, the apparition of 
 the Muses, as he fed his father's flock beside the divine 
 Helicon, when, after one of those night-dances in which 
 
6 HESIOD. 
 
 " They wont 
 To lead the mazy measure, breathing grace 
 Enkindling love, and glance their quivering feet," 
 
 they accosted the favoured rustic with their heavenly 
 speech, gave him commission to be the bard of didactic, 
 as Homer was of epic, poetry, and in token of such a 
 function invested him with a staff of bay, symbolic of 
 poetry and song. Hesiod's own account of this vision 
 in the opening of his ' Theogony ' is as follows : 
 
 " They to Hesiod erst 
 Have taught their stately song, the whilst his flocks 
 He fed beneath all-sacred Helicon. 
 Thus first those goddesses their heavenly speech 
 Addressed, the Olympian Muses born from Jove : 
 ' Night- watching shepherds ! beings of reproach ! 
 Ye grosser natures, hear ! We know to speak 
 Full many a fiction false, yet seeming true, 
 Or utter at our will the things of truth/ 
 So said they, daughters of the mighty Jove, 
 All eloquent, and gave into mine hand, 
 Wondrous ! a verdant rod, a laurel branch, 
 Of bloom unwithering, and a voice imbreathed 
 Divine, that I might utter forth in song 
 The future and the past, and bade me sing 
 The blessed race existing evermore, 
 And first and last resound the Muses' praise." 
 
 E. 33-48. 
 
 The details of this interview, as above recorded, are 
 replete with interest centred, indeed, in the poet 
 himself, but in . some degree also attaching to his 
 reputed works. If the verses are genuine and that 
 the ancients so accounted them is plain from two allu- 
 
THE LIFE OF HESIOD. 7 
 
 sions of Ovid* they show that with a faith quite in 
 keeping with his simple, serious, superstitious character, 
 he took this night-vision for no idle dream-fabric, hut 
 a definite call to devote himself to the poetry of truth, 
 and the errand of making song subserve the propaga- 
 tion of religion and moral instruction. The " fictions 
 seeming true " in other words, the heroic poetry so 
 popular in the land of his father's birth Hesiod con- 
 siders himself enjoined to forsake for a graver strain 
 "the things of truth" which the Muses declare have 
 been hitherto regarded by mortals as not included 
 in their gift of inspiration. He takes their com- 
 mission to be prophet and poet of this phase of min- 
 strelsy, embracing, it appears, the past and future, and 
 including his theogonic and ethical poetry. And 
 while the language of the Muses thus defines the 
 poet's aim, when awakened from a rude shepherd-life 
 to the devout service of inspired song, it implies, 
 rather than asserts, a censure of the kinds of poetry 
 which admit of an easier and freer range of fancy. 
 For himself, this supernatural interview formed the 
 starting-point of a path clear to be tracked ; and that 
 he accepted his commission as Heaven-appointed is 
 seen in the gratitude which, as we learn from his 
 1 Works and Days,' he evinced by dedicating to the 
 maids of Helicon, 
 
 " Where first their tunef id inspiration flowed," 
 
 an eared tripod, won in a contest of song at funeral 
 games in Eubcea. In the same passage (E. 915-922) 
 
 * Fasti, vi. 13 ; Art of Love, i 27. 
 
8 HESIOD. 
 
 Hesiod testifies to the gravity of his poetic trust by 
 averring that he speaks "the mind of aegis - hearing 
 Jove, whose daughters, the Muses, have taught him 
 the divine song." Pausanias (IX. xxxi. 3) records the 
 existence of this tripod at Helicon in his own day. 
 
 But though he took his call as divine, there is no 
 reason to think that Hesiod depended solely on this 
 gift of inspiration for a name and place among poets. 
 His father's antecedents suggest the literary culture 
 which he may well have imbibed from his birthplace 
 in zEolia. His own traditions and surroundings in the 
 mother-country so near the very Olympus which was 
 the seat of the old Pierian minstrels, whatever it may 
 have been of the fabled gods so fed by local influences 
 and local cultivation of music and poetry may have 
 predisposed him to the life and functions of a poet ; 
 but there is a distinctly practical tone about all his 
 poetry, which shows that he was indebted to his own 
 pains and thought, his own observation and retentive- 
 ness, for the gift which he brought, in his measure, to 
 perfection. A life afield conduced to mould him into 
 the poet of the ' Works and Days/ ra sort of Boeo- 
 tian ' Shepherd's Calendar/ interwoven with episodes 
 of fable, allegory, and personal history. The nearness 
 of his native hills, as well as the traditions of elder 
 bards, conspired to impel him to the task of shaping a 
 theogony. And both aims are so congenial and com- 
 patible, that prima facie likelihood will always 
 support the theory of one and the same authorship foi 
 both poems against the separatists* who can no more 
 
 * The ancient critics who believed in the separate authorship 
 
THE LIFE OF IIESIOD. 9 
 
 brook an individual Hesiod than an individual Homer. 
 But be this as it may, the glimpses which the poet 
 gives of himself, in the more autobiographical of his 
 reputed works, present the picture of a not very loco- 
 motive sage, shrewd, practical, and observant within 
 Ids range_of observation, apt to learn, and apt also to 
 teach, storing up life's everyday lessons as they strike 
 him, and drawing for his poetry upon a well-filled bank 
 of homely truth and experience. He gives the distinct 
 idea of one who, having a gift and believing in a com- 
 mission, sets himself to illustrate his own sentiment, 
 that " in front of excellence the gods have placed 
 exertion ;" and whilst in the c Works and Days ' it is 
 obvious that his aim and drift are the improvement of 
 his fellow-men by a true detail of his experiences in 
 practical agriculture, in the ' Theogony ' he commands 
 our respect and reverence for the pains and research 
 by which he has worked into a system, and this too 
 for the benefit and instruction of his fellows, the 
 floating legends of the gods and goddesses and their 
 offspring, which till his day must have been a chaotic 
 congeries. On works akin to these two main and 
 extant poems we may conceive him to have spent 
 that part of his mature life which was not given up 
 to husbandry. Travelling he must have disliked at 
 any rate, if it involved sea-voyages. His lists of 
 rivers in the ' Theogony ' are curiously defective where 
 it might have been supposed they would be fullest as 
 regar Is Hellas generally ; whereas he gives many names 
 
 of the Iliad and Odyssey were so called, as separating what 
 by the voice of previous tradition had been made one. 
 
10 HESIOD. 
 
 of Asiatic rivers, and even mentions the Nile and the 
 Phasis, neither of which occur in Homer. But this 
 would seem to have "been a hearsay knowledge of 
 geography, for he distinctly declares his experience of 
 his father's quondam calling to he limited to a single 
 passage to Euhcea from the mainland ; and as he is less 
 full when he should enumerate Greek rivers, the 
 reasonable supposition is that he was no traveller, and, 
 depending on tradition, was most correct and com- 
 municative touching those streams of which he had 
 heard most in childhood. The one voyage to which 
 lie owned was made with a view to ;the musical contest 
 at Chalcis above alluded to ; and it is surely not with- 
 out a touch of quiet humour that this sailor's son owns 
 himself a landlubber in the following verses addressed 
 to his ne'er-do-well brother : . 
 
 " If thy rash thought on merchandise be placed, 
 Lest debts ensnare or woeful hunger waste, 
 Learn now r the courses of the roaring sea, 
 Though ships and voyages are strange to me. 
 Ne'er o'er the sea's broad way my course I bore, 
 Save once from Aulis to the Eubcean shore ; 
 From Aulis, where the mighty Argive host, 
 The winds awaiting, lingered on the coast, 
 From sacred Greece assembled to destroy 
 The guilty walls of beauty-blooming Troy." 
 
 < Works and Days/ E. 901-910. 
 
 This, the poet goes on to say, is all he knows prac- 
 tically about navigation, and truly it is little enough ; 
 for it is no exaggeration, but a simple fact, that the 
 strait which constituted Hesiod's sole experience of a 
 
THE LIFE OF HES10D. 11 
 
 sea voyage was no more than a stretch of forty yards 
 a span compared with which the Menai Strait, or the 
 Thames at any of the metropolitan bridges, would be a 
 serious business. Emile Burnouf might literally call 
 the Euripus " le canal Eubeen." In the days of Thucy- 
 dides a bridge had been thrown across it. 
 
 But experimental knowledge was reckoned super- 
 fluous by one who could rest in the knowledge he 
 possessed of the mind of Jove, and in the commission 
 he held from his daughters, who, according to his be- 
 lief, taught him navigation, astronomy, and the rest ol 
 the curriculum, when they made him an interpreter of 
 the divine will, and a " vates " in a double sense, to 
 dictate a series of precepts concerning the time for 
 voyaging and the time for staying ashore. Besides, in 
 the poet's eye seafaring was a necessity of degenerate 
 times. In the golden age none were merchants. 
 ('Works and Days,' 236.) 
 
 Yet the even flow of the poet's rural life was not 
 without its occasional and chronic disturbances and 
 storms. The younger brother, to whom allusion has 
 been made more than once, and whom he generally 
 addresses as " simple, foolish, good-for-nought Perses," 
 had, it seems, come in for a share of the considerable 
 property which Hesiod's father had got together, after 
 he exchanged navigation and merchandise for agricul- 
 tural pursuits. The settlement of the shares in this 
 inheritance lay with the kings, who in primitive ages 
 exercised in Bceotia, as elsewhere, the function of judges, 
 and, according to Hesiod's account, were not superior 
 to bribery and corruption. Perses found means to 
 
12 BES10D. 
 
 purchase their award to him of the better half of the 
 patrimony, and, after this fraud, dissipated his ill-gotten 
 wealth in luxury and extravagance, a favourite mode 
 of spending his time being that of frequenting the 
 law-tribunals, as nowadays the idletons of a town or 
 district may be known by their lounging about the petty 
 sessional courts when open. Perhaps the taste for 
 litigation thus fostered furnished him with the idea 
 of repairing his diminished fortunes by again proceed- 
 ing against his brother, and hence Hesiod's invectives 
 against the unscrupulousness of the claimant, and of the 
 judges, who were the instruments, of his rapacity. It 
 is not distinctly stated what was the issue of this 
 second suit, which aimed at stripping Hesiod of that 
 smaller portion which had already been assigned to 
 him : perhaps it was an open sore, under the influ- 
 ence of which he wrote his ' Works and Days,' a 
 persuasive to honest labour as contrasted with the 
 idleness which is fertile in expedients for living at the 
 expense of others a picture from life of the active 
 farmer, and, as a foil to him, of the idle lounger. 
 Here is a sample of it : 
 
 " Small care be his of wrangling and debate, 
 For whose ungathered food the garners wait; 
 Who wants within the summer's plenty stored, 
 Earth's kindly fruits, and Ceres' yearly hoard : 
 With these replenished, at the brawling bar 
 F<>r other's wealth go instigate the war : 
 But this thou may'st no more ; let justice guide, 
 Best boon of heaven, and future strife decide. 
 Not so we shared the patrimonial land, 
 When greedy pillage filled thy grasping hand ; 
 
THE LIFE OF HE SI OB. 13 
 
 The bribe-devouring judges, smoothed by thee, 
 The sentence willed, and stamped the false decree : 
 O fools and blind ! to whose misguided soul 
 Unknown how far the half exceeds the whole, 
 Unknown the good that healthful mallows yield, 
 And asphodel, the dainties of the field." 
 
 E. 44-58. 
 
 The gnomic cbaracter of tbe last four lines must not 
 blind the reader to the fact that they have a personal 
 reference to the poet and his brother, and represent the 
 anxiety of the former that the latter should adopt, 
 though late, his own life-conviction, and act out the 
 truth that a dinner of herbs with a clear conscience 
 is preferable to the luxuries of plenty purchased by 
 fraud. Consistent with this desire is the unselfish 
 tone in which he constantly recurs to the subject 
 throughout the * Works and Days,' and that not so 
 much as if he sought to work this change in his 
 brother for peace and quietness to himself, as for a real 
 interest in that brother's amendment we do not 
 learn with what success. Perhaps, as has been surmised, 
 Perses had a wife who kept him up to his extravagant 
 ways, and to the ready resource of recouping his failing 
 treasure by endeavouring to levy a fresh tax upon 
 Hesiod. Such a surmise might well account for the 
 poet's curious misogynic crotchets. Low as is the 
 value set upon a " help-meet " by Simonides, Archilo- 
 chus, Bacchylides, and, later still, by Euripides, one 
 might have expected better words in favour of marriage 
 from one whose lost works included a catalogue of 
 celebrated women of old, than the railing tone wlrich 
 
14 HES10D. 
 
 accompanies his account of the myth of Pandora, the 
 association of woman with unmixed evil in that legend, 
 and the more practical advice to his brother in a later 
 part of his ' Works and Days/ where he bids him shun 
 the wiles of a woman "dressed out behind" (crinolines 
 and dress-improvers being, it would seem, not by any 
 means modern inventions), and unsparingly lashes the 
 whole sex in the style of the verses we quote : 
 
 " Let no fair woman robed in loose array, 
 That speaks the wanton, tempt thy feet astray; 
 Who soft demands if thine abode be near, 
 And blandly lisps and murmurs, in thine ear. 
 Thy slippery trust the charmer shall beguile, 
 For, lo ! the thief is ambushed in her smile." 
 
 E. 511-516. 
 
 Indeed, it might be maintained, quite consistently 
 with the internal evidence of Hesiod's poems, that 
 he lived and died a bachelor, seeing perhaps the 
 evil influences of a worthless wife on his brother's 
 establishment and character. It is true that in certain 
 cases (which probably should have come more close in 
 the text to those above cited, whereas they have got 
 shifted to a later part of the poem, where they are less 
 to the point) he prescribes general directions about 
 taking a wife, in just the matter-of-fact way a man 
 would who wrote without passion and without experi- 
 ence. The bridegroom was to be not far short of 
 thirty, the bride about nineteen. Possibly in the in- 
 junction that the latter should be sought in the ranks 
 of maidenhood, lurked the same aversion to " marrying 
 a widow " which animated the worldly-wise father of 
 
THE LIFE OF IIESIOD. 16 
 
 Mr Samuel Weller. Anyhow, he would have had the 
 model wife fulfil the requirements of the beautiful 
 Latin epitaph on a matron, for he prescribes that she 
 should be " simple - minded " and " home - keeping " 
 (though he says nothing about her being a worker in 
 wools), in lines of which, because Elton's version is 
 here needlessly diffuse, we submit a closer rendering 
 of our own : 
 
 " And choose thy wife from those that round thee dwell, 
 Weighing, lest neighbours jeer, thy choice full well. 
 Than wife that's good man finds no greater gain, 
 But feast-frequenting mates are simply bane. 
 Such without fire a stout man's frame consume, 
 And to crude old age bring his manhood's bloom." 
 
 ' Works and Days,' 700-705. 
 
 This, we conceive, was Hesiod's advice, as an out- 
 sider might give it, to others. For himself, it is pro- 
 bable he reckoned that the establishment would suf- 
 fice which he elsewhere recommends to the farmer 
 class an unmarried bailiff, a housekeeper without 
 encumbrances ; for a female servant with children, he 
 remarks, in bachelor fashion, is troublesome and a 
 dog that bites (see < Works and Days,' 602-604). It 
 is indirectly confirmatory of this view that tradition, 
 which has built up many absurd figments upon the 
 scant data of Hesiod's autobiography, has signally 
 failed to fasten other offspring to his name than the 
 intellectual creations which have kept it in remem- 
 brance. This was surely Plato's belief when he wrote 
 the following beautiful sentences in his l Symposium.' 
 
16 HESIOD. 
 
 "Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and 
 other great poets, would not rather have their children 
 than ordinary human ones ? Who would not emulate 
 them in the creation of children such as theirs, which 
 have preserved their memory, and given them ever- 
 lasting glory 1 " * 
 
 So far as the poet's life and character can be ap- 
 proximately guessed from his poems, it would seem to 
 have been temperately and wisely ordered, placid, and 
 for the most part unemotional. That one who so 
 clearly saw the dangers of association with bad women 
 that he shrank from intimacy with good, should have 
 met his death through an intrigue at (Enoe, in Ozolian 
 Locris, with Clymene, the sister of his hosts, is doubt- 
 less just as pure a bit of incoherent fiction as that his 
 remains were carried ashore, from out of the ocean into 
 which they had been cast, by the agency of dolphins ; or 
 that a faithful dog no doubt the sharp-toothed speci- 
 men we have seen recommended in the ' Works and 
 Days ' traced out the authors of the murder, and 
 brought them to the hands of justice. Some accounts 
 attribute to the poet only a guilty knowledge of the 
 crime of a fellow-lodger ; but in either shape the legend 
 is an after-thought, as is also the halting story that 
 Stesichorus, who lived from B.C. 643 to B.C. 560, was 
 the offspring of this fabled liaison. All that can be con- 
 cluded from trustworthy data for his biography, beyond 
 what has been already noticed, is that in later life he 
 must have exchanged his residence at Ascra for Orcho- 
 menus, possibly to be further from the importunities of 
 * Jowett's transl., i. 525. 
 
THE LIFE OF HESIOD. 17 
 
 Perses, and beyond the atmosphere of unrighteous 
 judges. Pausanias states that Hesiod, like Homer, 
 whether from fortune's spite or natural distaste, en- 
 joyed no intimacy with kings or great people ; and this 
 consists with Plutarch's story that the Spartan Cleo- 
 menes used to call Hesiod " the poet of the Helots," 
 in contrast with Homer, " the delight of warriors," and 
 with the inference from an expression in the ' Works 
 aud Days' that the poet and his father were only 
 resident aliens in Boeotia. In Thespise, to which 
 realm he belonged, agriculture was held degrading to a 
 freeman, which helps to account for his being, in his 
 own day, a poet only of the peasantry and the lower 
 classes. Pausanias and Paterculus do but retail tradi- 
 tion ; but this suffices to corroborate the impression, 
 derived from the poet's own works, of a calm and con- 
 templative life, unclouded except by the worthlessness 
 of others, and owing no drawbacks to faults or failings 
 of its own. Musing much on the deities whose his- 
 tories he systematised as best he might, and at whose 
 fanes, notwithstanding all his research and inquiry, 
 he still ignorantly worshipped ; regulating his life on 
 plain and homely moral principles, and ever awake to 
 the voice of mythology, which spoke so stirringly to 
 dwellers in his home of Bceotia, Hesiod lived and died 
 in that mountain-girded region, answerably to the testi- 
 mony of the epitaph by his countryman Chersias, 
 which Pausanias read on the poet's sepulchre at 
 Orchomenus : 
 
 " Though fertile Ascra gave sweet Hesiod birth, 
 
 Yet rest his bones beneath the Minyan earth, 
 
 a. c. vol. xv. . B 
 
18 HES10D. 
 
 Equestrian land. There, Hellas, sleeps thy pride, 
 The wisest bard of bards in wisdom tried." 
 
 Pausan., ix. 38, 4. 
 
 The question of Hesiod's literary offspring has 
 been much debated, the ' Works and Days ' alone en- 
 joying an undisputed genuineness. But it does not 
 seem that the 'Theogony' was impugned before the 
 time of Pausanias,* who records that Hesiod's Heli- 
 conian fellow - citizens recognised only the ' Works 
 and Days.' On the other hand to say nothing of 
 internal evidence in the * Theogony ' we have the 
 testimony of Herodotus to Hesiod's, authorship ; whilst 
 the ancient popular opinion on this subject finds cor- 
 roboration in Plato's direct allusion to a certain passage 
 of the ' Theogony' as Hesiod's recognised work. Allud- 
 ing to vv. 116-118 of the 'Theogony,' the philosopher 
 writes in the 'Symposium' (178), "As Hesiod 
 says, 
 
 ' First Chaos came, and then broad-bosomed Earth, 
 The everlasting seat of all that is, 
 And Love/ 
 
 In other words, after Chaos, the Earth and Love, 
 these two came into being." Aristophanes, also, in 
 more than one drama, must be considered to refer to 
 the 'Theogony' and the "Works." Furthermore, 
 it is certain that the Alexandrian critics, to whom 
 scepticism in the matter would have opened a con- 
 genial field, never so much as hinted a question con- 
 cerning the age and authorship of the 'Theogony.' 
 Besides these two works, but one other poem has 
 ix. 31, 3. 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 THE LIFE OF HES10D. ^^Ca 19 
 
 descended to our day under the name of Hesiod, 
 unless, indeed, we take as a sample of Lis 'Eoiae, or 
 Catalogue of Heroines/ the fifty-six verses which, 
 having slipped their cable, have got attached to the 
 opening of ' The Shield of Hercules.' The ' Shield ' 
 is certainly of questionable merit, date, and authorship, 
 though a little hesitation would have been wise in 
 Colonel Mure, before expressing such wholesale con- 
 demnation and contempt as he heaps upon it* These 
 three poems, at all events, are what have come down 
 under the name and style of Hesiod, and are our 
 specimens of the three classes of poetical composition 
 which tradition imputes to him: (1) didactic; (2) 
 historical and genealogical ; (3) short mythical poems. 
 Under one or other of these heads it is easy to group 
 the Hesiodic poems, no longer extant, of which notices 
 are found in ancient authors. Thus the ' Astronomy ' 
 and the ' Maxims of Chiron,' with the ' Ornithoman- 
 teia, or Book of Augury,' belong to the first class ; the 
 'Eoiae, or Catalogue of Women,' which is probably 
 the same poem as the ' Genealogy of Heroes ; ' the 
 * Melampodia,' which treated of the renowned pro- 
 phet, prince, and priest of the Argives, Melampus, and 
 of his descendants in genealogical sequence ; and the 
 'iEgimius,' which gathered round the so-named my- 
 thical prince of the Dorians, and friend and ally of 
 Hercules, many genealogical traditions of the Heraclid 
 and Dorian races, will, with the extant 'Theogony,' 
 represent the second ; while the smaller epics of * The 
 Marriage of Ceyx,' * The Descent to Hades of Theseus/ 
 * History of Greek Lit., ii. 424. 
 
20 HESIOD. 
 
 and the ( Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis/ "will 
 keep in countenance the sole extant representative of 
 the third class, and enhance the possibility that ' The 
 Shield of Hercules ' is at least Hesiodic, though it is 
 safer to put it thus vaguely than to affirm it Hesiod's. 
 A conveniently wide berth is afforded by the modern 
 solution, that several imputed works of Hesiod are the 
 works of a school of authors of which Hesiod was the 
 name-giving patriarch. The truth in this matter can 
 only be approximated. Enough, perhaps, is affirmed 
 when we say that in style, dialect, and flavour of anti- 
 quity, the ' Theogony ' and the ' Works ' are more akin 
 to each other than to the ' Shield ; ' while, at the 
 same time, the last-named poem is of very respectable 
 age. The two former poems are of the iEolo-Boeotic 
 type of the ancient epic dialect, while the l Shield ' is 
 nearer to the .^Eolo- Asia, tic branch of it, used by 
 Homer. Discrepancies, where they occur, may be set 
 down to the interpolations of rhapsodists, and to the 
 accretions incident to passage through the hands of 
 many different workmen, after the original master. 
 The style and merits of each work will best be dis- 
 cussed separately ; and we shall give precedence to 
 Hesiod's most undoubted poem, the ' Works and 
 Days.' 
 
CHAPTER TL 
 
 THE WORKS AND DAYS. 
 
 The meaning of the title prefixed to Hesiod's great 
 didactic poem appears to be properly " Farming Opera- 
 tions," "Lucky and Unlucky Days," or, in short, 
 "The Husbandman's Calendar;" but if the ethical 
 scope of it be taken into account, it might, as Colonel 
 Mure has remarked, be not inaptly described as "A 
 Letter of Kemonstrance and Advice to a Brother." 
 And inasmuch as its object is to exhort that brother to 
 amend his ways, and take to increasing his substance 
 by agriculture, rather than dreaming of schemes to 
 enhance it by frequenting and corrupting the law r - 
 courts, the two descriptions are not inconsistent with 
 each other. It has been imputed as blame to the 
 poem that it hangs loosely together, that its connec- 
 tion is obscure and vague, in short, that its constitu- 
 ent parts, larger and smaller, are seldom fitly jointed 
 and compacted. But some allowance is surely to be 
 made for occasional tokens of inartistic workmanship 
 in so early a poet, engaged upon a task wdiere he had 
 neither pattern nor master to refer to; and besides 
 
22 IIES10D. 
 
 tills, a closer study of the whole will prove that the 
 want of connectedness in the work is more seeming 
 than real. Didactic poetry, from Hesiod's day until 
 the present, has ever claimed the privilege of arrang- 
 ing its hortatory topics pretty much as is most con- 
 venient, and of enforcing its chief idea, be that what 
 it may, by arguments and illustrations rather congru- 
 ous in the main than marshalled in the best order of 
 their going. But the ' Works and Days' is capable 
 of tolerably neat division and subdivision. The first 
 part (vv. 1-383) is ethical rather than didactic, a set- 
 ting-forth by contrast, and by t}ie accessory aid of 
 myth, fable, allegory, and proverb-lore, of the superi- 
 ority of honest labour to unthrift and idleness, and of 
 worthy emulation to unworthy strife and envying. 
 The second part (vv. 384-764) consists of practical 
 hints and rules as to husbandry, and, in a true didactic 
 strain, furnishes advice how best to go about that 
 which was the industrious Boeotian's proper and chief 
 means of subsistence. It thus follows naturally on 
 the general exhortation to honest labour which formed 
 the first part of the poem. The third and last part 
 is a religious calendar of the months, with remarks 
 upon the days most lucky or unpropitious for this or 
 that duty or occupation of rural and nautical life. All 
 three, however, more or less address Perses as " a sort 
 of ideal reader," and thus hang together quite suffi- 
 ciently for didactic coherence ; whilst in each of the 
 two first parts episodic matter helps to relieve the dry 
 routine of exhortation or precept, and is introduced, as 
 we shall endeavour to show, with more skill and sys- 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 23 
 
 tern than would appear to a perfunctory reader. The 
 first part, as is almost universally agreed by editors 
 and commentators, begins properly at v. 11, which 
 in the Greek reads as if it were a correction of the 
 view held by the author in his 'Theogony/ that 
 there was but one "Eris," or "Contention," and which is 
 therefore of some slight weight in the question of unity 
 of authorship for the two poems. The introductory 
 ten verses are in all probability nothing more than 
 a shifting proem, in the shape of an address to Jove 
 and the Muses, available for the use of the Hesiodian 
 rhapsodists, in common with divers other like intro- 
 ductions. According to Pausanias, the Heliconians, 
 who kept their countryman's great work engraved on 
 a leaden tablet, knew nothing of these ten verses. 
 Starting, then, at this point, the poet distinguishes 
 between two goddesses of strife, the one pernicious 
 and discord-sowing, the other provocative of honest 
 enterprise. The elder and nobler of the twain is the 
 parent of healthy competition, and actuates mechanics 
 and artists, as well as bards and beggars, between 
 which last trades it is obvious that the poet traces a 
 not fortuitous connection : 
 
 " Beneficent this better envy burns, 
 Thus emulous his wheel the potter turns, 
 The smith his anvil beats, the beggar throng 
 Industrious ply, the bards contend in song." 
 
 E. 33-36. 
 
 The wandering minstrel and the professional beggar 
 of the heroic age exercise equally legitimate callings 
 in Hesiod's view, and the picture which he draws 
 
24 HESIOD. 
 
 ' recalls to us those of the "banquet-hall in the Odyssey. 
 When Antinous rates the swine-herd Eumseus for 
 bringing Ulysses disguised as a beggar -man into the 
 hall of feasting, his grievance is that 
 
 " Of the tribes 
 Of vagrants and mean mendicants that prey, 
 As kill-joys, at our banquets, we have got 
 A concourse ample. Is it nought to thee 
 That such as these, here gathering, all the means 
 Of thy young master waste ? " 
 
 Odyssey, xvii. 624-628 (Musgrave). 
 
 It is probable that the beggar's place was nearer the 
 threshold than that of Phemius the bard, who had 
 just before been singing to his harp, or of other in- 
 spired minstrels, of whom it is said that 
 
 " These o'er all the world 
 At all feasts are made welcome." 
 
 Odyssey, xvii. 639-641 (Musgrave). 
 
 But that he had an assured footing and dole in such . 
 assemblies is plain from Irus's jealousy of a supposed 
 rival beggar, which results in the boxing-match with 
 Ulysses in the 18th Book. 
 
 To return to Hesiod. The bettermost kind of rivalry 
 is the goddess to whom he would have Perses give 
 heed, and not her wrangling sister, who inspires 
 wrongful dealing, chicanery, and roguish shifts, and 
 has no fancy for fair-play or healthy emulation. She, 
 says the poet, has had it too much her own way since 
 Prometheus stole the fire from heaven, because Zeus, 
 as a punishment, made labour toilsome, and the idle, 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 25 
 
 to shirk their inevitable lot, resort to injustice. " If 
 the gods had not ordained toil, men might stow away 
 their boat-paddles over the smoke, and there would be 
 an end to ploughing with mules and oxen : " 
 
 " But Zeus our food concealed : Prometheus' art 
 With fraud illusive had incensed his heart ; 
 Sore ills to man devised the heavenly sire, 
 And hid the shining element of fire. 
 Prometheus then, benevolent of soul, 
 In hollow reed the spark recovering stole, 
 And thus the god beguiled, whose awful gaze 
 Serene rejoices in the lightning blaze." 
 
 E. 67-74. 
 
 Till the Titan's offence, toil and sickness and human 
 ills had been unknown ; but after that transgression 
 they were introduced as sin into the world through 
 our mother Eve by Zeus's " beauteous evil," Pandora. 
 The Father creates her, and the immortals rival each 
 other in the gifts that shall make her best adapted for 
 her work of witchery, and presently send her as a gift 
 to Epimetheus, the personification of " Unreflection," 
 who takes her in spite of the remonstrances of his 
 elder and more foresight ed brother, Prometheus. If, 
 as has been suggested, we may take the wise Prome- 
 theus to represent the poet, and Perses to be implied 
 in the weaker Epimetheus and if, too, in Pandora 
 there is a covert allusion to the foolish wife of Perses, 
 who encouraged his extravagance, and seems to have 
 inspired Hesiod with an aversion for her sex it will 
 bring home the more closely the pertinence of this 
 myth to the moral lesson which, in the first part of 
 
26 HES10D. 
 
 the poem, the poet designed to teach. The creation 
 and equipment of Pandora is one of Hesiod's finest 
 nights above a commonly-even level : 
 
 " The Sire who rules the earth and sways the pole 
 Had said, and laughter filled his secret soul: 
 He hade the crippled god his hest obey, 
 And mould with tempering water plastic clay ; 
 With human nerve and human voice invest 
 The limbs elastic, and the breathing breast ; 
 Fair as the blooming goddesses above, 
 A virgin's likeness with the looks of love. 
 He bade Minerva teach the skill that sheds 
 A thousand colours in the gliding threads ; 
 He called the magic of love's golden queen 
 To breathe around a witchery of mien, 
 And eager passion's never-sated flame, 
 And cares of dress that prey upon the frame ; 
 Bade Hermes last endue with craft refined 
 Of treacherous manners, and a shameless mind." 
 
 E. 83-99. 
 
 The Olympians almost overdo the bidding of their 
 chief, calling in other helpers besides those named in 
 the above extract : 
 
 " Adored Persuasion and the Graces young, 
 Her tapered limbs with golden jewels hung ; 
 Round her fair brow the lovely-tressed Hours 
 A golden garland twined of spring's purpureal flowers." 
 
 E. 103-106. 
 And when the conclave deemed that they had per- 
 fected an impersonation of mischief, 
 
 " The name Pandora to the maid was given, 
 For all the gods conferred a gifted grace 
 To crown this mischief of the mortal race. 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 27 
 
 The sire commands the winged herald bear 
 The finished nymph, the inextricable snare ; 
 To Epimetheus was the present brought, 
 Prometheus' warning vanished from his thought 
 That he disclaim each offering from the skies, 
 And straight restore, lest ill to man should rise. 
 But he received, and conscious knew too late 
 The invidious gift, and felt the curse of fate." 
 
 E. 114-124. 
 
 How this gift of " woman " was to be the source of pro- 
 lific evil and sorrow, the poet, it must be confessed, does 
 not very coherently explain. Nothing is said, in the 
 account of her equipment, of any chest or casket sent 
 with her by Zeus, or any other god, as an apparatus 
 for propagating ills. And when in v. 94 of the poem 
 we are brought face to face with the chest and the lid, 
 and Pandora's fatal curiosity, the puzzle is " how they 
 got there." Homer, indeed, glances at two chests, 
 one of good the other of evil gifts, in Jove's heavenly 
 mansion : 
 
 " Two casks there stand on Zeus' high palace-stair, 
 One laden with good gifts, and one with ill : 
 To whomso Zeus ordains a mingled share, 
 Now in due time with foul he meeteth, now with fair." 
 
 Conington, II. xxiv. 
 
 And those who hold Hesiod to have lived after Homer, 
 or to have availed himself here and there of the same 
 pre-existent legends, may infer that the poet leaves it 
 to be surmised that Pandora was furnished with the 
 less desirable casket for the express purpose of woe to 
 man. But it is a more likely solution that Prometheus, 
 the embodiment of mythic philanthropy, had im- 
 
28 HESIOD. 
 
 prisoned " human ills " in a chest in the abode of Epi- 
 metheus, and this chest was tampered with through 
 the same craving for knowledge which actuated Mother 
 Eve. This account is supported by the authority of 
 Proclus. In Hesiod, the first mention of the chest is 
 simultaneous with the catastrophe 
 
 " The woman's hands an ample casket bear ; 
 She lifts the lid she scatters ills in air. 
 Hope sole remained within, nor took her flight, 
 Beneath the casket's verge concealed from sight. 
 The unbroken cell with closing lid the maid 
 Sealed, and the cloud-assembler's voice obeyed. 
 Issued the rest, in quick dispersion hurled, 
 And woes innumerous roamed the breathing world ; 
 With ills the land is rife, with ills the sea ; 
 Diseases haunt our frail humanity : 
 Self-wandering through the noon, the night, they glide 
 Voiceless a voice the Power all-wise denied. . 
 Know then this awful truth : it is not given 
 To elude the wisdom of omniscient Heaven." 
 
 E. 131-144. 
 
 It is a beautiful commentary on that part of the 
 legend which represents Hope as lying not at the 
 bottom of the casket, but just beneath the lid which 
 in closing shuts her in, that this did not happen 
 through inadvertence on Pandora's part, but with her 
 connivance, and that of her divine prompter, who, 
 though desirous to punish mankind, represents a par- 
 tial benefactor to the race. The concluding lines of 
 the last extract recall the reader to the drift of the 
 first part of the poem, by repeating that the moral 
 governance of the universe will not suffer wrong to 
 
TEE WORKS AND DAYS. 29 
 
 go unpunished, or allow innocence to succumb to 
 fraud. 
 
 And yet, the poet goes on to argue, the times in 
 which he lives are out of joint. Such men as his 
 brother prosper in an age which in wickedness dis- 
 tances its precursors. His lot, he laments, is cast in 
 the fifth age of the world ; and here he takes occasion 
 to in troduce the epi sode of the five a ges of the world , 
 and of the increaseof corruption as each suc ceeds the 
 other. In this episode, which Mr Puley considers to 
 bear a more than accidental resemblance to the Mosaic 
 writings, the gol den a ge comes first those happy 
 times und^exlkonoaj^rj^ when there was neither 
 
 care nor trouble nor labour, but life was a blameless 
 holiday spent in gathering self-sown fruits ; and death, 
 unheralded by decay or old age, coming to men even 
 as a sleep, was the very ideal of an Euthanasia : 
 
 " Strangers to ill, they nature's banquets proved, 
 Rich in earth's fruits, and of the blest beloved, 
 They sank in death, as opiate slumber stole 
 Soft o'er the sense, and whelmed the willing soul. 
 Theirs was each good the grain-exuberant soil 
 Poured its full harvest uncompelled by toil : 
 The virtuous many dwelt in common blest, 
 'And all unenvying shared what all in peace possessed." 
 
 E. 155-162. 
 
 It was with sin^inJHesiod's view as in that of the 
 author of the Book of Genesis, that death, deserving 
 the name, came into the world. As for the golden 
 race, when earth in the fulness of time closed upon it, 
 they became daemons or genii, angelic beings invisibly 
 
30 I1ESIOD. 
 
 moving over the earth a race of which Homer, indeed, 
 says nought, but whose functions, shadowed forth in 
 Hesiod, accord pretty much with the account Diotima 
 gives of them in the * Banquet of Plato.' * Here is 
 Hesiod's account : 
 
 " When on this race the verdant earth had lain, 
 By Jove's high will they rose a ' genii ' train ; 
 Earth-wandering demons they their charge began, 
 The ministers of good, and guards of man : 
 Veiled with a mantle of aerial night, 
 O'er earth's wide space they wing their hovering flight, 
 Disperse the fertile treasures of the ground, 
 And bend their all-observant glance around ; 
 To mark the deed unjust, the just approve, 
 Their kingly office, delegates of Jove." 
 
 E. 163-172. 
 
 With this dim forecasting by a heathen of the " min- 
 istry of angels " may be compared the poet's reference 
 further on in the poem to the same invisible agency, 
 where he uses the argument of the continual oversight 
 of these thrice ten thousand genii as a dissuasive to 
 corrupt judgments, such as those which the Boeotian 
 judges had given in favour of his brother : 
 
 " Invisible the gods are ever nigh, 
 Pass through the midst, and bend the all-seeing eye ; 
 Who on each other prey, who wrest the right, 
 Aweless of Heaven's revenge, are open to their sight. 
 For thrice ten thousand holy daemons rove 
 The nurturirg earth, the delegates of Jove ; 
 Hovering they glide to earth's extremest bound, 
 A cloud aerial veils their forms around 
 
 * Jowett's transl., i. 519. 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 31 
 
 Guardians of man ; their glance alike surveys 
 The upright judgments and the unrighteous ways." 
 
 E. 331-340. 
 
 In the second or silver age began declension an I 
 degeneracy. The blessedness of this race consisted in 
 long retention of childhood and its innocence even 
 ujTfcf a hundred years. Manhood attained, it became 
 quarrelsome, irreligious, and ungrateful to the gods 
 its creators. This generation soon had an end : 
 
 " Jove angry hid them straight in earth, 
 Since to the blessed deities of heaven 
 They gave not those respects they should have given. 
 But when the earth had hid these, like the rest, 
 They then were called the subterrestrial blest, 
 And in bliss second, having honours then 
 Fit for the infernal spirits of powerful men." 
 
 C. 135-142. 
 
 In Hesiod's account of this race it is curious to note 
 a correspondence with holy Scripture as to the term of 
 life in primitive man ; curious, too, that Jove is not 
 said to have created^Jbut to have laid to sleep, the 
 silver face. It obtained from men, after its demise, 
 the honours of propitiatory sacrifice, and represented the 
 "blessed spirits of the departed," and perhaps the 
 " Manes " of the Latin, without, however, attaining to 
 immortality. A rougher type was that of the brazen 
 age, which the Elizabethan translator Chapman seems 
 light in designating as 
 
 " Of wild ash fashioned, stubborn and austere," 
 
 though another way of translating the words which he 
 
32 HESIOD. 
 
 so interprets represents these men of brass as " mighty 
 by reason of their ashen spears." The question is set 
 at rest by the context, in which the arms of this race 
 are actually said to have been of brass. This age was 
 hard and ferocious, and, unlike those preceding it, 
 carnivorous. It perished by mutual slaughter, and 
 found an end most unlike the posthumous honours 
 of the silver race, in an ignominious descent to 
 Hades : 
 
 " Their thoughts were bent on violence alone, 
 The deeds of battle and the dying groan : 
 Bloody their feasts, by wheaten bread unblest ; 
 Of adamant was each unyielding breast. 
 Huge, nerved with strength, each hardy giant stands, 
 And mocks approach with unresisted hands ; 
 Their mansions, implements, and armour shine 
 In brass dark iron slept within the mine. 
 They by each other's hands inglorious fell, 
 In horrid darkness plunged, the house of hell. 
 Fierce though they were, their mortal course was run, 
 Death gloomy seized, and snatched them from the sun." 
 
 E. 193-204. 
 
 At this stage Hesiod suspends awhile the downward 
 course of ages and races, and reflecting that, having 
 commemorated the " genii V on earth and the blessed 
 spirits in Hades, he must not overlook the " heroes," a 
 veneration for whom formed an important part of the 
 religion of Hellas, brings the " heroic age " apparently 
 unmetallic into a place to which their prowess en- 
 titled them, next to the brazen age \ and at the same 
 time, contrasting their virtues with the character of 
 their violent predecessors, assigns to them an after- 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 33 
 
 state nearer to that of the gold and silver races. Of 
 their lives and acts Hesiod tells us that 
 
 " These dread battle hastened to their end ; 
 Some when the sevenfold gates of Thebes ascend, 
 The Cadmian realm, where they with savage might 
 Strove for the flocks of (Edipus in fight : 
 Some war in navies led to Troy's far shore, 
 O'er the great space of sea their course they bore, 
 For sake of Helen with the golden hair, 
 And death for Helen's sake o'er whelmed them there." 
 
 E. 211-218. 
 
 Their rest is in the Isles of the Blest, and in 
 
 " A life, a seat, distinct from human kind, 
 Beside the deepening whirlpools of the main, 
 In those black isles where Cronos holds his reign, 
 Apart from heaven's immortals ; calm they share 
 A rest unsullied by the clouds of care. 
 And yearly, thrice with sweet luxuriance crowned, 
 Springs the ripe harvest from the teeming ground." 
 
 E. 220-226. 
 
 Who does not recognise the same regions beyond 
 circling ocean, of which Horace long after says in his 
 sixteenth Epode, . 
 
 " The rich and happy isles, 
 Where Ceres year by year crowns all the untilled land with 
 
 sheaves, 
 And the vine with purple clusters droops, unpruned of all 
 
 her leaves. 
 
 Nor are the swelling seeds burnt up within the thirsty 
 
 clods, 
 So kindly blends the seasons there the king of all the gods. 
 a. c. vol. xv. o 
 
34 HESIOD. 
 
 For Jupiter, when he with brass the golden age alloyed, 
 That blissful region set apart by the good to be enjoyed." 
 Theodore Martin, p. 242. 
 
 But with this exception and interval, the ages tend 
 to the worse. Now comes the iron age, corrupt, un- 
 restful, and toilsome; wherein, in strong contrast to the 
 silver age, which enjoyed a hundred years of childhood 
 and youth, premature senility is an index of physical 
 degeneracy : 
 
 " Scarcely they spring into the light of day, 
 Ere age untimely shows their temples grey." 
 
 E. 237, 238. 
 
 "With this race, Hesiod goes on to tell us, family ties, 
 the sanctity of oaths, and the plighted faith, are dead 
 letters. Might is right. Lynch-lawyers get the upper 
 hand. All is " violence, oppression, and sword law," 
 and 
 
 " Though still the gods a weight of care bestow, 
 And still some good is mingled with the woe," 
 
 yet, as this iron age, at the transition point of which 
 Hesiod's own lot is cast, shades off into a lower and 
 worse generation, the lowest depth will at length be 
 reached, and baseness, corruption, crooked ways and 
 words, will supplant all nobler impulses, 
 
 " Till those fair forms, in snowy raiment bright, 
 
 From the broad earth have winged their heavenward flight 
 
 Called to th' eternal synod of the skies, 
 
 The virgins, Modesty and Justice, rise, 
 
 And leave forsaken man to mourn below 
 
 The weight of evil and the cureless woe." 
 
 E. 259-264. 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 35 
 
 Having thus finished his allegory of the five ages, 
 and identified his own generation with the last and 
 worst, it is nowise abrupt or unseasonable in the poet 
 to bring home to the kings and judges of Boeotia their 
 share in the blame of things being as they are, by 
 means of an apologue or fable. Some have said that 
 it ought to be entitled " The Haw T k and the Dove," but 
 Hesiod probably had in his mind the legend of Tereus 
 and. Philomela ; and the epithet attached to the night- 
 ingale in v. 268 probably refers to the tincture of 
 green on its dark-coloured throat, with which one of 
 our older ornithologists credits that bird. The fable is 
 as follows, and it represents oppression and violence in 
 their naked repulsiveness. Contrary to the use of 
 later fabulists, the moral is put in the mouth of the 
 hawk, not of the narrator : 
 
 " A stooping hawk, crook- taloned, from the vale 
 
 Bore in his pounce a neck-streaked nightingale, 
 
 And snatched among the clouds ; beneath the stroke 
 
 This piteous shrieked, and that imperious spoke : 
 
 1 Wretch, why these screams 1 a stronger holds thee now; 
 
 Where'er I shape my course a captive thou, 
 
 Maugre thy song, must company my way ; 
 
 I rend my banquet, or I loose my prey. 
 
 Senseless is he who dares with power contend ; 
 
 Defeat, rebuke, despair shall be his end." 
 
 E. 267-276. 
 
 From fable the poet passes at once to a more direct 
 appeal. Addressing Perses and the judges, he points 
 out that injustice and overbearing conduct not only 
 crush the poor man, but eventually the rich and power- 
 ful fail to stand against its consequences. He pictures 
 
36 HESIOD. 
 
 the rule of wrong and the rule of right, and forcibly 
 contrasts the effects of each on the prosperity of com- 
 munities. Here are the results of injustice : 
 
 " Lo ! with crooked judgments runs th' avenger stern 
 Of oaths forsworn, and eke the murmuring voice 
 Of Justice rudely dragged, where base men lead 
 Thro' greed of gain, and olden rights misjudge 
 With verdict perverse. She with mist enwrapt 
 Follows, lamenting homes and haunts of men, 
 To deal out ills to such as drive her forth, 
 By custom of wrong judgment, from her seats." D. 
 
 And here, by contrast, are the fruits of righteousness 
 and justice, practised by cities and nations : 
 
 " Genial peace 
 Dwells in their borders, and their youth increase. 
 Nor Zeus, whose radiant eyes behold afar, 
 Hangs forth in heaven the signs of grievous war. 
 Nor scathe nor famine on the righteous prey : 
 Earth foodful teems, and banquets crown the day. 
 Rich wave their mountain oaks ; the topmost tree 
 The rustling acorn fills, its trunk the murmuring bee. 
 Burdened with fleece their panting flocks ; the race 
 Of woman soft reflects the father's face : 
 Still flourish they, nor tempt with ships the main; 
 The fruits of earth are poured from every plain." 
 
 E. 303-314. 
 
 In the lines italicised the old poet anticipates that 
 criterion of honest wedlock which Horace shapes into 
 the line, " The father's features in his children smile " 
 (Odes, iv. 5-23, Con.); and Catullus into the beautiful 
 wish for Julia and Manlius, that their offspring 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 37 
 
 " May strike 
 Strangers when the boy they meet 
 As his father's counterfeit ; 
 And his face the index be 
 Of his mother's chastity." 
 
 Epithalam. (Theod. Martin). 
 
 After a recurrence, suggested by this train of thought, 
 to the opposite picture, and an appeal to the judges to 
 remember those invisible watchers who evermore sup- 
 port the right and redress the wrong, as well as the 
 intercession of Justice at the throne of Zeus for them 
 that are defrauded and oppressed, the poet for a moment 
 resorts to irony, and, like Job, asks " what profit there 
 is in righteousness, when wrong seems to carry all 
 before it 1 " But only for a moment. In a short but 
 fine image, Perses is invited to lift up his eyes to the 
 distant seat, 
 
 " Where virtue dwells on high, the gods before 
 Have placed the dew that drops from every pore. 
 And at the first to that sublime abode 
 Long, steep the ascent, and rough the rugged road. 
 But when thy slow steps the rude summit gain, 
 Easy the path, and level is the plain." 
 
 E. 389-394. 
 
 He is urged again to rely on his own industry, and 
 encouraged to find in work the antidote to famine, and 
 the favour of bright-crowned Demeter,-who can fill his 
 barns with abundance of corn. That which is laid up 
 m your own granary (he is reminded in a series of 
 terse economic maxims, which enforce Hesiod's general 
 exhortation) does not trouble you like that which you 
 
38 IIESIOD. 
 
 borrow, or that which you covet. Honesty is the "best 
 policy. Shame is found with poverty born of idleness; 
 whereas a just boldness inspirits him whose wealth is 
 gained by honest work and the favour of Heaven. 
 Some of these adagial maxims will form part of the 
 chapter on " Hesiod's Proverbial Philosophy ; " and of 
 the rest it may suffice to say, that the poet has his own 
 quaint forceful way of prescribing the best rules for 
 dealing with friends and neighbours, as to giving and 
 entertaining, and with regard to women, children, and 
 domestics. Tn most of these maxims the ruling motive 
 appears to be expediency. In reference to the fair sex, 
 it is plain that he is on the defensive, and regards 
 them as true representatives of Pandora, with whom 
 the less a man has to do, the less he will be duped, 
 the less hurt will there be to his substance. As old 
 Chapman renders it, 
 
 " He that gives 
 A woman trust doth trust a den of thieves." 
 
 C. 585. 
 
 As to family, his view is that " the more children 
 the more cares/' * The best thing is to have an only 
 son, to nurse and consolidate the patrimony; and if a 
 man has more, it is to be desired that he should die 
 old, so as to prevent litigation (a personal grievance 
 this) between young heirs. And yet, adds the pious 
 bard, it lies with Zeus to give store of wealth to even 
 a large family ; and he seems to imply that where such 
 
 * " He that hath a wife and children hath given pledges to 
 fortune. " Bacon. 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 39 
 
 a family is thrifty there will be the greater aggregate 
 increase of property. Such is the advice, he remarks 
 in concluding the first part of his poem, which he has 
 to offer to any one who desires wealth ; to observe these 
 rules and cautions, and to devote himself to the system- 
 atic routine of the farming operations, which, to his 
 mind, constitute the highroad to getting rich. 
 
 From the very outset of the second part of the 
 'Works and Days/ a more definite and practical 
 character attaches to Hesiod's precepts touching agri- 
 culture. Hitherto his exhortation to his brother had 
 harped on the one string of " work, work ;* and now, 
 as agriculture was the Boeotian's work, he proceeds 
 to prescribe and illustrate the modus operandi, and 
 the seasons best adapted for each operation. This is 
 really the didactic portion of Hesiod's Georgics, if we 
 may so call his poem on agriculture ; and it is curiously 
 interesting to study, by the light he affords, the theory 
 and practice of very old-world farming. 
 
 As apparently he was ignorant of any calendar of 
 months by which the time of year might be described, 
 he has recourse to the rising and setting of the stars, 
 whose annual motion was known to him, to indicate 
 the seasons of the year. Thus the husbandman is 
 bidden to begin cutting his corn at the rising of the 
 Pleiads (in May), and his ploughing when they set (in 
 November). They are invisible for forty days and 
 nights, during which time, as he tells us later on, 
 sailing, which with the Boeotian was second in im- 
 portance to agriculture (inasmuch as it subserved the 
 exportation of his produce), was suspended, and works 
 
40 HESIOD. 
 
 on the farm came on instead. To quote Elton's 
 version : 
 
 "When Atlas-born the Pleiad stars arise 
 Before the sun above the dawning skies, 
 'Tis time to reap ; and when they sink below 
 The morn-illumined west, 'tis time to sow. 
 Know too, they set, immerged into the sun, 
 While forty days entire their circle run ; 
 And with the lapse of the revolving year, 
 When sharpened is the sickle, reappear. 
 Law of the fields, and known to every swain 
 Who turns the laboured soil beside the main ; 
 Or who, remote from billowy ocean's gales, 
 Fills the rich glebe of inland- winding vales." 
 
 E. 525-536. 
 
 With Hesiod, therefore, as with us, ploughing and 
 sowing began, for early crops, in late autumn ; and to 
 be even with the world around him, and not depend- 
 ent on his neighbours, a man must (he tells his ne'er- 
 do-well brother) " strip to plough, strip to sow, and 
 strip to reap," advice which Virgil has repeated 
 in his first Georgic. He seems to imply, too, in v. 
 398, that it is a man's own fault if he does not avail 
 himself of the times and the seasons which the Gods 
 have assigned and ordained, and of which the stars are 
 meant to admonish him. If he neglect to do so, he 
 and his wife and children cannot reasonably complain 
 if friends get tired, of repeated applications for relief. 
 But suppose the better course of industrious labour 
 resolved upon. The first thing the farmer has to do 
 is to take a house, and get an unmarried female slave, 
 and an ox to plough with, and then the farming ini- 
 
THE WORKS AND DA YS. 4'1 
 
 plements suited to his hand. It will never do to be 
 always borrowing, and so waiting till others can lend, 
 and the season has glided away. Delay is always bad 
 policy : 
 
 a The work-deferrer never 
 Sees full his barn, nor he that leaves work ever, 
 And still is gadding out. Care-flying ease 
 Gives labour ever competent increase : 
 He that with doubts Lis needful business crosses 
 Is always wrestling with uncertain losses." 
 
 C. 48-53. 
 
 Accordingly, on the principle of having all proper 
 implements of one's own, the poet proceeds to give 
 instructions for the most approved make of a wain, a 
 plough, a mortar, a pestle, and so forth. The time to 
 fell timber, so that it be not worm-eaten, and so that 
 it may not be cut when the sap is running, is when in 
 autumn the Dog-star, Sirius, " gets more night and less 
 day ; " in other words, when the summer heats abate, 
 and men's bodies take a turn to greater lissomness and 
 moisture. The pestle and mortar prescribed were a 
 stone handmill or quern, for Crushing and bruising corn 
 and other grain, and bring us back to days of very 
 primitive simplicity, though still in use in the days of 
 Aristophanes. So minute is the poet in his directions 
 for making the axle-tree of a waggon, that he recom- 
 mends its length to be seven feet, but adds that it is 
 well to cut an eight-foot length, that one foot sawn off 
 may serve for the head of a mallet for driving in stakes. 
 The axles of modern carts are about six feet long. 
 But his great concern is, to give full particulars about 
 
42 HESIOD. 
 
 the proper wood and shape for the various parts of his 
 plough. The plough-tail (Virgil's "buris,"Georg. i. 170) 
 is to be of ilex wood, which a servant of Athena i.e., 
 a carpenter is to fasten with nails to the share-beam, 
 and fit to the pole. It is well, he says, to have two 
 ploughs, in case of an accident to a single one. And 
 whilst one of these was to have plough - tail, share- 
 beam, and pole all of one piece of timber, the other 
 was to be of three parts, each of different timber, and 
 all fastened with nails. This latter is apparently the 
 better of the two, that which is all of one wood being 
 a most primitive implement, simply " a forked bough." 
 The soundest poles are made of bay or elm, share-beams 
 of oak, and plough-tails of ilex oak. For draught 
 and yoking together, nine-year-old oxen are besi,, be- 
 cause, being past the mischievous and frolicsome age, 
 they are not likely to break the pole and leave the 
 ploughing in the middle. Directions follow this some- 
 what dry detail as to the choice of a ploughman : 
 
 " In forty's prime thy ploughman ; one with bread 
 Of four-squared loaf in double portions fed. 
 He steadily will cut the furrow true, 
 Nor toward his fellows glance a rambling view, 
 Still on his task intent : a stripling throws 
 Heedless the seed, and in one furrow strows 
 The lavish handful twice, while wistful stray 
 His longing thoughts to comrades far away." 
 
 E. 602-609. 
 
 The loaf referred to was scored crosswise, like the 
 Latin "quadra" or our cross-bun, and the object in 
 this case was easy and equal division of the slaves' 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 43 
 
 rations Theocritus, xxiv. 136, speaks of "a big 
 Doric loaf in a basket, such as would safely satisfy a 
 garden-digger ; " and it is probable that, in prescribing 
 a loaf with eight quarterings, Hesiod means " double 
 rations," thereby implying that it is good economy to 
 feed your men well, if you would have them work 
 well. 
 
 The poet next proceeds to advise that the cattle 
 should be kept in good condition, and ready for work, 
 when the migratory crane's cry bespeaks winter's 
 advent and the prospect of wet weather. Everything 
 should be in readiness for this ; and it will not do to 
 rely on borrowing a yoke of oxen from a neighbour at 
 the busy time. The wideawake neighbour may up 
 and say, 
 
 " Work up thyself a waggon of thine own, 
 For to the foolish borrower is not known 
 That each wain asks a hundred joints of wood : 
 These things ask forecast, and thou shouldst make good 
 At home, before thy need so instant stood." 
 
 C. 122-126. 
 
 A farmer who knows what he is about will have, 
 Hesiod says, all his gear ready. He and his slaves 
 will turn to and plough, wet and dry, early and late, 
 working manfully themselves, and not forgetting to 
 pray Zeus and Demeter to bless the labour of their 
 hand, and bestow their fruits. An odd addition to the 
 farmer's staff is the slave who goes behind the plough 
 to break the clods, and give trouble to the birds by 
 covering up the seed. In Wilkinson's ' Ancient 
 Egyptians' (ii. 13), an engraving representing the 
 
44 HESIOD. 
 
 processes of ploughing and hoeing gives a slave in 
 the rear with a wooden hoe, engaged in breaking the 
 clods. A little further on, a reference to the same 
 interesting work explains Hesiod's meaning where he 
 says, that if ploughing is done at the point of mid- 
 winter, men will have to sit or stoop to reap (on ac- 
 count, it should seem, of the lowness of the ears), 
 " enclosing but little round the hand, and often cov- 
 ered with dust while binding it up." To judge by 
 the Egyptian paintings, wheat was reaped by men in 
 an upright posture, because they cut the straw much 
 nearer the ear than the ground. Of course, if the 
 straw was very short, the reaper had to stoop, or to 
 sit, if he liked it better. He is represented by Hesiod 
 as seizing a handful of corn in his left hand, while 
 he cuts it with his right, and binding the stalks in 
 bundles in opposite directions, the handfuls being 
 disposed alternately, stalks one way and ears the 
 other. The basket of which Hesiod speaks as carry- 
 ing the ears clipped from the straw, has its illustration 
 also in the same pages. This is the explanation given 
 also by Mr Paley in his notes. On the whole, the 
 poet is strongly against late sowing, though he admits 
 that if you can sow late in the dry, rainy weather in 
 early spring may bring on the corn so as to be as for- 
 ward as that which was ear]y sown : 
 
 u So shall an equal crop thy time repair, 
 With his who earlier launched the shining share." 
 
 E. 676, 677. 
 
 In this part of the ' Works ' our poet is exception- 
 ally matter-of-fact ; but as he proceeds to tell what is 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 45 
 
 to be done and what avoided in the wintry season, he 
 becomes more amusing. He warns against the error 
 of supposing that this is the time for gossip at the 
 smithy, there being plenty of work for an active man 
 to do in the coldest weather. In fact, then is the 
 time for household work, and for so employing your 
 leisure 
 
 " That, famine-smitten, thou may'st ne'er be seen 
 To grasp a tumid foot with hand from hunger lean ;" 
 
 E. 690, 691. 
 
 a figurative expression for a state of starvation, which 
 emaciates the hand and swells the foot by reason of 
 weakness. As a proper pendant to this sound advice, 
 Hesiod adds his much-admired description of winter, 
 the storms and cold of which he could thoroughly 
 speak of from the experience of a mountain residence 
 in Boeotia. This episode is so poetic, even if over- 
 wrought in some portions, that critics have suggested 
 its being a later addition of a rhapsodist of the post- 
 Hesiodic school; and there are two or three tokens 
 (e. g., the mention of " Lenseon " as the month that 
 answers to our Christmastide and beginning of Janu- 
 ary, whereas the Boeotians knew no such name, but 
 called the period in question "Bucatius") which be- 
 speak a later authorship. And yet a sensitiveness to 
 cold, and a lively description of its phenomena, is 
 quite in keeping with the poet's disparagement of 
 Ascra ; and further, it is quite possible that, a propos 
 of Hesiod and his works, theories of interpolation have 
 been suffered to overstep due limits. Inclination, and 
 
46 HESIOD. 
 
 absence of any certain data, combine to facilitate our 
 acceptance of this fine passage as the poet's own handi- 
 work. Indeed, it were a hard fate for any poet if, in 
 the lapse of years, his beauties were to be pronounced 
 spurious by hypercriticism, and his level passages alone 
 left to give an idea of his calibre. We give the descrip- 
 tion of winter from Elton's version : 
 
 " Beware the January month ; beware 
 
 Those hurtful days, that keenly-piercing air 
 
 Which flays the steers, while frosts their horrors cast, 
 
 Congeal the ground, and sharpen every blast. 
 
 From Thracia's courser-teeming region sweeps 
 
 The northern wind, and, breathing on the deeps, 
 
 Heaves wide the troubled surge : earth, echoing, roars 
 
 From the deep forests and the sea beat shores. 
 
 He from the mountain-top, with shattering stroke, 
 
 Rends the broad pine, and many a branching oak 
 
 Hurls 'thwart the glen : when sudden, from on high, 
 
 With headlong fury rushing down the sky, 
 
 The whirlwind stoops to earth ; then deepening round 
 
 Swells the loud storm, and all the boundless woods resound. 
 
 The beasts their cowering tails with trembling fold, 
 
 And shrink and shudder at the gusty cold. 
 
 Though thick the hairy coat, the shaggy skin, 
 
 Yet that all-chilling breath shall pierce within. 
 
 Not his rough hide the ox can then avail, 
 
 The long-haired goat defenceless feels the gale ; 
 
 Yet vain the north wind's rushing strength to wound 
 
 The flock, with sheltering fleeces fenced around. 
 
 And now the horned and unhorned kind, 
 Whose lair is in the wood, sore famished grind 
 Their sounding jaws, and frozen and quaking fly, 
 Where oaks the mountain-dells imbranch on high ; 
 
f UNIVERSITY 
 TUB WORKS AXD DATS. 47 
 
 They seek to couch in thickets of the glen, 
 
 Or lurk deep sheltered in the rocky den. 
 
 Like aged men who, propped on crutches, tread 
 
 Tottering, with broken strength and stooping head, 
 
 So move the beasts of earth, and, creeping low, 
 
 Shun the white flakes and dread the drifting snow.' 7 
 
 E. 700-745. 
 
 The lines italicised scarcely realise the poet's compari- 
 son of the crouching beasts to three-footed old men, or 
 old men crawling with the help of a stick, which in 
 the original recalls, as Hesiod doubtless meant it to 
 do, the famous local legend of the Sphinx. 
 
 "Now," adds the poet, "is the time to go warm- 
 clad, thick-shod, and with a waterproof cape over the 
 shoulders, and a fur cap, lined with felt, about the 
 head and ears." He certainly knew how to take care 
 of himself. But he is equally thoughtful for his 
 hinds. When at this season the rain betokened by a 
 misty morning sets in at night, and cold and wet 
 interfere with husbandry, a time " severe to flocks, nor 
 less to man severe," then, because workmen need more 
 food in cold weather, but cattle, having little work 
 by day and plenty of rest at night, can do with less, - 
 
 " Feed thy keen husbandmen with larger bread, 
 With half their provender thy steers be fed. 
 Them rest assists ; the night's protracted length 
 Becruits their vigour and supplies their strength. 
 This rule observe, while still the various earth 
 Gives every fruit and kindly seedling birth ; 
 Still to the toil proportionate the cheer, 
 The day to night, and equalise the year." 
 
 E. 775-782. 
 
48 HESIOD. 
 
 And now the poet turns to vine- dressing. He dates 
 k the early spring by the rising of Arcturus, sixty days 
 *, after the winter solstice (February 19), which is soon 
 followed by the advent of the swallow. This is the 
 season for vine-trimming ; but when the snail (which 
 Hesiod characteristically, and in language resembling 
 that used in oracular responses, designates as " house- 
 carrier") quits the earth and climbs the trees, to 
 shelter itself from the Pleiads, then vine-culture must 
 give place (about the middle of May) to the early 
 harvest. Then must men rise betimes : 
 
 " Lo ! the third portion of thy labours cares 
 The early morn anticipating shares : 
 In early morn the labour swiftly wastes, 
 In early mom the speeded journey hastes, 
 The time when many a traveller tracks the plain, 
 And the yoked oxen bend them to the wain." 
 
 E. 801-806. 
 
 A brief and picturesque episode follows about the 
 permissible rest and enjoyment of the summer season, 
 when artichokes flower, and the " cicala " (as Hesiod 
 accurately puts it) pours forth " song from its wings " 
 the result of friction or vibration. " Then," he 
 says, "fat kids, mellow wine, and gay maidens are fair 
 relaxation for the sun-scorched rustic," who, however, 
 is supposed to make merry with temperate cups, and 
 to enjoy the cool shade and trickling rill quite as 
 much as the grape-juice. Hesiod prescribes three 
 cups of water to one of wine ; and, as Cratinus's 
 question in Athenseus " Will it bear three 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 49 
 
 parts water?" suggests, only generous wine will 
 stand such dilution. If such potations are ever season- 
 able, however, it will be in the greatest heat of sum- 
 mer, when the Dog Star burns. The rising of Orion is 
 the time for threshing and winnowing (i.e., about the 
 middle of July) ; and this operation appears to have 
 been performed by drawing over the corn the heavy- 
 toothed plank or " tribulum," or trampling it by means 
 of cattle on a smooth level threshing-floor. In some 
 parts of Europe, Mr Paley informs us, the old process 
 is still retained. After the corn has been winnowed, 
 Hesiod counsels a revision of the household staff, in 
 language of which Chapman catches the humour : 
 
 " Make then thy man-swain one that hath no house, 
 Thy handmaid one that hath nor child nor spouse : 
 Handmaids that children have are ravenous. 
 A mastiff likewise nourish still at home, 
 Whose teeth are sharp and close as any comb, 
 And meat him well, to keep with stronger guard 
 The day -sleep-night-wake man from forth thy yard." 
 
 a 346-352. 
 
 "When Sirius and Orion are in mid-heaven, and Arc- 
 turus is rising, then the grapes are to be gathered, so 
 that Hesiod's vintage would be in the middle of Sep- 
 tember ; and he prescribes exactly the process of 
 (1) drying the grapes in the sun, (2) drying them in 
 the shade to prevent fermentation, and (3) treading 
 and squeezing out the wine : 
 
 " The rosy-fingered morn the vintage calls ; 
 
 Then bear the gathered grapes within thy walls. 
 A. C. Vol. XV. D 
 
50 HESIOD. 
 
 Ten days and nights exposed the clusters lay, 
 Basked in the radiance of each mellowing day. 
 Let five their circling round successive run, 
 Whilst lie thy grapes o'ershaded from the sun ; 
 The sixth express the harvest of the vine, 
 And teach thy vats to foam with joy-inspiring wine." 
 
 E. 851-858. 
 
 When the Pleiads, Hyads, and Orion set, it is time 
 to plough again. But not to go on a voyage ! Though, 
 as we have before stated, and as Hesiod seems particu- 
 larly anxious to have it known, he was no sailor, our 
 poet gives now directions how to keep boats and 
 tackle safe and sound in the wintry season, by means 
 of a rude breakwater of stones, and by taking the 
 plug out of the keel to prevent its rotting. The 
 best season for voyaging is between midsummer and 
 autumn, he says ; only it requires haste, to avoid the 
 winter rains. The other and less desirable time is in 
 spring, when the leaves at the end of a spray have 
 grown to the length of a crow's foot a compara- 
 tive measurement, which Mr Paley observes is still 
 retained in the popular name of some species of 
 the ranunculus crowfoot ; but Hesiod calls this a 
 "snatched voyage," and holds the love of gain that 
 essays it foolhardy. He concludes his remarks on 
 this head by prudent advice not to risk all your 
 exports in one venture, all your eggs as our homely 
 proverb runs in one basket : 
 
 " Trust not thy whole precarious wealth to sea, 
 Tossed in the hollow keel : a portion send : 
 Thy larger substance let the shore defend. 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 51 
 
 Fearful the losses of the ocean fall, 
 
 When on a fragile plank embarked thy all : 
 
 So bends beneath its weight the o'erburdened wain, 
 
 And the crushed axle spoils the scattered grain. 
 
 The golden mean of conduct should confine 
 
 Our every aim, be moderation thine ! " 
 
 E. 954-962. 
 
 After this fashion the poet proceeds to give the 
 advice on marriage which has been already quoted, 
 and which probably belongs to an earlier portion of 
 the poem. From this he turns to the duties of friend- 
 ship, still regulated by caution and an eye to expe- 
 diency. It is better to be reconciled to an old friend 
 with whom you have fallen out than to contract new 
 friendships ; and, above all, to put a control on your 
 countenance, that it may betray no reservations or 
 misgivings. A careful and temperate tongue is com- 
 mended, and geniality at a feast, especially a club 
 feast, for 
 
 " When many guests combine in common fare, 
 Be not morose, nor grudge a liberal share : 
 Where all contributing the feast unite, 
 Great is the pleasure, and the cost is light." 
 
 E. 1009-1012. 
 
 And now come some precepts of a ceremonial nature, 
 touching what Professor Conington justly calls " smal- 
 ler moralities and decencies," some of w T hich, it has 
 been suggested, savour of Pythagorean or of Judaic 
 obligation, whilst all bespeak excessive superstition. 
 Prayers with unw ashen hands, fording a river without 
 propitiatory prayer, paring the nails off your " bunch 
 
52 HESIOD. 
 
 of fives 1 * (i.e., your five fingers*) at a feast after sacri- 
 fice, lifting the can above the bowl at a banquet, all 
 these acts of commission and omission provoke, says 
 Hesiod, the wrath of the gods. Some of his precepts 
 have a substratum of common sense, but generally 
 they can only be explained by his not desiring to con- 
 travene the authority of custom ; and, in fact, he 
 finishes his second part with a reason for the observ- 
 ance of such rules and cautions : 
 
 " Thus do, and shun the ill report of men. 
 Light to take up, it brings the bearer pain, 
 And is not lightly shaken off ; nor dies 
 The rumour that from many lips doth rise, 
 But, like a god, all end of time defies." D. 
 
 And now comes the closing portion of the poem, 
 designated by Chapman " Hesiod's Book of Days," 
 and, in point of fact, a calendar of the lucky and 
 unlucky days of the lunar month, apparently as con- 
 nected with the various worships celebrated on those 
 days. The poet divides the month of thirty days, as 
 was the use at Athens much later, into three decades. 
 The thirtieth of the month is the best day for overlook- 
 ing farm-work done, and allotting the rations for the 
 month coming on ; and it is a holiday, too, in the law- 
 courts. The seventh of the month is specially lucky as 
 Apollo's birthday ; the sixth unlucky for birth or mar- 
 riage of girls, probably because the birthday of the 
 virgin Artemis, his sister. The fifth is very unlucky, 
 because on it Horcus, the genius who punishes per- 
 
 *"A slang term for the fists, in use among pugilists." See 
 Palev's note on v. 742. 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 53 
 
 jury, and not, as -Virgil supposed, the Roman Orcus or 
 Hades, was born, and taken care of by the Erinnyes. 
 The seventeenth was lucky for bringing in the corn to 
 the threshing-floor, and for other works, because it was 
 the festival-day, in one of the months, of Demeter 
 and Cora, or Proserpine. The fourth was lucky for 
 marriages, perhaps because sacred to Aphrodite and 
 Hermes. Hesiod lays down the law, however, of 
 these days without giving much enlightenment as to 
 the "why" or "wherefore," and our knowledge from 
 other sources does not suffice to explain them all. A 
 fair specimen of this calendar is that which we proceed 
 to quote : 
 
 " The eighth, nor less the ninth, with favouring skies 
 Speeds of th' increasing month each rustic enterprise : 
 And on the eleventh let thy flocks be shorn, 
 And on the twelfth be reaped thy laughing corn : 
 Both days are good ; yet is the twelfth confessed 
 More fortunate, with fairer omen blest. 
 On this the air-suspended spider treads, 
 In the full noon, his fine and self-spun threads ; 
 And the wise emmet, tracking dark the plain, 
 Heaps provident the store of gathered grain. 
 On this let careful woman's nimble hand 
 Throw first the shuttle and the web expand." 
 
 E. 1071-1082. 
 
 Hesiod's account of the twenty-ninth of the month 
 is also a characteristic passage, not without a touch of 
 the oracular and mysterious. " The prudent secret," 
 he says, " is to few confessed.'* " One man praises one 
 day, another another, but few know them." " Some- 
 
54 HESIOD. 
 
 times a day is a stepmother, sometimes a mother." 
 " Blest and fortunate lie who knowingly doeth all 
 with an eye to these days, unblamed by the immortals,- 
 discerning omens and avoiding transgression." 
 
 Such is the appropriate ending of Hesiod's didactic 
 poem a termination which ascribes prosperity in 
 agricultural pursuits to ascertainment of the will of 
 the gods, and avoidance of even unwitting transgres- 
 sion of their festivals. The study of omens, the poet 
 would have it understood, is the way to be safe in 
 these matters. 
 
 The ' Works and Days ' possesses a curious interest 
 as Hesiod's most undoubted production, and as the 
 earliest sample of so-called didactic poetry ; nor is it 
 fair or just to speak of this poem as an ill-constructed, 
 loose-hanging concatenation of thoughts and hints on 
 farming matters, according as they come uppermost. 
 That later and more finished didactic poems have only 
 partially and exceptionally borrowed Hesiod's manner 
 or matter does not really detract from the interest of a 
 poem which, as far as we know, is the first in classical 
 literature to afford internal evidence of the writer's 
 mind and thoughts, the first to teach that subjectivity, 
 in which to many readers lies the charm and attraction 
 of poetry. No doubt Hesiod's style and manner be- 
 token a very early and rudimentary school ; but few 
 can be insensible to the quaintness of his images, the 
 "Dutch fidelity" (to borrow a phrase of Professor 
 Coni ngton) of his minute descriptions, or, lastly, the 
 point and terseness of his maxims. To these the fore- 
 going chapter on the * Works and Days' has been 
 
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 55 
 
 unable to do justice, because it seemed of more conse- 
 quence to show the connection and sequence of the 
 parts and episodes of that work. It is proposed, 
 therefore, in the brief chapter next following, to exa- 
 mine " the Proverbial Philosophy of Hesiod," which is 
 chiefly, if not entirely, found in the poem we have 
 been discussing. 
 
CHATTEK IIL 
 
 hesiod's proverbial philosophy. 
 
 A chief token of the antiquity of Hesiod's ' Works 
 and Days ' is his use of familiar proverbs to illustrate 
 his vein of thought, and to attract a primitive audience. 
 The scope and structure of his other extant poems are 
 not such as to admit this mode of illustration ; but 
 the fact, that amidst the fragments which remain of 
 his lost poems are preserved several maxims and 
 saws of practical and homely wisdom, shows that this 
 use of proverbs was characteristic of his poetry, or 
 that his imitators if we suppose these lost poems 
 not to have been really his at all events held it to be 
 so. It is, perhaps, needless to remark that the poems 
 of Homer are full of like adagial sentences so much 
 so, indeed, that James Duport, the Greek professor at 
 Cambridge, published in 1680 an elaborate parallelism 
 of the proverbial philosophy of the Iliad and Odyssey, 
 with the adages as well of sacred as of profane writers. 
 Other scholars have since followed his lead, and eluci- 
 dated the same common point in the father of Greek 
 poetry, and those who have opened a like vein in 
 
HESIOD 1 S PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY. 57 
 
 other nations and languages. Obviously an appeal to 
 this terse and easily-remembered and retained wisdom 
 of the ancients is adapted to the needs of an early 
 stage of literature ; and its kinship, apparent or real, 
 to the brief " dicta " of the oracles of antiquity, would 
 constitute a part of its weight and popularity with an 
 audience of wonder-stricken listeners. And so we 
 come to see the fitness of such bards as Homer and 
 Hesiod garnishing their poems with these gems of 
 antique proverbial wisdom, each drawing from a store 
 that was probably hereditary, and pointing a moral or 
 establishing a truth by neat and timely introduction 
 of saws that possessed a weight not unlike that of 
 texts of Scripture to enforce a preacher's drift. 
 It is, furthermore, a minor argument for the common 
 date of these famous poets, that both Homer and 
 Hesiod constantly recur to the use of adages. With 
 the latter the vein is not a little curious. The honest 
 thrift-loving poet of Ascra has evidently stored up 
 maxims, on the one hand of homely morality and good 
 sense, and on the other of shrewdness and self-interest. 
 He draws upon a rare stock of proverbial authority for 
 justice, honour, and good faith, but he also falls back 
 upon a well-chosen supply of brief and telling saws to 
 affirm the policy of " taking care of number one," and 
 is provided with short rules of action and conduct, 
 which do credit to his observation and study of the 
 ways of the world. If, as we have seen in his auto- 
 biography (if we may so call the ' Works and Days '), 
 his life was a series of chronic wrestlings with a worth- 
 less brother and unjust judges, it is all the more natu- 
 
58 HESIOD. 
 
 ral that his stock of proverbs should partake of the 
 twofold character indicated ; and we proceed to illus- 
 trate both sides of it in their order. 
 
 In distinguishing the two kinds of contention, 
 Hesiod ushers in a familiar proverb by words which 
 have themselves taken adagial rank. " This conten- 
 tion," he says, "is good for mortals " (' Works and Days/ 
 24-26) viz., " when potter vies with potter, crafts- 
 man with craftsman, beggar is emulous of beggar, and 
 bard of bard." Pliny the younger, in a letter on the 
 death of Silius Italicus, uses the introductory words 
 of Hesiod apropos of the rivalry, of friends, in provok- 
 ing each other to the quest of a name and fame that 
 may survive their perishable bodies ; * and Aristotle 
 and Plato quote word for word the lines respecting 
 " two of a trade " to which it will be observed that 
 Hesiod attaches a nobler meaning than that which 
 has become associated with them in later days. 
 He seems to appeal to the people's voice, succinctly 
 gathered up into a familiar saw, for the confirma- 
 tion of his argument, that honest emulation is both 
 wholesome and profitable. The second of Hesiod's 
 adages has an even higher moral tone, and conveys the 
 lesson of temperance in its broadest sense, by declaring 
 
 " That halfh more than all ; true gain doth dwell 
 In feasts of herbs, mallow, and asphodel." D. 
 
 Here the seeming paradox of the first portion of the 
 couplet is justified and explained by Cicero's remark 
 that men know not " how great a revenue consists in 
 
 * Epist. III., vii. 15. 
 
HESIOVS PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY. 59 
 
 moderation ; " and whilst in the first clause a sound 
 mind is the end proposed, the latter part evidently has 
 reference to the frugal diet, which bespeaks content- 
 ment and an absence of covetousness, such as breathes 
 in Horace's prayer : 
 
 " Let olives, endives, mallows light 
 Be all my fare," 
 
 Odes, I. 31, 15 (Theod. Martin). 
 
 and which, moreover, favours health and a sound 
 body. It is unnecessary to point out the similarity of 
 this proverb to that of Solomon respecting the " dinner 
 of herbs," or to our own adage that "enough is as 
 good as a feast ; " but it may be pertinent to note that 
 this Hesiodian maxim is, like the former, quoted by 
 Plato, who in his Laws (iii. 690) explains Hesiod's 
 meaning, " that when the whole was injurious and the 
 half moderate, then the moderate was more and better 
 than the immoderate." The next which presents itself 
 in the * Works and Days ' owes its interest as much 
 to the fact that it occurs almost totidem verbis in 
 Homer, as to its resemblance to a whole host of 
 later proverbs and adages amongst all nations. When 
 Hesiod would fain enforce the advantage of doing 
 right, and acting justly, without constraint, he, as it 
 were, glances at the case of those who do not see 
 this till justice has taught them its lesson, and says, 
 in the language of proverb, 
 
 " The fool first suffers, and is after wise." 
 
 < Works and Days/ 218. 
 
 In the 17th Book of the Iliad, Homer has the same 
 
60 HESIOD. 
 
 expression, save in the substitution of the word " acts ' 
 for " suffers ; " and it is exceedingly probable that 
 both adapted to their immediate purposes the words of 
 a pre-existing proverb.* Hesiod had already glanced 
 at the same proverb, when, in v. 89 of the ' "Works 
 and Days/ he said of the improvident Epimetheus 
 that " he first took the gift " (Pandora)/' and after 
 grieved;" and it is probable that we have in it the 
 germ of very many adagial expressions about the teach- 
 ing of experience such as those about "the stung 
 fisherman," "the burnt child," and "the scalded cat" 
 of the Latin, English, and Spanish languages respect- 
 ively. The Ojis, according to Burton, say, " He whom 
 a serpent has bitten, dreads a slow-worm." Of a kin- 
 dred tone of high heathen morality are several prover- 
 bial expressions in the 'Works and Days' touching 
 uprightness and justice in communities and indi- 
 viduals. Thus in one place we read that 
 
 " Oft the crimes of one destructive fall, 
 The crimes of one are visited on all." 
 
 E. 319, 320. 
 
 In another, that mischief and malice recoil on their 
 author : 
 
 " Whoever forgeth for another ill, 
 With it himself is overtaken still ; 
 In ill men run on that they most abhor ; 
 111 counsel worst is to the counsellor.' , 
 
 Chapman. 
 
 * Livy has " Eventus stultorum magister ; " and the Proverbs 
 of Solomon, xx. 2, 3 "A prudent man foreseeth the evil and 
 hideth himself; but the simple pass on and are punished." 
 
HESIOD'S PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY. Gl 
 
 And in a third, that 
 
 " Far best 
 Is heaven-sent wealth without reproach possest." 
 
 The second of these sentences recalls the story of the 
 " Bull of Phalaris ; " whilst another, not yet noticed, 
 according to Elton's version, runs on this wise : 
 
 " "Who fears his oath shall leave a name to shine 
 With brightening lustre through his latest line." 
 
 E. 383, 384. 
 
 More literally rendered, the sentence might read, " Of 
 a man that regardeth his oath the seed is more blessed 
 in the aftertime ; " and so rendered, it curiously recalls 
 the answer of the oracle to Glaucus in Herodotus 
 (vi. 86), where the Greek words are identical with 
 Hesiod's, and either denote an acquaintance, in the 
 Pythoness, with the ' Works and Days/ or a com- 
 mon source whence both she and Hesiod drew. We 
 give Juvenal's account of the story of Glaucus, from 
 Jx^dgson's version : 
 
 u The Pythian priestess to a Spartan sung, 
 While indignation raised her awful tongue : 
 ' The time will come when e'en thy thoughts unjust, 
 Thy hesitation to restore the trust, 
 Thy purposed fraud shall make atonement due 
 Apollo speaks it, and his voice is true.' 
 Scared at this warning, he who sought to try 
 If haply Heaven might wink at perjury, 
 Alive to fear, though still to virtue dead, 
 Gave back the treasure to preserve his head. 
 Vain hope, by reparation now too late, 
 To loose the bands of adamantine fate ! 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 'califor^X, 
 
62 HESIOD. 
 
 By swift destruction seized, the caitiff dies, 
 Swept from the earth : nor he sole sacrifice 
 One general doom o'erwhelms his cursed line, 
 And verifies the judgment of the shrine." 
 
 P. 251, 252. 
 
 Within a couple of lines of the proverb last cited 
 occurs a maxim almost scriptural in its phraseology. 
 " Wickedness," sings the poet, " you might choose in 
 a heap ; level is the path, and it lies hard at hand." 
 One is reminded of the " broad and narrow roads " in 
 our Saviour's teaching ; and the lines which follow, and 
 enforce the earnest struggle which alone can achieve 
 the steep ascent, have found an echo in many noble 
 outbursts of after-poetry. The passage in Tennyson's 
 Ode, which expands the sentiment, is sufficiently 
 well known, but perhaps it is itself suggested by the 
 20th fragment of Simonides, which may be freely tran- 
 slated : 
 
 " List an old and truthful tale,- 
 Virtue dwells on summits high, 
 
 Sheer and hard for man to scale, 
 
 Where the goddess doth not fail 
 Her pure precincts, ever nigh, 
 
 Unrevealed to mortal sight, 
 
 Unrevealed, save then alone 
 When some hero scales her height, 
 Whom heart- vexing toil for right 
 
 Bringeth up to virtue's throne." * 
 
 * Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington : 
 u He that ever follows her commands, 
 Or with toil of heart and knees and hands. 
 
BESIOUS PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY. 63 
 
 Of a less exalted tone is the famous graduation ot 
 man's wisdom, which declares " that man far best who 
 can conceive and carry out with foresight a wise 
 counsel ; next in order, him who has the sense to 
 value and heed such counsel; whilst he who can neither 
 initiate it, nor avail himself of it when thrown in his 
 way, is to all intents worthless and good for nothing." 
 ('Works and Days,' 294-297.) This passage, however, 
 has been thought worthy of citation by Aristotle. 
 Another passage of proverbial character, but subordi- 
 nate moral tone, is that which declares 
 
 * Lo ! the best treasure is a frugal tongue ; 
 The lips of moderate speech with grace are hung." 
 
 E. 1005, 1006. 
 
 And a little further on an adage of mixed character, 
 moral and utilitarian, deifies the offspring of our unrulj 
 member, by saying 
 
 u No rumour wholly dies, once bruited wide, 
 But deathless like a goddess doth abide." D. 
 
 When we turn to the other class of adages those which 
 syllable the teaching of common-sense we are struck 
 more by the poet's shrewdness than his morality. The 
 end of all his precepts is, " Brother, get rich ; " or 
 " Brother, avoid poverty and famine." Even the wor- 
 ship and offerings of the gods are inculcated with an 
 
 Through the long gorge to the far light hath won 
 
 His path upward, and prevailed, 
 
 Shall find the toppling crags of duty scaled 
 
 Are close beside the shining table-lands 
 
 To which our God Himself is moon and sun." 
 
64 H.ESIOD. 
 
 eye to being able " to buy up the land of others, and 
 not others thine" (341). He says, indeed, in v. 686, 
 that " money is life to miserable men," in much the 
 same terms as Pindar after him ; but this is only as a 
 dissuasive from unseasonable voyages, and because " in 
 all things the fitting season is best." In effect he 
 upholds the maxim that "money makes the man," 
 though it is but fair to add that he prescribes right 
 means to that end. To get rich, a man must work : 
 
 " Famine evermore 
 Is natural consort to the idle boor." C. 
 
 " Hard work will best uncertain fortune mend." D. 
 
 He must save, too, on the principle that " many a little 
 makes a mickle," or, as Hesiod hath it, 
 
 " Little to little added, if oft done, 
 In small time makes a good possession." C. 
 
 It is no use, he sagaciously adds, to spare the liquor 
 when the cask is empty : 
 
 " When broached, or at the lees, no care be thine 
 To save the cask, but spare the middle wine ; " 
 
 E. 503, 504. 
 
 nor to procrastinate, because 
 
 " Ever with loss the putter-off contends," 
 
 413. 
 
 and the man that would thrive must take time by the 
 forelock, repeating to himself, as well as to his slaves 
 at midsummer, 
 
HESIOD'S PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY. 65 
 
 " The summer day 
 Endures not ever : toil ye wliile ye may," 
 
 E. 698, 699. 
 
 and rising betimes in the morning, on the faith that 
 
 " The morn the third part of thy work doth gain ; 
 The morn makes short thy way, makes short thy pain." C. 
 
 Shrewd and practical as all this teaching is, its 
 author deprecates anything that is not honest and 
 straightforward. "Dishonest gains," he declares in 
 v. 352, "are tantamount to losses;" and perhaps his 
 experience of the detriment of such ill gains to his 
 brother enabled him to judge of their hurtfulness the 
 more accurately. Referable to this experience is a 
 maxim that is certainly uncomplimentary to brotherly 
 love and confidence : 
 
 " As if in joke, that he no slight may feel, 
 Call witnesses, if you with brother deal." 
 
 D. 371. 
 
 And there is a latent distrust of kinsfolk and connec- 
 tions involved in another proverb : 
 
 " When on your home falls unforeseen distress, 
 
 Half-clothed come neighbours : kinsmen stay to dress." 
 
 D. 345. 
 
 Perhaps his bardic character won him the goodwill of 
 his neighbours, and so he estimated them as he found 
 them ; for he says a little further on, with considerable 
 fervour 
 
 " He hath a treasure, by his fortune signed, 
 That hath a neighbour of an honest mind." 
 
 C. 347. 
 
 A. C. Vol. XV. E 
 
66 HES10D. 
 
 And in his treatment of these neighbours there was, to 
 judge by his teaching, a very fair amount of liberality, 
 though scarcely that high principle of benevolence 
 which is content " to give, hoping nothing again." 
 Self-interest, indeed, as might be expected, leavens 
 the mass of his precepts of conduct, which may be 
 characterised as a good workaday code for the citizen 
 of a little narrow world, shut up within Boeotian 
 mountains. We laugh at the suspicion that animates 
 some, and the homeliness of others, but cannot fail 
 withal to be captivated perforce by the ingenuousness 
 with which the poet speaks his inner mind, and pre- 
 tends to no higher philosophy than one of self-defence. 
 In the line which follows the couplet last quoted, and 
 which says that " where neighbours are what they 
 should be, not an ox would be lost," for the whole 
 village would turn out to catch the thief, it has been 
 surmised that there is allusion to an early "associa- 
 tion for the prosecution of felons " in the iEolian 
 colony from which Hesiod's father had come ; but 
 these glosses of commentators and scholiasts only spoil 
 the simplicity of the poet's matter-of-fact philosophy, 
 which in the instance referred to did but record what 
 Themistocles afterwards seems to have seen, when, as a 
 recommendation to a held for sale, he advertised that 
 it had "a good neighbour." 
 
 Though the 'Theogony' is, from its nature and scope, 
 by no means a storehouse of proverbs like the ' Works 
 and Days,' it here and there has allusions and refer- 
 ences to an already existing stock of such maxims. 
 Where, in pointing a moral a prqpos of Pandora, he 
 
HESIOD'S PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY. 67 
 
 takes up his parable against women, and likens them 
 to the drones, 
 
 " Which gather in their greedy maw the spoils 
 Of others' labour," 
 
 E. 797, 798. 
 
 Hesiod has in his mind's eye that ancient proverb 
 
 touching " one sowing and another reaping," which 
 
 Callimachus gives as follows in his hymn to Ceres 
 
 (137)- 
 
 " And those who ploughed the field shall reap the corn " 
 
 but which, in some shape or other, must have existed 
 previously even to Hesiod's date. In most modern 
 languages it has its counterpart ; and it was recognised 
 and applied by our Lord, and His apostle St Paul.* 
 Earlier in the poem, the saw that " Blest is he whom 
 the Muses love " is probably pre-Hesiodian ; but it is 
 too obviously a commonplace of poets in general to 
 deserve commemoration as a proverb. We cannot cite 
 any adages from ' The Shield,' and an examination of 
 ' The Fragments ' adds but few to the total of Hesiod's 
 stock. These few are chiefly from the l Maxims of 
 Chiron,' supposed to have been dictated by that philo- 
 sophic Centaur to his pupil Achilles. One of these, 
 preserved by Harpocration from an oration of Hyperi- 
 des, may be thus translated : 
 
 u Works for the young, counsels for middle age ; 
 The old may best in vows and prayers engage." 
 
 Another savours of the philosophy of the ' Works 
 and Days : ' 
 
 * St Matt. xxv. 24 ; Gal. vi. 7 ; 2 Cor. ix. 6. 
 
68 HESIOD. 
 
 " Gifts can move gods, and gifts our godlike kings." 
 
 Whilst a third might well be a stray line from one of 
 the exhortations to Perses ; for it deprecates the pre- 
 ference of a shadow to a substance in some such lan- 
 guage as this : 
 
 " Only a fool will fruits in hand forego, 
 That he the charm of doubtful chase may know." 
 
 Another proverb, preserved by Cicero in a letter to 
 Atticus,* looks very like Hesiod's, though the orator 
 and critical man of letters dubs it u pseudo-Hesiod- 
 ian." It bids us " not decide a case until both sides 
 have been heard." And yet another saw, referred 
 to the Ascraean sage, appears -to us in excellent keep- 
 ing with the maxims respecting industry and hard 
 work which abound in his great didactic poem. We 
 are indebted for it to Xenophon's Memorabilia, and 
 it may be Englished 
 
 " Seek not the smooth, lest thou the rough shouldst find," 
 
 an exhortation in accord with the fine passage in the 
 ' Works and Days,' which represents Virtue and Ex- 
 cellence seated aloft on heights difficult to climb. 
 
 Perhaps also the following extracts from the extant 
 fragments of the ' Catalogue of Women/ though not 
 succinct enough to rank as adages, may lay some claim 
 to containing jets and sparkles of adagial wisdom. The 
 first, taken from the pages of Athena3iis,t concerns wine 
 that rnaketh sorry, as well as glad, the heart of man : 
 * vii. 18, 4. tx. 428. 
 
HESIOUS PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY. 69 
 
 a What joy, what pain cloth Dionysus give 
 To men who drink to excess. For wine to such 
 Acts insolently, binds them hand and foot, 
 Yea, tongue and mind withal, in bondage dire, 
 Ineffable ! Sleep only stands their friend." D. 
 
 The second is a curious relic of the ancient notions 
 about comparative longevity : 
 
 " Nine generations lives the babbling crow 
 Of old men's life ; the lively stag outlasts 
 Four crow-lives, and the raven thrice the stag's. 
 Nine raven's terms the phcenix numbers out ; 
 And we, the long-tressed nymphs, whose sire is Zeus, 
 By ten times more the phcenix life exceed." D. 
 
 Enough, however, has been set down of Hesiod's 
 proverbial philosophy, to show that herein consists 
 one of his titles to a principal place among didactic 
 poets. A plain blunt man, and a poet of the people, 
 he knew how and when to appeal with cogency to 
 that " wisdom of many and wit of one," which has 
 been stjled by our own proverb - collector, James 
 Howell, " the people's voice." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE TtlEOGONY. 
 
 The geographer Pausanias was the first to cast a doubt 
 upon the received belief of the ancients that the ' The- 
 ogony ' and the ' Works and Days ' originated from one 
 and the same author. On the other hand, Herodotus 
 attributed to Hesiod the praise of having been one of 
 the earliest systematisers of a national mythology; and 
 Plato in his Dialogues has references to the ' Theogony * 
 of Hesiod, which apparently correspond with passages 
 in the work that has come down to us as such. Un- 
 less, therefore, there is strong internal evidence of sepa- 
 rate authorship in the two poems, the testimony of a 
 writer four hundred years before Christ is entitled to 
 outweigh that of one living two hundred years after. 
 But so far from such internal evidence being forth- 
 coming, it would be easy to enumerate several strong 
 notes of resemblance, which would go far towards 
 establishing a presumption that both were from the 
 same hand. The same economical spirit which actu- 
 ates the poet of the * "Works ' is visible also in the 
 'Theogony/ where the head and front of Pandora's 
 
THE THEOGONY. 71 
 
 offending is, that the "beauteous evil," woman, is a 
 drone in the hive, and consumes the fruits of man's 
 labour without adding to them. The author of the 
 1 Theogony ' holds in exceptionally high esteem the 
 wealth-giving divinity Plutus, and this is quite con- 
 sistent with the hereditary and personal antipathy to 
 poverty and its visitations so manifest in the bard of 
 the ' Works/ Again, there is reason to believe that 
 the proper commencement of the ' Works and Days ' 
 which, to translate the Greek idiom, might run, 
 "Well, it seems that after all Contention is of two 
 kinds, and not of one only" (v. 11) is nothing less 
 than the poet's correction of a statement he had made 
 in his poem on the generation of the gods, that Eris, or 
 Contention, was one and indivisible, the daughter of 
 Night, and the mother of an uncanny progeny, begin- 
 ning with Trouble and ending with Oath.* We 
 might add, too, curious coincidences of expression 
 and verse-structure, such as the use of a character- 
 istic epithet standing by itself for the substantive 
 which it would commonly qualify (e. g., " the bone- 
 less " to represent " the caterpillar," and " the silvery " 
 for " the sea "), and the peculiarity of the commence- 
 ment of three consecutive lines with one and the same 
 word. Instances of both are common to the two poems. 
 But for the purposes of the present volume it is perhaps 
 sufficient to rest our acquiescence in a common author- 
 ship upon the plausibility and reasonableness of Bishop 
 Thirl wall's view, that Hesiod, living amidst a people 
 rich in sacred and oracular poetry, and engaged for the 
 * See Theog., v. 225. 
 
72 HESIOD. 
 
 most part in husbandry, " collected for it in a fuller 
 and a more graceful body the precepts with which the 
 simple wisdom of their forefathers had ordered their 
 rural labours and their domestic life ; " at the same 
 time that, " from the songs of their earlier bards, and 
 the traditions of their temples, he drew the knowledge 
 of nature and of superhuman things which he delivered 
 in the popular form of the ' Theogony.' " * 
 
 Of the aim which he proposed to himself in that 
 ancient poem, no better description has been given than 
 Mr Grote's, who designates it as " an attempt to cast 
 the divine functions into a systematic sequence." The 
 work of Homer and Hesiod was, to reduce to system 
 the most authentic traditions about the Hellenic gods 
 and demi-gods, and to consolidate a catholic "belief in 
 the place of conflicting local superstitions. So far as 
 we are able to judge, Homer's share in the task con- 
 sisted in the passing notices of gods and goddesses 
 which are scattered up and down the Iliad and the 
 Odyssey. For Hesiod may be claimed the first incor- 
 poration and enumeration of the generation and genea- 
 logy of the gods and goddesses in a coherent system ; 
 and so it was from his ' Theogony,' as Mr Grote has 
 shown, that " men took their information respecting 
 their theogonic antiquities ; that sceptical pagans, and 
 later assailants of paganism, derived their subjects of at- 
 tack; and that, to understand what Plato deprecated 
 and Xenophanes denounced, the Hesiodic stories must 
 be recounted in naked simplicity." t Whence he de- 
 rived his information, which is older than the so-called 
 * 'Hist, of Greece, I., c. vi. |* Ibid., i. 15, 16. 
 
THE TIIEOGONY. 73 
 
 Orphic Theogony whether from Egypt, India, and 
 Persia, or. as some have thought, from the Mosaic 
 writings it is lost labour to inquire. He certainly 
 systematised and consolidated the mass of traditions, 
 which came to his hand a more or less garbled and 
 distorted collection of primitive and nearly universal 
 legendary lore. An especial interest must therefore 
 attach to the study of his scheme and method, and it 
 must be enhanced by the position which antiquity 
 has almost unanimously accorded to him, in the history 
 of its earliest poetry and religion. 
 
 Hesiod's * Theogony consists of three divisions : a 
 cosmogony, or creation of the world, its powers, and 
 its fabric ; a theogony proper, recording the history 
 of the dynasties of Cronus and Zeus ; and a fragmen- 
 tary generation of heroes, sprung from the intercourse 
 of mortals with immortals. Hesiod and his contem- 
 poraries considered that in their day Jupiter or Zeus 
 was the lord of Olympus ; but it was necessary to 
 chronicle the antecedents of his dynasty, and hence the 
 account of the stages and revolutions which had led up 
 to the established order under which Hesiod's genera- 
 tion found itself. And so, after a preface containing 
 amongst other matters the episode of the Muses' visit 
 to the shepherd-poet, at which we glanced in Chapter 
 I., Hesiod proceeds to his proper task, and represents 
 Chaos as primeval, and Earth, Tartarus, and Eros 
 (Love), as coming next into existence : 
 
 " Love then arose, 
 Most beauteous of immortals ; he at once 
 Of every god and every mortal man 
 
74 HE SI OB. 
 
 Unnerves the limbs, dissolves the wiser "breast 
 By reason steeled, and quells the very soul." 
 
 E. 171-175. 
 
 At first Chaos spontaneously produces Erebus and 
 Night, the latter of whom gives birth to Ether and 
 Day; whilst Earth creates in turn the heaven, the 
 mountains, and the sea, the cosmogony so far corre- 
 sponding generally w T ith the Mosaic. But at this 
 point Eros or Love * begins to work. The union of 
 Earth with Heaven results in the birth of Oceanus 
 and the Titans, the Cyclopes, and the hundred- 
 handed giants. The sire of so numerous a progeny, 
 and first ruler of creation, Uranus, conceiving that his 
 sovereignty is imperilled by his offspring, resorts to 
 the expedient of relodging each child, as soon as it is 
 born, within the bowels of its mother, Earth. Groan- 
 ing under such a burden, she arms her youngest and 
 wiliest son, Cronus, with a sickle of her own product, 
 iron, and hides him in an ambush with a view to his 
 mutilating his sire. The conspiracy is justified on the 
 principle of retributive justice. Uranus is disabled 
 and dethroned, and, by a not very clear nor present- 
 able legend, the foam - born goddess Aphrodite is 
 fabled to have sprung from his mutilation. Here is 
 the poet's account of her rise out of the sea : 
 
 " So severing with keen steel 
 The sacred spoils, he from the continent 
 Amid the many surges of the sea 
 Hurled them. Full long they drifted o'er the deeps, 
 Till now swift-circling a white foam arose 
 From that immortal substance, and a nymph 
 
THE THEOGONY. 75 
 
 Was nourished in their midst. The wafting waves 
 
 First bore her to Cythera the divine : 
 
 To wave-encircled Cyprus came she then, 
 
 And forth emerged a goddess in the charms 
 
 Of awful beauty. Where her delicate feet 
 
 Had pressed the sands, green herbage flowering sprang. 
 
 Her Aphrodite gods and mortals name, 
 
 The foam-born goddess : and her name is known 
 
 As Cytherea with the blooming wreath, 
 
 For that she touched Cythera's flowery coast ; 
 
 And Cypris, for that on the Cyprian shore 
 
 She rose amid the multitude of waves. 
 
 Love tracked her steps, and beautiful Desire 
 
 Pursued ; while soon as born she bent her way 
 
 Towards heaven's assembled gods : her honours these 
 
 From the beginning : whether gods or men 
 
 Her presence bless, to her the portion falls 
 
 Of virgin whisperings and alluring smiles, 
 
 And smooth deceits, and gentle ecstasy, 
 
 And dalliance and the blandishments of love." 
 
 F. 258-283. 
 
 The concluding verses of this passage are notable 
 as enumerating the fabled assessors of Venus ; and the 
 italicised lines, which find modern parallels in Milton, 
 Scott, and Tennyson,* may have suggested the invo- 
 
 * " Now when as sacred light began to dawn 
 In Eden on the humid flowers that breathed 
 Their morning incense, when all things that breath 
 From the earth's great altar send up silent praise 
 To the Creator ; " &c. 
 
 Paradise Lost, ix. 
 
 " A foot more light, a step more true, 
 Ne'er from the heath-flower dash'd the dew ; 
 E'en the slight harebell raised its head 
 Elastic from her airy tread." 
 
 Lady of the Lake, i. 18. 
 
76 BESIOD. 
 
 cation of the benignant goddess in the opening of 
 Lucretius : 
 
 " Before thee, goddess, thee ! the winds are hushed, 
 Before thy coming are the clouds dispersed ; 
 The plastic earth spreads flowers before thy feet ; 
 Thy presence makes the plains of ocean smile, 
 And sky shines placid with diffused light." 
 
 Lucret. i. 7-12 (Johnson). 
 
 By the act of Cronus, the Titans, released from dur- 
 ance, arose to a share in the deliverer's dynasty, the 
 Cyclopes and giants still, it would seem, remaining shut 
 up in their prison-house. But before the poet proceeds 
 to the history of this dynasty and succession of rulers, 
 he apparently conceives it to be his duty to go through 
 the generations of the elder deities with a genealogical 
 
 " But light as any wind that blows, 
 So fleetly did she stir ; 
 The flower she touched on dipt and rose, 
 And turned to look at her." 
 
 Tennyson : < The Talking Oak.' 
 
 Even more to the point, which is the charm to create verdure 
 and flower-growth which pertains to Aphrodite's feet, are the 
 following citations from Ben Jonson and Wordsworth : 
 
 " Here she was wont to go, and here, and here, 
 Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow; 
 The world may find the spring by following her, 
 For other print her aery steps ne'er left. 
 And where she went the flowers took thickest root, 
 As she had sowed them with her odorous foot." 
 
 Jonson : ' Sad Shepherd,' i. 1. 
 
 " Flowers laugh before thee in their beds, 
 And fragrance in thy footing treads." 
 
 -Wordsworth : ' Ode to Duty. 
 
THE THEOGONY. 77 
 
 minuteness which, it must he confessed, is now and 
 then tedious ; though, on the other hand, there are occa- 
 sional points of interest in the process, which would 
 be interminable if not so relieved. It is curious, for 
 example, to find " the Hesperian maids n 
 
 " Whose charge o'ersees the fruits of bloomy gold 
 Beyond the sounding ocean, the fair trees 
 Of golden fruitage " 
 
 E. 293-297. 
 
 ranked with Death, and Sleep, and .Gloom and its 
 kindred, as the unbegotten brood of Night. Possibly 
 the clue is to be found in Hesiod's having a glimmer- 
 ing of the Fall and its consequences, because death and 
 woe were in the plucking of the fruit of " that forbid- 
 den tree." Again, from the union of Nereus, the sea- 
 god par excellence, and eldest offspring of Pontus, one 
 of the original powers, with the Oceanid, Doris, are 
 said to have sprung the fifty Nereids, whose names, 
 taken from some characteristic of the sea its wonders, 
 its treasures, and its good auguries correspond in 
 many instances with Homer's list in the Iliad (xviii. 
 39-48), and point to a pre-existent legend approached 
 by both poets. In due order, also, are recorded the 
 children of Tethys and the Titan Oceanus, to wit, 
 the endless rivers and springs, and the water-nymphs, 
 or Oceanids, whose function is to preside over these, 
 and to convey nourishment from the Sire to all things 
 living. As to the list of rivers, it is noticeable that 
 Hesiod includes the Nile, known to Homer only by 
 the name of iEgyptus and the Eridanus, supposed to 
 
78 HESIOD. 
 
 represent the Rhodanus or Rhone ; also that the rivers 
 of Greece appear to he slighted in comparison with 
 those of Asia Minor and the Troad a circumstance to 
 he accounted for hy the Asiatic origin of the poet's 
 father, which would explain his completer geographi- 
 cal knowledge of the colonies than of the mother 
 country. The names of the water-nymphs are refer- 
 able to islands and continents e. g., Europa, Asia, 
 Doris, Persia or to physical characteristics, such as 
 clearness, turbidness, violet hue, and the like. But 
 the poet gives .a good reason for furnishing only a 
 selection : 
 
 " More remain untold. Three thousand nymphs 
 Of Oceanic line, in beauty tread 
 With ample step, and far and wide dispersed 
 Haunt the green earth and azure depth of lakes, 
 A blooming race of glorious goddesses. 
 As many rivers also yet untold, 
 Rushing with hollow dashing sound, were born 
 To awful Tethys, but their every name 
 Is not for mortal man to memorate, 
 Arduous, yet known to all the dwellers round." 
 
 E. 492 501. 
 
 We must not trespass upon our readers' patience, by 
 enumerating with the conscientious genealogist the 
 progeny of the rest of the Titans. Two goddesses, 
 however, stand out from amidst one or other of these 
 broods, as of more special note, and more direct bearing 
 upon the world's government and order. Asteria, the 
 goddess of stars, a Titanid in the second generation, 
 bears to Perses, a god of light, and a Titan of the original 
 stock, one only daughter, Hecate. The attributes of 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 MB MEOGONY. \^cg% 
 
 this goddess, as described by Hesiod, are so discrepant 
 from those ascribed to her by later poets, as to afford 
 strong proof of the antiquity of this poem. She is not, 
 as in later poetry, the patron of magic arts, but the 
 goddess who blesses labour and energy, in field, senate, 
 and forum : 
 
 " When the mailed men rise 
 To deadly battle, comes the goddess prompt 
 To whom she wills, bids rapid victory 
 Await them, and extends the wreath of fame. 
 She sits upon the sacred judgment-seat 
 Of venerable monarchs. She is found 
 Propitious when in solemn games the youth 
 Con tending strive ; there is the goddess nigh 
 With succour : he whose hardiment and strength 
 Victorious prove, with ease the graceful palm 
 Achieving, joyous o'er his father's age, 
 Sheds a bright gleam of glory. She is known 
 To them propitious, who the fiery steed 
 Rein in the course, and them who labouring cleave 
 Through the blue watery waste the untractable way." 
 
 E. 581-595. 
 
 The other goddess, Styx, a daughter of Oceanus, is 
 memorable not more for her own prominent position 
 in ancient fable, than for having amongst her off- 
 spring those iron-handed ministers of Jove, Strength 
 (Kratos) and Force (Bia), whom the classical reader 
 meets again in the opening of the ' Prometheus ' of 
 iEschylus. Their nearness to Zeus is ascribed by 
 Hesiod to the decision with which their mother 
 espoused his cause in the struggle with Cronus and the 
 Titans : 
 
80 HESIOD. 
 
 " Lo ! then incorruptible Styx the first, 
 Swayed by the awful counsels of her sire, 
 Stood on Olympus and her sons beside; 
 There graced with honour and with goodly gifts, 
 Her Zeus ordained the great tremendous oath 
 Of deities ; her sons for evermore 
 Indwellers in the heavens. Alike to all, 
 E'en as he pledged his sacred word, the god 
 Performed ; so reigned he strong in might and power." 
 
 E. 537-545. 
 
 But here Hesiod has been anticipating the sequence 
 of events, and forestalling, to this extent, the second 
 stage of the poem. According to Hesiod, Cronus or 
 Saturn was alive to the faults of his sire's policy of 
 self-protection, and conceived an improvement in the 
 means of checking revolutionary development on the 
 part of his offspring, by imprisoning them in his own 
 bowels rather than their mother's. Mindful of the 
 destiny that " to his own child he should bow down 
 his strength," he proceeded to swallow up his progeny 
 with such regularity, that the maternal feelings of his 
 consort, Ehea, roused her to a spirit of opposition. 
 When about to be delivered of her sixth child, Zeus, 
 she called in the aid of her parents, Heaven and Earth, 
 in the concealment of his birth : 
 
 " And her they sent to Lyctus, to the clime 
 Of fruitful Crete ; and when her hour was come, 
 The birth of Zeus, her youngest born, then Earth 
 Took to herself the mighty babe, to rear 
 "With nurturing softness, in the spacious isle 
 Of Crete ; so came she then, transporting him 
 Swift through the darksome air, to Lyctus first, 
 
THE THEOGONY. 81 
 
 And thence upbearing in her arms, concealed 
 Beneath the sacred ground in sunless cave, 
 Where shagged with densest woods the iEgean mount 
 Impends. But to the imperial son of heaven, 
 "Whilom the King of gods, a stone she gave 
 In wrapt in infant swathes, and this with grasp 
 Eager he snatched, and in his ravening breast 
 Conveyed away ; unhappy ! nor once thought 
 That for the stone his child remained behind 
 Invincible, secure ; who soon with hands 
 Of strength o'ercoming him, should cast him forth. 
 From glory, and himself the immortals rule." 
 
 E. 641-659. 
 
 As the gods in ancient mythology grow apace, Zeus 
 is soon ripe for the task of aiding his mother, whose 
 craft persuades Cronus to disgorge first the stone 
 which he had mistaken for his youngest-born, and 
 then the five children whom he had previously de- 
 voured. A stone, probably meteoric, was shown at i 
 Delphi in Pausanias's day as the stone in question, \ 
 and an object of old memorial to the devout Greek. 
 The rescued brethren at once take part with their de- 
 liverer. The first act of Zeus was, as we have seen, 
 to advance Force and Strength, with their brothers 
 Victory and Eivalry, to the dignity of " a body- 
 guard," and to give their mother Styx the style and 
 functions of " oath-sanctioner." His next was to free 
 from the prison to which their father Uranus had 
 consigned them, the hundred-handed giants, and the 
 Cyclopes, who furnished his artillery of lightnings and 
 hot thunderbolts. His success in the struggle was 
 assured by the oracles of Gaea (Earth), if only he could 
 
 a. c. voL xv. p 
 
82 HESIOD. 
 
 band these towers of strength and muscularity against 
 Cronus and his Titans ; and so the battle was set in 
 array, and a fierce war ensued 
 
 " Each with each 
 Ten years and more the furious battle joined 
 Unintermitted ; nor to either host 
 "Was issue of stern strife nor end ; alike 
 Did either stretch the limit of the war." 
 
 E. 846-850. 
 
 Hesiod's description of the contest, which has been 
 justly held to constitute his title to a rank near Homer 
 as an epic poet, is prefaced by a feast at which Zeus 
 addresses his allies, and receives in turn the assurance 
 of their support. The speeches are not wanting in 
 dignity, though briefer than those which, in his great 
 epic, Milton has moulded on their model. Our Eng- 
 lish poet had bathed his spirit in Hesiod before he 
 essa} T ed the sixth book of his ' Paradise Lost ; ' and it 
 was well and wisely done by the translator of the fol- 
 lowing description of the war betwixt Zeus and the 
 Titans to aim at a Miltonic style and speech : 
 
 " All on that clay roused infinite the war, 
 
 Female and male ; the Titan deities, 
 
 The gods from Cronus sprang, and those whom Zer 
 
 From subterranean gloom released to light : 
 
 Terrible, strong, of force enormous ; burst 
 
 A hundred arms from all their shoulders huge : 
 
 From all their shoulders fifty heads upsprang 
 
 O'er limbs of sinewy mould. They then arrayed 
 
 Against the Titans in fell combat stood, 
 
 And in their nervous grasp wielded aloft 
 
 Precipitous rocks. On the other side alert 
 
THE THEOGONY. 83 
 
 The Titan phalanx closed : then hands of strength 
 
 Joined prowess, and displayed the works of war. 
 
 Tremendous then the immeasurable sea 
 
 Roared : earth resounded : the wide heaven throughout 
 
 Groaned shattering: from its base Olympus vast 
 
 Reeled to the violence of the gods : the shock 
 
 Of deep concussion rocked the dark abyss 
 
 Remote of Tartarus : the shrilling din 
 
 Of hollow tramplings and strong battle-strokes, 
 
 And measureless uproar of wild pursuit. 
 
 So they reciprocal their weapons hurled 
 
 Groan-scattering, and the shout of either host 
 
 Burst in exhorting ardour to the stars 
 
 Of heaven with mighty war-cries either host 
 
 Encountering closed." 
 
 E. 883-908. 
 
 A pause at this point may be excused, seeing that 
 it affords the opportunity of noting the contrast be- 
 tween the heathen and the Christian conceptions of 
 divine strength. In Milton the Messiah has a super- 
 abundance of might : 
 
 Yet half his strength he put not forth, but checked 
 His thunder in mid volley, for he meant 
 Not to destroy, but root them out of heaven." 
 
 Par. Lost, vi. 853-855. 
 
 In the conflict with the Titans, Zeus has to exert all 
 his might to insure victory : 
 
 " Nor longer then did Zeus 
 Curb his full power, but instant in his soul 
 There grew dilated strength, and it was filled 
 With his omnipotence. At once he loosed 
 His whole of might, and put forth all the god. 
 
84 HESJOD. 
 
 The vaulted sky, the mount Olympian flashed 
 
 With his continual presence, for he passed 
 
 Incessant forth, and scattered fires on fires. 
 
 Hurled from his hardy grasp the lightnings flew 
 
 Keiterated swift : the whirling flash 
 
 Cast sacred splendour, and the thunderbolt 
 
 Fell : roared around the nurture-yielding earth 
 
 In conflagration ; for on every side 
 
 The immensity of forests crackling blazed : 
 
 Yea, the broad earth burned red, the streams that mix 
 
 With ocean and the deserts of the sea. 
 
 Round and around the Titan brood of earth 
 
 Rolled the hot vapour on its fiery surge. 
 
 The liquid heat air's pure expanse divine 
 
 Suffused : the radiance keen of quivering flame 
 
 That shot from writhen lightnings, each dim orb, 
 
 Strong though they were, intolerable smote, 
 
 And scorched their blasted vision : through the void 
 
 Of Erebus the preternatural glare 
 
 Spread mingling fire with darkness. But to see 
 
 With human eye and hear with the ear of man 
 
 Had been as if midway the spacious heaven 
 
 Hurtling with earth shocked e'en as nether earth 
 
 Crashed from the centre, and the wreck of heaven 
 
 "Fell ruinous from high. So vast the din 
 
 When, gods encountering gods, the clang of arms 
 
 Commingled, and the tumult roared from heaven." 
 
 E. 908-939. 
 
 To heighten the turmoil, the winds and elements fight 
 on the side of Zeus. The tide of battle turns. Jove's 
 huge auxiliaries overwhelm the Titans with a succes- 
 sion of great missiles, send them sheer beneath the 
 earth, and consign them to a durance " as far beneath, 
 under earth, as heaven is from earth, for equal is the 
 
THE THEOGONY. 85 
 
 space from earth to murky Tartarus/' There, iu the 
 deeper chamber of an abyss from which there is no 
 escape, the Titans are thenceforth imprisoned, with 
 the hundred-handed giants set over them as keepers, 
 and with Day and Night acting as sentries or janitors 
 in front of the brazen threshold : 
 
 " There Night 
 And Daj T , near passing, mutual greeting still 
 Exchange, alternate as they glide athwart 
 The brazen threshold vast. This enters, that 
 Forth issues, nor the two can one abode 
 At once constrain. This passes forth and roams 
 The round of earth, that in the mansion waits 
 Till the d ue season of her travel come. 
 Lo ! from the one the far-discerning light 
 Beams upon earthly dwellers : but a cloud 
 Of pitchy darkness veils the other round : 
 Pernicious Night, aye leading in her hand 
 Sleep, Death's twin brother : sons of gloomy Night, 
 There hold they habitation, Death and Sleep, 
 Dread deities : nor them doth shining sun 
 E'er with his beam contemplate, when he climbs 
 The cope of heaven, or when from heaven descends. 
 Of these the one glides gentle o'er the space 
 Of earth and broad expanse of ocean waves, 
 Placid to man. The other has a heart 
 Of iron : yea, the heart within his breast 
 Is brass unpitying : whom of men he grasps, 
 Stern he retains : e'en to immortal gods 
 A foe." E. 992-1014. 
 
 Of these sentries the readers of Milton's * Paradise 
 Lost ' may recall the description at the opening of the 
 .sixth book; whilst the counterparts of the twin cliil* 
 
86 HESIOD. 
 
 dren of Night may be found in the Iliad,* as well as 
 in the iEneid.t 
 
 Another wonder of the prison-house, in Hesiod's 
 account of it, is Cerberus : 
 
 " A grisly dog, implacable, 
 "Watching before the gates. A stratagem 
 Is his, malicious : them who enter there, 
 With tail and bended ears he fawning soothes, 
 But suffers not that they with backward step 
 Repass : whoe'er would issue from the gates 
 Of Pluto strong and stern Persephone, 
 For them with marking eye he lurks : on them 
 Springs from his couch, and pitiless devours." 
 
 E. 1018-1026. 
 
 In close proximity to this monster was the fabled 
 Styx, in some respects the most awful personage in 
 the 'Theogony.' The legend about her is somewhat 
 obscure, but it is curious as being connected with that 
 of Iris, the rainbow, whose function of carrying up 
 water when any god has been guilty of falsehood 
 seems a vague embodiment of the covenant sealed by 
 the " bow set in the cloud : " 
 
 " Jove sends Iris down 
 To bring the great oath in a golden ewer, 
 The far-famed water, from steep, sky-capt rock 
 Distilling in cold stream. Beneath the earth 
 Abundant from the sacred river-head 
 Through shades of darkest night the Stygian horn 
 Of Ocean flows : a tenth of all the streams 
 To the dread Oath allotted. In nine streams 
 Circling the round of earth and the broad seas 
 
 * II. xiv. 231, &c. t iEn. vi. 278, &c 
 
THE THEOGONY. 87 
 
 With silver whirlpools twined with many a maze, 
 It falls into the deep : one stream alone 
 Glides from the rock, a mighty bane to gods. 
 Who of immortals, that inhabit still 
 Olympus topped with snow, libation pours 
 And is forsworn, he one whole year entire 
 Lies reft of breath, nor yet approaches once 
 The Hectare d and ambrosial sweet repast : 
 But still reclines on the spread festive couch 
 Mute, breathless : and a mortal lethargy 
 O'erwhelms him ; but his malady absolved 
 With the great round of the revolving year, 
 More ills on ills afflictive seize : nine years 
 From everlasting deities remote 
 His lot is cast : in council nor in feast 
 Once joins he, till nine years entire are full. 
 
 So great an oath the deities of heaven 
 Decreed the waters incorruptible, 
 Ancient, of Styx, who sweeps with wandering wave 
 A rugged region : where of dusky Earth, 
 And darksome Tartarus, and Ocean waste, 
 And the starred Heaven, the source and boundary 
 Successive rise and end : a dreary wild 
 And ghastly, e'en by deities abhorred." 
 
 E. 1038-1072. 
 
 Such, according to Hesiod, are the surroundings of 
 the infernal prison-house which received the vanquished 
 Titans when Jove's victory was assured. Not yet, how- 
 ever, could he rest from his toil : he had yet to scotch 
 the half-serpent, half-human Typhosus, the offspring of 
 a new union betwixt Earth and Tartarus, a monster so 
 terror-inspiring by means of its hundred heads and voices 
 to match, that Olympus might well dread another and 
 
88 HMSIOD. 
 
 less welcome master should this pest attain full devel- 
 opment. Zeus, we are told, foresaw the dangei : 
 
 " Intuitive and vigilant and strong 
 He thundered : instantaneous all around 
 Earth reeled with horrible crash : the firmament 
 Roared of high heaven, the ocean streams and seas, 
 And uttermost caverns ! While the king in wrath 
 Uprose, beneath his everlasting feet 
 Trembled Olympus : groaned the steadfast earth. 
 From either side a burning radiance caught 
 The darkly-rolling ocean, from the flash 
 Of lightnings and the monster's darted flame, 
 Hot thunderbolts, and blasts of fiery winds. 
 Glowed earth, air, sea : the billows heaved on high 
 Foamed round the shores, and dashed on every side 
 Beneath the rush of gods. Concussion wild 
 And unappeasable arose : aghast 
 The gloomy monarch of th' infernal dead 
 Trembled : the sub-Tartarean Titans heard 
 E'en where they stood and Cronus in the midst ; 
 They heard appalled the unextinguished rage 
 Of tumult and the din of dreadful war. 
 Now when the god, the fulness of his might 
 Gathering at once, had grasped his radiant arms, 
 The glowing thunderbolt and bickering flame, 
 He from the summit of th' Olympian mount 
 Leapt at a bound, and smote him : hissed at once 
 The horrible monster's heads enormous, scorched 
 In one conflagrant blaze. When thus the god 
 Had quelled him, thunder-smitten, mangled, prone, 
 He fell : beneath his weight earth groaning shook. 
 Flame from the lightning-stricken prodigy 
 Flashed 'mid the mountain hollows, rugged, dark, 
 Where he fell smitten. Broad earth glowed intense 
 From that unbounded vapour, and dissolved : 
 
THE THEOGONY. 89 
 
 As fusile tin, by art of youths, above 
 
 The wide-brimmed vase up-bubbling, foams with heat ; 
 
 Or iron hardest of the mine, subdued 
 
 By burning flame, amid the mountain delis 
 
 Melts in the sacred caves beneath the hands 
 
 Of Vulcan, so earth melted in the glare 
 
 Of blazing lire. He down wide Hell's abyss 
 
 His victim hurled, in bitterness of soul." 
 
 E. 1108-1149. 
 
 The italicised lines may recall the noble image in the 
 'Paradise Lost;'* a passage w T hich Milton's editor, 
 Todd, pronounces grander in conception than Hesiod's. 
 But, as Elton fairly answers, it is only in Milton's 
 reservation that he is superior. " The mere rising of 
 Zeus causing mountains to rock beneath his everlast- 
 ing feet, is sublimer than the firmament shaking from 
 the rolling of wheels." 
 
 After quelling this monster, Zeus is represented be- 
 thinking himself of a suitable consort, and espousing 
 Metis or Wisdom, so as to effect a union of abso- 
 lute wisdom with absolute power. As, however, in the 
 Hesiodic view of the divinity, there was ever a risk of 
 dethronement to the sire at the hand of his offspring, 
 Zeus hit upon a plan which should prevent his wife 
 producing a progeny that might hereafter conspire with 
 her to dethrone him, after the hereditary fashion. He 
 absorbed Metis, with her babe yet unborn, in his own 
 breast, and, according to mythology, found this task 
 
 * " Under his burning wheels 
 The steadfast empyrean shook throughout, 
 All but the throne itself of God," 
 
 vi. 832-834. 
 
90 HESIOD. 
 
 easier through having persuaded her to assume the 
 most diminutive of shapes. Thenceforth he blended 
 perfect wisdom in his own body, and in due time, as 
 from a second womb 
 
 " He from his head disclosed, himself, to birth 
 The blue-eyed maid Tritonian Pallas, fierce, 
 Rousing the war-field's tumult, unsubdued, 
 Leader of armies, awful, whose delight 
 The shout of battle and the shock of war/' 
 
 E. 1213-1217. 
 
 Yet, notwithstanding so summary a putting away of 
 his first wife, Zeus, it appears, had no mind to remain 
 a widower. Themis bare him the Hours ; Eurynome 
 the Graces 
 
 "Whose eyelids, as they gaze, 
 Drop love unnerving ; and beneath the shade 
 Of their arched brows they steal the sidelong glance 
 Of sweetness ; " 
 
 E. 1196-1199. 
 
 and Mnemosyne, a daughter of Uranus, became the 
 mother by him of the Nine Muses, celebrated by 
 Hesiod at the beginning of the poem. With Deme- 
 ter and Latona also he had tender relations, before 
 he finally resigned himself to his sister Hera (Juno), 
 who took permanent rank as Queen of the Gods. 
 From this union sprang Mars and Hebe, and Eilei- 
 tbyia or Lucina : whilst according to Hesiod, who 
 herein differs from Homer, Hephcestus or Vulcan 
 was the offspring of Hera alone, as a set-off to Zeus's 
 sole parentage of Athena. Of the more illicit amours 
 of the fickle king of the gods, and of their issues, and 
 
THE THEOGONY. 91 
 
 the marriages consequent upon these children of the gods 
 espousing nymphs or mortals, Hesiod has still much 
 to tell, in his fashion of genealogising, "before we reach 
 the Heroogony, or list of heroes horn of the union of 
 goddesses with mortal men, which is tacked to the ' The- 
 ogony' proper, as it has come down to us. It is indeed 
 a list and little more ; tracing, for example, the birth of 
 Plutus to the meeting of Demeter with Iasius in the 
 wheat-fields of Crete; of Achilles, to the union of Peleus 
 with Thetis ; of Latinus, Telegonus, and another, to the 
 dalliance of Ulysses with the divine Circe. 
 
 " Lo ! these were they who, yielding to embrace 
 Of mortal men, themselves immortal, gave 
 A race resembling gods." 
 
 E. 1324-1236. 
 Thus virtually ends the * Theogony ' in its extant 
 form, but our sketch of it would not be complete were 
 we to ignore the story of Pandora and Prometheus, 
 which has been passed over at its proper place in the 
 genealogy, with a view to a clearer unfolding of the 
 sequence of the poem. In the I. Works' this legend 
 is an episode ; in the * Theogony ' it is a piece of gen- 
 ealogy, apropos of the offspring of Iapetus, the brother 
 of Cronus, and Clymene. Atlas, one of their sons, was 
 doomed by Zeus to bear up the vault of heaven as an 
 eternal penalty ; Menoetius, another, was for his inso- 
 lence thrust down to Erebus by the lightning-flash. 
 Of Epimetheus, who in the * Works ' accepts the gift 
 of Pandora, it is simply said in the * Theogony ' that 
 he did so, and brought evil upon man by his act. 
 Nothing is said of heedlessness of his brother's cau- 
 
 \Tb r a ^p* 
 
 OF THE 
 
 "UNIVERSITY 
 
 / 
 
92 HESIOD. 
 
 tion ; nothing of the casket of evils, from which in the 
 'Works,' Pandora, by lifting the lid, lets mischief 
 and disease loose upon the world. The key to the 
 difference between the two accounts is to be found 
 in the fact that in the ' Works ' Hesiod narrates the 
 consequences of the sin of Prometheus ; in the ' The- 
 ogony,' the story of the sin itself. In the order ol 
 events that story would run thus : Prometheus enrage? 
 Zeus by scoffing at sacrifices, and by tricking the sage 
 ruler of Olympus into a wrong choice touching the 
 most savoury part of the ox. In his office of arbitrator, 
 he divides two portions, the flesh and entrails covered 
 with the belly on one hand, the bones under a cover 
 of white fat on the other. Zeus chooses after the 
 outward appearance, but, as Hesiod seems to imply, 
 chooses wittingly, for the sake of having a grievance. 
 Thenceforth in sacrifice it was customary to offer the 
 whitening bones at his altars. But the god neither 
 forgot nor forgave the cheat 
 
 " And still the fraud remembering from that hour, 
 The strength of unexhausted fire denied 
 To all the dwellers upon earth. But him 
 Benevolent Prometheus did beguile : 
 The far-seen splendour in a hollow reed 
 He stole of inexhaustible flame. But then 
 Besentment stung the Thunderer's inmost soul, 
 And his heart chafed With anger when he saw 
 The fire far-gleaming in the midst of men. 
 Straight for the flame bestowed devised he ill 
 To man." 
 
 E. 749-759. 
 
 Outwitted twice, he roused himself to take vengeance 
 
THE THEOGONY. 93 
 
 upon Prometheus as well as his clients. On the latter 
 he inflicted the evil of winsome womankind, repre- 
 sented by Pandora, and placed them in the dilemma 
 of either not marrying, and dying heirless, or of find- 
 ing in marriage the lottery which it is still accounted. 
 As to Prometheus and his punishment, Hesiod's ac- 
 count is as follows : 
 
 " Prometheus, versed 
 In various wiles, he bound with fettering chains 
 Indissoluble, chains of galling weight, 
 Midway a column. Down he sent from high 
 The broad-winged eagle : she his liver gorged 
 Immortal. For it sprang with life, and grew 
 In the night season, and the waste repaired 
 Of what by day the bird of spreading wing 
 Devoured." 
 
 E. 696-704. 
 
 This durance was eventually terminated by Hercules 
 slaying the vulture or eagle, and reconciling Zeus and 
 the Titan. Hesiod's moral will sum up the tale : 
 
 " Nathless it is not given thee to deceive 
 The god, nor yet elude the omniscient mind ; 
 For not Prometheus, void of blame to man, 
 Could 'scape the burden of oppressive wrath ; 
 And vain his various wisdom ; vain to free 
 From pangs, or burst the inextricable chain." 
 
 E. 816-821. 
 
 The foregoing sketch will, it is hoped, have enabled 
 English readers to discover in Hesiod's 'Theogony ' not a 
 mere prosy catalogue, but a systematised account of the 
 generation of the gods of Hellas, relieved of excessive 
 
94 HESIOD. 
 
 detail by fervid descriptions, stirring battle-pieces, noble 
 images, and graceful fancies. Such as it was, it appears 
 to have found extensive circulation and acceptance in 
 Greece, and to have formed the chief source of infor- 
 mation amongst Greeks concerning the divine antiquity. 
 This is not the kind of work to admit of a comparison 
 of the so-called Orphic Theogony, which, in point of 
 fact, belongs to a much later date, with that of Hesiod. 
 Enough to state that the former, to use Mr Grote's ex- 
 pression, " contains the Hesiodic ideas and persons, 
 enlarged and mystically disguised." But those who 
 have the time and materials for, carrying out the com- 
 parison for themselves, will be led to discover in the 
 development of religious belief, in the bias towards a 
 sort of unity of Godhead, and in the investment of the 
 powers of nature with the attributes of deity, which 
 characterise the Orphic worship and theogonies, in- 
 direct corroboration of the opinion which assigns a 
 very early date to the simple, unmystical, and, so to 
 speak, unspiritual view of the divine foretime, hai ded 
 down to us in Hesiod's theogonic system. 
 
CHAPTEE V. 
 
 THE SHIELD OF HERCULES. 
 
 It was remarked at the outset that one class of Hesi- 
 odic poems consisted of epics in petto on some subject 
 of heroic mythology. The ' Shield of Hercules ' sur- 
 vives as a sample, if indeed it is to be received as 
 Hesiod's work. Its theme is a single adventure of 
 Hercules, his combat with Cycnus and his father, the 
 war-god, near Apollo's Temple at Pagasae. Shorn of a 
 preface of fifty-six verses borrowed from the ' Catalogue 
 of Women,' and having for their burden the artifice 
 of Zeus with Alcmena, which resulted in the birth of 
 Hercules, a preface manifestly in the wrong place, the 
 'Shield ' is a fairly compact poem, constructed as a frame 
 for the description of the hero's buckler, to which the 
 rest of the poem is ancillary. Among the ancients the 
 balance of opinion leaned to the belief that it was 
 written by the author of the ' Theogony ; ' but though 
 there is insufficient ground for the wholesale deprecia- 
 tion cast upon it by Mure, in his ' History of the Lan- 
 guage and Literature of Ancient Greece/ it can hardly 
 be maintained that the ' Shield of Hercules ' is a poem 
 
96 HESIOD. 
 
 of the same age and authorship as the ' Works * or the 
 * Theogony.' The sounder criticism of Muller deems 
 it worthy to be set side by side with Homer's account 
 t>f the Shield of Achilles in the 13th book of the 
 Iliad, and characterises it as executed in the genuine 
 spirit of the Hesiodian school. Were it desirable, it 
 might be shown from the writings of the same critic* 
 that the objects represented on Hesiod's shield were in 
 fact the first subjects of the Greek artificers in bronze, 
 and that there are proofs in the accoutrement of Her- 
 cules, not with club and lion's skin, but like other 
 heroes, of a date for this poem not posterior to the 
 40th Olympiad. 
 
 It has, no doubt, been the ill-fortune of this poem 
 to have attracted more than its fair share of botchers 
 and interpolators, and the discrimination of the true 
 gold from the counterfeit and base metal belongs rather 
 to a critical edition of the Hesiodic remains ; but in 
 the glance which we propose to bestow upon the work 
 as it has come down to us, it will be shown that, after 
 considerable allowance for interpolated passages, a 
 residuum of fine heroic poetry will survive the pro- 
 cess. 
 
 The poem proper, it has been said, begins at v. 57. 
 Hercules, on reaching manhood, had undertaken an 
 expedition against a noted robber, Cycnus, the son of 
 Ares and Pelopia. This Cycnus used to infest the 
 mountain-passes between Thessaly and Eceotia, and 
 sacrilegiously waylay the processions to Delphi. It 
 seems he would have been willing to buy off Apollo's 
 * Hist. Gr. Lit., i. 132. 
 
THE SHIELD OF HERCULES. 97 
 
 wrath by building him at Pagasae an altar of the horns 
 of captured beasts ; but the god loved his shrine too 
 well to compound matters so easily, and instead of 
 doing so, appears to have commissioned Hercules to 
 exact reparation from the robber. The poem opens 
 with the approach of the hero, with his charioteer and 
 kinsman, Iolaus, to the robber's haunt : 
 
 " There in the grove of the far-darting god 
 He found him, and, insatiable of war, 
 Ares, his sire, beside. Both bright in arms, 
 Bright in the sheen of burning flame they stood 
 On their high chariot, and the horses fleet 
 Trampled the ground with rending hoofs ; around 
 In parted circle smoked the cloudy dust, 
 Up-dashed beneath the trampling hoofs, and cars 
 Of complicated frame. The well-framed cars 
 Rattled aloud ; loud clashed the wheels, while wrapt 
 In their full speed the horses flew. Rejoiced 
 The noble Cycnus ; for the hope was his 
 Jove's warlike offspring and his charioteer 
 To slay, and strip them of their gorgeous mail. 
 But to his vaunts the prophet god of day 
 Turned a deaf ear : for he himself set on 
 The assault of Heracles." 
 
 E. 81-97. 
 
 Kone but Hercules, we are told, could have faced 
 the unearthly light with which the sheen of the war- 
 god's armour and the glare of his fire-flashing eyes lit 
 up. the sacred enclosure and its environs. He, how- 
 ever, is equal to the occasion. Probably, if we had the 
 poem as it was written, the hero would not be repre- 
 sented as in the text, employing this critical moment 
 in irrelevant speeches to his charioteer to the effect 
 
 a. c. vol. xv. ' G 
 
98 HESIOD. 
 
 that the labours (in which, by the way, his soul de- 
 lighted) were all occasioned by the folly of that chari- 
 oteer's father, Iphiclus. It was an odd time to twit 
 his comrade and his brother's son with that brother's 
 errors, when a fight with Ares, the god of war, was 
 imminent. Iolaus's answer is more to the point. He 
 bids his chief rely on Zeus and Poseidon for victory in 
 the encounter, and urges him to don his armour in 
 readiness for a fray in which the race of Alcseus, to 
 which Hercules jputatively belongs, shall get the vic- 
 tory : 
 
 " He said, and Heracles smiled stern his joy, 
 Elate of thought : for he had spoken words 
 Most welcome. Then in winged accents thus : 
 'Jove-fostered hero, it is e'en at hand, 
 The battle's rough encounter : thou, as erst, 
 In martial prudence firm, aright, aleft, 
 "With vantage of the fray unerring guide 
 Areion, huge and sable-maned ; and me 
 Aid in the doubtful conflict, as thou may'st.'" 
 
 E. 157-165. ' 
 
 It would appear that the horse here mentioned owes 
 its prominence to being of divine strain, and the off- 
 spring of the sea-god. The other member of the pair 
 is not named, because of the transcendent breed of its 
 yoke-fellow, who is, in the twenty-third book of the 
 Iliad, said to belong to Adrastus. ' 
 
 But now the hero begins his war-toilet, donning his 
 greaves of mountain-brass, the corselet which is Athe- 
 na's gift, and the sword from the same donor, which 
 he slings athwart his shoulders. Of the arrows in his 
 quiver the poet says 
 
THE SHIELD OF HERCULES. 99 
 
 " Shuddering horrors these 
 Inflicted, and the agony of death 
 Sudden, that chokes the suffocative voice : 
 The points were barbed with death and bitter-steeped 
 "With human tears : burnished the length'ning shafts, 
 And they were feathered from the tawny plume 
 Of eagles." 
 
 E. 177-183. 
 
 The heroic spear and helm complete his equipment, 
 save and except the shield, to which it has been above 
 noted that all the rest is introductory. This would 
 seem to have been a circular disc, with a dragon for 
 centre, and the parts \between it and the outer rim 
 divided by layers of cyanus or blue steel into four 
 compartments of enamel, ivory, electrum, and gold. 
 According to Miiller,* a battle of wild boars and lions 
 forms a narrow band round the middle. The first con- 
 siderable band which surrounds the centre-piece in the 
 circle consists of four departments, of which two contain 
 warlike, and two peaceable subjects, so that the entire 
 shield contains, as it were, a sanguinary and a tranquil 
 side. The rim of the shield is surrounded by the 
 ocean. An idea of the poem is best gathered from 
 some of the details of the several parts. Perched in 
 the centre on the dragon's head 
 
 " Stern Strife in air 
 Hung hovering, and arrayed the war of men ; 
 Haggard ; whose aspect from all mortals reft 
 All mind and soul ; whoe'er in brunt of arms 
 Should match their strength, and face the son of Zeus, 
 Below, this earth their spirits to the abyss 
 
 * Hist. Gr. Lit., i. 132. 
 
100 HESIOD. 
 
 Descend ; and through the flesh that wastes away 
 Beneath the parching Sun, their whitening bones 
 Start forth and moulder in the sable dust." 
 
 E. 200-208. 
 
 Around this central image are grouped the appro- 
 priate forms of " Bout," " Eailying," " Terror," " Tu- 
 mult," " Carnage," and " Discord ; " but in close proxi- 
 mity to the dragon's head came twelve serpent-heads, 
 freezing with dread all mortal combatants, and endowed, 
 it should seem, with properties not inherent in the 
 metal of the shield. The translation is as follows : 
 
 "Oft as he 
 Moved to the battle, from their clashing fangs 
 A sound was heard. Such miracles displayed 
 The buckler's held with living blazonry 
 Resplendent ; and those fearful snakes were streaked 
 O'er their cerulean backs with streaks of jet, 
 And their jaws blackened with a jetty dye." 
 
 E. 224-230. 
 
 But the original seems to imply that the rows of teeth, 
 with which each serpent was finished, actually gnashed 
 and clashed while Hercules was fighting. This, as Mr 
 Paley suggests, may have been a mechanical device 
 like that in the Theban Shields mentioned in the 
 ' Phoenissse ' of Euripides, v. 11-26 ; or a bit of the mar- 
 vellous a " Munchausenism," such as ancient poets 
 affect in enhancing the wonder of some work of the 
 gods. Whichever it was, a like demand on our 
 credulity is made in two other passages ; one, where in 
 another compartment Perseus is represented as seeming 
 to hover over the shield's surface, like a man flying 
 low in air, and to flit like a thought : 
 
THE SHIELD OF HERCULES. 101 
 
 u There was the knight, of fair-haired Danae born, 
 Perseus, nor yet the buckler with his feet 
 Touched, nor yet distant hovered : strange to think ; 
 For nowhere on the surface of the shield 
 He rested : so the crippled artist god, 
 Illustrious, framed him with his hands in gold." 
 
 E. 297 302. 
 
 The other is where the noise of the Gorgons' feet, as 
 they tread, is represented as realised in connection 
 with the sculptured shield : 
 
 " Close behind the Gorgons twain 
 Of nameless terror, unapproachable, 
 Came rushing : eagerly they stretched their arms 
 To seize him : from the pallid adamant 
 Audibly as they rushed, the clattering shield 
 Clanked with a sharp shrill sound/' 
 
 E. 314-319. 
 
 Next to the serpent-heads on the shield was wrought 
 a fight betwixt boars and lions an occasion to the poet 
 of spirited description : 
 
 " Wild from the forest, herds of boars were there, 
 And lions, mutual glaring : these in wrath 
 Leaped on each other ; and by troops they drove 
 Their onset : nor yet these nor those recoiled, 
 Nor quaked in fear : of both the backs uprose, 
 Bristling with anger : for a lion huge 
 Lay stretched amidst them, and two boars beside, 
 Lifeless : the sable blood down-dropping oozed 
 Into the ground. So these with bowed backs 
 Lay dead beneath the terrible lions ; they 
 For this the more incensed, both savage boars 
 And tawny lions, chafing sprang to war." 
 
 E. 231-242. 
 
102 IIES10D. 
 
 Next came tlie battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs, 
 the names of both races corresponding in the main with 
 those in the first book of the Iliad. Both bands are 
 wrought in silver, their arms and missiles in gold. 
 The Centaurs, it is noteworthy, have not yet assumed 
 the double form of man and beast, of which the first 
 mention occurs in Pindar (Pyth. ii. 80), but are hero 
 the rude monsters we find under the same name in the 
 Iliad and Odyssey a fact which is of some importance 
 in fixing the comparatively early date of the shield. 
 On the same compartment is wrought, the poet tells 
 us, Ares in his war- chariot, attended by Pear and 
 Consternation ; whilst Pallas, taking the spoil, spear 
 in hand, with helmed brow and her aegis athwart her 
 shoulders, is depicted as she sets the battle in array, 
 and rushes forth to mingle in the war din. 
 
 After a description following next of the material 
 wealth of Olympus, which has been suspected of 
 spuriousness, as savouring of post-Homeric style and 
 ideas, occurs a curious presentment of a harbour and 
 surging sea, wrought of tin, in which silver dolphins are 
 chasing the lesser fish, and amusing themselves with 
 gorging these, and spouting up water, whale fashion. 
 The little fish are wrought in brass. A later addition 
 to the picture is obviously interpolated from Theo- 
 critus (i. 39), namely, the fisherman on a crag 
 
 " Observant, in his grasp who held a net, 
 Like one that poising rises to the throw." 
 
 What is needed to complete the picture in the 
 Alexandrian poet is, however, de trop here. 
 
THE SHIELD OF HERCULES. 103 
 
 The description of Perseus, and his encounter with 
 the Gorgon s, has been partially anticipated, though our 
 citations did not include the Gorgon's head covering all ( 
 his hack, his silver knapsack with gold tassels, or his 
 invisible cap, the " helmet of Hades," which occurs in 
 the fifth book of the Iliad, and has passed into a proverb. 
 Above this group were wrought two cities, one at war, 
 the other at peace. The details of the former are life- 
 like ; able-bodied men engaged in fight, women beat- 
 ing their breasts upon the walls, the elders at the 
 gates asking help of the blessed gods ; whilst the 
 Fates with interest survey and fan the work of siege 
 and slaughter with a prospect to a coming banquet of 
 blood : 
 
 " Hard by there stood 
 Clotho, and Lachesis, and Atropos 
 Somewhat in years inferior : nor was she 
 A mighty goddess ; yet those other Fates 
 Exceeding, and of birth the elder far." 
 
 E. 346-350. 
 
 Had the translator read size for years, Hesiod's ac- 
 count would have tallied with the evidence of vases and 
 terra-cottas, which represent Clotho as the tallest, and 
 Atropos the most decrepit of the weird sisters. Ap- 
 propriately near this group is seen 
 
 u Misery, wan and ghastly, worn with woe, 
 Arid and swoln of knee, with hunger's pains 
 Faint falling : from her lean hands long the nails 
 Outgrew : an ichor from her nostrils flowed. 
 Blood from her cheeks distilled to earth : with teeth 
 All wide, disclosed in grinning agony 
 
104 HESIOD. 
 
 She stood : a cloud of dust her shoulders spread, 
 And her eyes ran with tears " 
 
 E. 355-362. 
 
 The italicised words in the above description recall 
 a curious image of starvation, " pressing a tumid foot 
 with hand from hunger lean," in the 'Works and 
 Days (v. 692), and to some extent point to a kindred 
 authorship of the two poems. 
 
 From this ghastly picture the poet soon carries his 
 readers to a contrast on the same band of the shield 
 a city at peace, which has been supposed to be meant 
 for Thebes. We recognise the towers and the seven 
 gates, and become spectators of bridal processions to 
 the sound of the flute, as opposed as possible to the 
 revels of the war-god in that city in its day of trouble 
 revels which Euripides described as " most unmusical." 
 Here is some account of what is passing : 
 
 " Some on the smooth-wheeled car 
 A virgin bride conducted : then burst forth 
 Aloud the marriage song, and far and wide 
 Loud splendours flashed from many a quivering torch, 
 Borne in the hands of slaves. Gay blooming girls 
 Preceded ; and the dancers followed blithe. 
 These with shrill pipe indenting the soft lip 
 Breathed melody, while broken echoes thrilled 
 Around them : to the lyre with flying touch, 
 Those led the love-enkindling dance. A group 
 Of youths was elsewhere imaged ; to the flute 
 Disporting, some in dances and in song, 
 In laughter others. To the minstrel's pipe 
 So passed they on, and the whole city seemed 
 As filled with pomps, with dances, and with feasts.** 
 
 E. 366-380. 
 
n y 
 
 THE SHIELD OF HERCU^^F^^^ 
 
 A comparison of this passage with its parallel in 
 Homer's shield of Achilles (II. xviii.), encourages the 
 theory that hoth poets had a common ideal, though the 
 representation is more full and prolix in Hesiod. We 
 quote the Homeric description from an unpublished 
 translation : * 
 
 " Two cities of mankind he wrought. In one 
 Marriage was made and revelry went on. 
 Here brides environed with bright torches' blaze 
 Forth from their bowers they lead, and loudly raise 
 The nuptial chant ; and dancers blithely spring, 
 Cheered by the sweet-breathed pipe and harper's string, 
 And women at their doors stand wondering." 
 
 A distinct subject, having nothing to do with the 
 nuptial procession, though perhaps an accessory illus- 
 tration of a city at peace, is formed in the operations 
 of husbandry ; plough ers tucked up and close girt are 
 making the furrow, as on the Homeric shield, yield 
 before the coulter. The equipment of these plough- 
 men carries us back again to the ' Works/ where the 
 husbandman is advised "to sow stripped, plough 
 stripped, and reap stripped," if he would enjoy the gift 
 of Ceres ; and where " stripping " means probably 
 getting rid of the cloak, and wearing only the close 
 tunic : 
 
 " Next arose 
 A field thick set with depth of corn : where some 
 "With sharpened sickle reaped the club-like stalks, 
 Some bound them into bands, and strewed the floor 
 For thrashing." E. 
 
 * By Mr Richard Garnett. 
 
106 RESIOD. 
 
 And in close proximity was the delineation of a vin- 
 tage; some gathering the fruit, vine-sickle in hand, and 
 others carrying it away in baskets. By a marvellous 
 skill in metals, a row of vines had been wrought in 
 gold, waving with leaves and trellises of silver, and 
 bending with grapes represented in some dark metal. 
 Treading the winepress, and expressing the juice, com- 
 pleted the picture, which is less perfect than Homer's 
 parallel passage. 
 
 But there was room found, it would seem, on this 
 part of the shield, for athletic and field sports of vari- 
 ous kinds, the chariot-race being the most elaborate 
 description of the set : 
 
 " High o'er the well-compacted chariots hung 
 The charioteers : the rapid horses loosed 
 At their full stretch, and shook the floating reins. 
 Rebounding from the ground with many a shock 
 Flew clattering the firm cars, and creaked aloud 
 The naves of the round wheels. They therefore toiled 
 Endless : nor conquest yet at any time 
 Achieved they, but a doubtful strife maintained." 
 
 E. 413-420. 
 
 Around the shield's verge was represented the cir- 
 cumambient ocean, girding, as it did in Homer's view^ 
 the flat and circular earth with its boundless flood : 
 
 " Rounding the utmost verge the ocean flowed 
 As in full swell of waters : and the shield 
 All variegated with whole circle bound. 
 Swans of high-hovering wing there clamoured shrill, 
 Who also skimmed the breasted surge with plume 
 Innumerous : near them fishes 'midst the waves 
 Frolicked in wanton leaps,"- 
 
 E. 424-429. 
 
THE SHIELD 0I< HERCULES. 107 
 
 so like the life, the poet adds, as to exact the admira- 
 tion of even Zeus, the artificer's sire and patron. 
 
 So much for the shield : what remains concerns the 
 combat betwixt Hercules, and Cycnus with the war- 
 god to help him. The odds are partially balanced by 
 the aid of the blue-eyed Pallas to the hero, who by 
 her counsel forbears to dream of " spoiling the steeds 
 and glorious armour of a god," a thing which he finds 
 is against the decrees of fate. Nor does the goddess 
 stop at advice, but vouchsafes her invisible presence 
 in the hero's car. As the combatants come to close 
 quarters Hercules resorts to mock civilities, and with 
 taunting allusions asks free passage to the court of 
 Ceyx, king of Iolchos, the father-in-law of Cycnus. 
 As a matter of course the permission is denied. Her- 
 cules and Cycnus leap to the ground, and their chariot- 
 eers drive a little aside to give free scope for the tug 
 of war : 
 
 u As rocks 
 From some high mountain-top precipitate 
 Leap with a bound, and o'er each other. whirled 
 Shock in the dizzying fall ; and many an oak 
 Of lofty branch, pine-tree, and poplar, deep 
 Of root, are crashed beneath them ; as their course 
 Rapidly rolls, till now they reach the plain ; 
 So met these foes encountering, and so burst 
 Their mighty clamour. Echoing loud throughout 
 The city of the Myrmidons gave back 
 Their lifted voices, and Iolchos famed, 
 And Arne, and Anthea's grass-girt walls, 
 And Helice. Thus with amazing shout 
 They joined in battle : all-consulting Zeus 
 Then greatly thundered : from the clouds of heaven 
 
108 HESIOD. 
 
 He cast forth dews of blood, and signal thus 
 Of onset gave to his high-daring son." 
 
 E. 506-522. 
 
 The simile of the dislodged rocks reminds us of 
 Hector's onslaught in the thirteenth book of the 
 Iliad ; but the poetical figure of the cities re-echoing 
 the din and clamour of the conflict, and the portent of 
 the bloody rain-drops, are due to Hesiod's own ima- 
 gination. Close following upon these comes a tissue 
 of similes, so prodigally strewn that they strike the 
 critical as later interpolations. The issue of the fight 
 is conceived in a more genuine strain : 
 
 " Truly then 
 Cycnus, the son of Zeus unmatched in strength 
 Aiming to slay, against the buckler struck 
 His brazen lance, but through the metal plate 
 Broke not. The present of a god preserved. 
 On the other side, he of Amphitryon named, 
 Strong Heracles, between the helm and shield 
 Drave his long spear, and, underneath the chin 
 Through the bare neck smote violent and swift. 
 The murderous ashen beam at once the nerves 
 Twain of the neck cleft sheer : for all the man 
 Dropped, and his force went from him : down he fell 
 Headlong. As falls a thunder- blasted oak, 
 Or perpendicular rock, riven with the flash 
 Of Zeus, in smouldering smoke is hurled from high, 
 So fell he." 
 
 E. 558-573. 
 
 Hercules, so far victorious, awaits the onset of the 
 bereaved war-god with a devout heedfulness of his 
 assessor's injunctions. She from her seat at his side 
 interposes to apprise Ares that any attempt at revenge 
 
THE SHIELD OF HERCULES. 109 
 
 or reprisals must involve a conflict with herself. But 
 the god, sore at his bereavement, heeds not her word, 
 and with violent effort hurls his brazen spear at the 
 liuge shield of his antagonist. In vain; for Pallas 
 diverts the javelin's force. Ares rushes upon Hercu- 
 les, and he, having watched his opportunity, 
 
 " Beneath the well-wrought shield the thigh exposed 
 Wounded with i.ll his slrtiigth, bud thrusting rived 
 The shield's large disk, and cleft it with his lance, 
 And in the midway threw him to the earth 
 Prostrate." 
 
 E. 624-628. 
 
 a curious denouement, wherein an immortal is in bit- 
 ter need of a Deus ex machina. The author of the 
 ' Shield/ however, has provided for the contingency. 
 Pear and Consternation had sat as helpers in the 
 chariot of Cycnus, as Pallas in that of Hercules. 
 They hurry the vanquished god into his car, and, 
 lashing the steeds, transport him without more ado to 
 Olympus. Here the poem should have ended; but a 
 later chronicler seems to have felt, like many a modern 
 novelist, that the minor dramatis personce must be 
 accounted for. And so we have a few lines about the 
 victor spoiling Cycnus, whose obsequies were after- 
 wards duly performed by his respectable father-in-law 
 Ceyx at lolchos. But the tomb erected over the 
 brigand and fane-robber was not suffered to remain in 
 honour. In requital for repeated sacrilege 
 
 u Anaurus foaming high with wintry rains 
 Swept it from sight away. Apollo thus 
 
110 HESIOD- 
 
 Commanded : for that Cycnus ambushed spoiled 
 By violence the Delphic hecatombs." 
 
 E. 681-654 
 
 Thus ends our sole sample extant of the short epiv* 
 which antiquity attributes to Hesiod. With all its 
 repetitions and interpolations, there is in it a residuum 
 of genuine poetry which is happily rescued from the 
 spoils of time. Even as a " fugitive ballad," which 
 Mure has designated it, it is too good to be lost ; and 
 though we may not venture to attribute it confidently 
 to Hesiod, the l Shield ' has its place in classical 
 literature, if we can even accept it as " Hesiodian." 
 
CHAPTEK VI. 
 
 IMITATORS OF HESIOD. 
 
 Although it would be impossible to point to any 
 direct imitation of Hesiod in poetry subsequent tc 
 Virgil's, and though even his is only imitation within 
 certain conditions, it seems incumbent on us to notice 
 briefly the influence, for the most part indirect and 
 unconscious, which his poetry, especially his didactic 
 poetry,, has had upon later poets. Those shorter epic 
 scraps, of which the ' Shield of Hercules ' is a sample, 
 have their modern presentment, if anywhere, in idyls 
 and professed fragments ; but the differences here 
 betwixt the old and the new are so considerable as to 
 make it unsafe to press the likeness. For the 'Theo- 
 gony ' we have one or two modern parallels, though it, 
 too, has served rather for a mine into which Christian 
 apologists might dig for relics of heathen mythology, 
 than as a type to be reproduced at the risk of that 
 endlessness which is associated with genealogies. But 
 as regards Hesiod's ' Works and Days,' there can be 
 no question that its form, and its union of practical 
 teaching with charm of versification, possessed an 
 
112 HESIOD. 
 
 attraction for subsequent generations of poets, and, 
 having "been more or less borrowed from and remod- 
 elled, according to the demands of their subjects, by 
 the poetical grammarians of Alexandria, was handed 
 over as an example to the Alexandrianising poets 
 of Eome. " The ' Phenomena ' of Aratus," writes 
 Professor Conington, in his introduction to the 
 ' Georgics ' " found at least two distinguished trans- 
 lators : Lucretius and Manilius gave the form and 
 colour of poetry to the truths of science ; Virgil and 
 Horace to the rules of art ; and the rear is brought up 
 by such poets as Gratius, Nemesianus, and Serenus 
 Sammonicus." But the 'Phaenomena' of Aratus, and 
 its Poman parallel, the * Astronomica' of Manilius, 
 though conversant with a portion of the same topics 
 as Hesiod's didactic poem, essay a loftier flight of 
 admonitory poetry ; and in them the advance of time 
 has substituted for the simplicity and directness of 
 Hesiod, rhetorical turns and artifices, and the efforts of 
 picturesque description. It is the same with Ovid's 
 contemporary, Gratius Faliscus, if we may judge of 
 him by his fragmentary ' Cynegetica.' In carrying 
 out his design of a didactic poem on the chase and its 
 surroundings, he barters simplicity for a forced eleva- 
 tion of moral tone, and spoils the effect of his real 
 insight into his subject by a fondness for sententious 
 maxims "in season and out of season." Nemesianus, 
 who wrote two centuries or more after Gratius, seems 
 to have so completely made Virgil his model that the 
 influence of Hesiod is imperceptible in his poetry, 
 which is diffuse and laboured, and instinct with exag- 
 
IMITATORS OF HESIOD. 113 
 
 gerated imitation of the Augustan poets. On the 
 whole, it is only between Hesiod and Virgil that solid 
 ground for comparison exists ; and such as institute 
 this comparison will be constrained to admit Mr 
 Conington's conclusion, that the ' Works and Days' 
 as distinctly stimulated Virgil's general conception 
 of the Georgics, as the Idyls of Theocritus that of 
 his Bucolics, or the Iliad and Odyssey that of his 
 iEneid. Uncertainty as to the extent of the frag- 
 mentariness of the model undoubtedly bars a confident 
 verdict upon the closeness of the copy. Propertius 
 may have had other and lost works of Hesiod in his 
 mind's eye when he addressed his great contemporary 
 as repeating in song the Ascraean sage's precepts on 
 vine-culture as well as corn-crops (iii. 26, v. 77). Yet 
 enough of direct imitation survives in the large portion 
 of the first book of the Georgics (wherein Virgil 
 treads common ground) to show that, with many 
 points of contrast, there are also many correspondences 
 between the old Boeotian bard and his smoother Roman 
 admirer ; and that where Virgil does copy, his copying 
 is as unequivocal as it is instructive for a study of 
 finish and refinement. Each poet takes for his theme 
 the same " glorification of labour " which Dean Meri- 
 vale discerns as the chief aim of the Georgics, the 
 difference consisting in the homeliness of the manner 
 of the Greek poet and the high polish of that of the 
 Roman. Each also recognises the time of man's 
 innocency, when this labour was not yet the law 
 of his being ; and the treatment by each of the 
 myth of a golden or Saturnian age is not an inappro- 
 A. c. vol. xv. H 
 
3d by : ^ 
 iiigfc : V 
 die. ) 
 
 114 HESIOD. 
 
 priate ground on which to trace their likeness and 
 unlikeness. As Hesiod's passage was not quoted in 
 our second chapter, its citation will be forgiven here, 
 the version selected being that of Mr Elton : 
 
 " When gods alike and mortals rose to birth, 
 A golden race the immortals formed on earth 
 Of many-Ian guaged men : they lived of old, 
 When Saturn reigned in heaven, an age of gold. 
 Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind, 
 Free from the toils and anguish of our kind. 
 Nor e'er decrepit age misshaped their frame, 
 The hand's, the foot's proportions still the same. 
 Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by : 
 Wealthy in flocks ; dear to the blest on hi; 
 Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die. 
 Theirs was each good ; the life-sustaining soil 
 Yielded its copious fruits, unbribed by toil. 
 They with abundant goods 'midst quiet lands 
 All willing shared the gathering of their hands." 
 
 E. 147-162. 
 
 Yirgil does not set himself to reproduce the myth of 
 the metallic ages of mankind ; but having assuredly 
 the original of the passage just quoted before him, 
 has seen that certain features of it are available for 
 introduction into his account of Jove's ordinance of 
 labour. He dismisses, we shall observe, the realistic 
 allusions to the sickness, death, and decrepit old age, 
 which in the golden days were " conspicuous by their 
 absence," and of which Hesiod had made much. These 
 apparently only suggest to him a couple of lines, in 
 which mortal cares are made an incentive to work, 
 instead of a destiny to be succumbed to ; and the death 
 
IMITATORS OF HESIOD. 115 
 
 of the body is transferred to the sluggish lethargy of 
 nature. To quote a very recent translator of the 
 Georgics, Mr R D. Blackmore : 
 
 " 'Twas Jove who first made husbandry a plan. 
 And care a whetstone for the wit of man ; 
 Nor suffered he his own domains to lie 
 Asleep in cumbrous old-world lethargy. 
 Ere Jove, the acres owned no master swain, 
 None durst enclose nor even mark the plain ; 
 The world was common, and the willing land 
 More frankly gave with no one to demand." 
 
 Georg. i. 121-128. 
 
 In the same spirit Yirgil, in the second book of the 
 Georgics, idealises the serenity of a rural existence, 
 when he says of him who lives it : 
 
 " Whatever fruit the branches and the mead 
 Spontaneous bring, he gathers for his need." 
 
 Georg. ii. 500. 
 
 It is the idea of this spontaneity of boon nature which he 
 has caught from Hesiod, as worth transferring ; and the 
 task is achieved with grace, and without encumbrance. 
 In the description of the process of making a plough, 
 Yirgil appears to copy Hesiod more closely than in the 
 above passage ; and if we may accept Dr Daubeny's 
 translation of the passage in the Georgics, the accounts 
 correspond with a nicety almost incredible, consider- 
 ing the interval between the two poets. The curved 
 piece of wood (or buris) of Virgil; the eight-foot- 
 pole (temo) joined by pins to the hurts (or basse, 
 as it is called in the south of France) ; the bent 
 handle (stiva) and the wooden share (dentale), have 
 
116 HESIOD. 
 
 all their counterparts in the directions for making 
 this implement given by Hesiod ; and the learned 
 author of ' Lectures on Eoman Husbandry ' considers 
 that both the Boeotian and the Eoman plough may be 
 identified with the little improved Herault plough, still 
 in use in the south of France.* The storm-piece of 
 the earlier poet, again, is obviously present to the 
 mind of the graphic improver of it in the Augustan 
 age ; though, in place of one point, the latter makes at 
 least half-a-dozen, and works up out of his predecessor's 
 hints a masterpiece of elaborate description. It need 
 scarcely be remarked, for it must strike every reader of 
 these poets, whether at first hand or second, that Yirgil 
 constructs his "natural calendar * upon the very model 
 of Hesiod's. He catches the little hints of his model 
 with reference to the bird-scarer who is to follow the 
 plough-track ; about the necessity of stripping to plough 
 or sow; about timing ploughing and seed-time by 
 the setting of the Pleiads ; and about divers other 
 matters of the same rural importance. To quit the 
 first book of the Georgics, we see Hesiod's influence 
 occasionally exerting itself in the third ; for, a propos 
 of the sharp-toothed dog which Hesiod prescribes in 
 his l Works and Days ' (604, &c), and would have 
 the farmer feed well, as a protection from the night- 
 prowling thief, we find a parallel in Yirgil : t 
 
 " Nor last, nor least, the dogs must have their place ! 
 With fattening whey support that honest race : 
 Swift Spartan whelps, Molossian mastiffs bold : 
 With these patrolling, fear not for the fold, 
 
 * Rom. Husb., 100-102. + Georg. iii. 403-408. 
 
IMITA TORS OF HESIOD. 1 1 7 
 
 Though nightly thieves and wolves would fain attack, 
 And fierce Iberians never spare thy hack." 
 
 Blackmore, 94, 95. 
 
 And a lover of Hesiod's simple muse would be struck 
 again and again, in the perusal of the four Georgics, 
 with expansions of some germ from the older poet, 
 calculated to make him appreciate more thoroughly the 
 genius of both the original and the imitator. The 
 landmarks and framework, as it were, of both, are the 
 risings and settings of stars, the migrations of birds, 
 and so forth : and though with Hesiod it was sim- 
 plicity and nature that prompted him to avail himself 
 of these, it is no small compliment that Virgil saw 
 their aptitude for transference, and turned what was 
 so spontaneous and unstudied to the purposes of art 
 and culture. It is no fault, by the way, of Yirgil, 
 that he has not reproduced more fully and faithfully 
 Hesiod's catalogue of " Lucky and Unlucky Days," at 
 the end of his poem. The original is obscure and 
 ambiguous. Yirgil has caught all the transmutable 
 matter in his passage of the first Georgic. * 
 
 As has been already said, when we have done with 
 Yirgil the resemblances of his successors and imitators 
 to Hesiod are very faint and indistinct. To pass to 
 our own poetry, it is natural to inquire, Have we 
 aught of a kindred character and scope, that can claim 
 to be accounted in any degree akin to Hesiod's ' Works 
 and Days'? It need hardly be said that there is not 
 a shadow of resemblance between him and Darwin 
 
 * v. 276-286 
 
118 HESIOD. 
 
 or Bloomfield, though we have somewhere seen their 
 names, as poets, set in juxtaposition. He is their 
 master as a poet ; he is their superior in simplicity. 
 He is essentially ancient ; they are wholly and entirely 
 modern in thought, form, and expression. The didac- 
 tic style, no doubt, has lent Hesiod's form to many 
 of the compositions of the Augustan period of English 
 literature. "We have had," says Mr Conington, in 
 his introduction to the Georgics, "Essays on Satire, 
 Essays on unnatural Flights in Poetry, Essays on 
 translated Yerse, Essays on Criticism, Essays on Man, 
 Arts of preserving Health, Arts of Dancing, and even 
 Arts of Cookery; the Chase, the Eleece, and the 
 Sugar-cane." But, with his usual clear-sightedness, 
 the late Oxford Professor of JLatin saw that all these 
 have grasped simply the form, and let go the spirit, of 
 their model. The real parallel is to be found between 
 the Ascrsean farmer -poet and the quaint shrewd 
 " British Yarro " of the sixteenth century 
 
 " Who sometime made the points of husbandry " 
 
 Thomas Tusser, gentleman : a worthy whose " five 
 hundred points, as well for the champion or open 
 country as for the woodland or several," are quite 
 worth the study of individual readers, not to say 
 of agricultural colleges ; so much wisdom, wit, and 
 sound sense do they bring together into verse, which 
 is, in very many characteristics, truly Hesiodian. 
 
 Endowed with an ear for music and a taste for 
 farming, a compound of the singing-man (of St Paul's 
 and Norwich cathedrals) and of the Suffolk grazier, a 
 
IMITATORS OF 1IESI0D. 119 
 
 liberally-educated scholar withal for his day, this Tusser 
 possessed several qualifications for the rank of our 
 " English Hesiod." But unlike, so far as we know, the 
 father of didactic poetry, neither his fanning nor 
 his poetry brought him success or profit ; and his own 
 generation regarded him as one who, with "the gift 
 of sharpening others by his advice of wit," combined 
 an inaptitude to thrive in his own person. He was 
 born in 1523, and died in 1580. His 'Five Hundred 
 Points of Good Husbandry ' was printed in 1557 ; and 
 no one will gainsay, after perusal of them, the opinion 
 that, in the w r ords of Dr Thomas Warton,* " this old 
 English Georgic has much more of the simplicity of 
 Hesiod than of the elegance of Virgil." Homely, 
 quaint, and full of observation, his matter is curiously 
 akin to that of the old Boeotian, after a due allowance 
 for the world's advance in age ; while the manner and 
 measures are Tusser's own, and notable, not indeed as 
 bearing any resemblance to the Hesiodic hexameters, 
 but for a facility and variety consistent with the 
 author's musical attainments, which are demonstrated 
 in his use indeed it may be his invention of more 
 than one popular English metre. 
 
 Although Tusser was indebted to Eton and King's 
 College for his education, we have no reason to 
 suppose that he had such acquaintance with Hesiod 
 as could have suggested the shape and scope of his 
 poem. It is better to attribute the coincidence of 
 form to the practical turn and homely bent of the 
 muse of each. That there is such coincidence will 
 * History of English Poetry, iii. 298-310. 
 
120 HESIOD. 
 
 be patent to the most cursory reader : the arrangement 
 by months and by seasons, the counsels as to thrift 
 and good economy, the eye to a well-ordered house, 
 ever and anon provoke comparison. Warton, in- 
 deed, by a slip of the pen, denies the English Hesiod 
 the versatility which indulges in digressions and invo- 
 cations, and avers that " Ceres and Pan are not once 
 named" by Tusser. But in an introduction to his 
 book may be found at once a refutation of this not 
 very serious charge, and, what is perhaps more to 
 the point, a profession of the author's purpose in the 
 volume, which has entitled him to a place of honour 
 among early English poets. He writes as follows : 
 
 " Though fence well kept is one good point, 
 
 And tilth well done in season due ; 
 Yet needing salve, in time t' anoint, 
 Is all in all, and needful true : 
 As for the rest, 
 Thus think I best, 
 As friend doth guest, 
 With hand in hand to lead thee forth 
 
 To Ceres' camp, there to behold 
 A thousand things as richly worth 
 As any pearl is worthy gold." 
 
 Mavor's Tusser, xiii. 
 
 In the body of the work, expressions, sentiments, and 
 sage counsels again and again remind us of Hesiod's 
 lectures to Perses. The lesson that " 'tis ill sparing 
 the liquor at the bottom of the cask " reappears in such 
 stanzas as ; 
 
 " Son, think not thy money purse-bottom to burn. 
 But keep it for profit to serve thine own turn : 
 
IMITATORS OF HESIOD. 121 
 
 A fool and his money be soon at debate, 
 Which after, with sorrow, repents him too late." 
 
 xxiii. .11. 
 
 " Some spareth too late, and a number with him 
 The fool at the bottom, the wise at the brim : 
 Who careth nor spareth till spent he hath all, 
 Of bobbing, not robbing, be careful he shall." 
 
 xxviii. 34. 
 
 At the same time he commends, quite in Hesiod's 
 style, a prudent avoidance of the law-courts : 
 
 u Leave princes' affairs undescanted on, 
 And tend to such doings as stands thee upon. 
 Fear God, and oifend not the prince nor his laws, 
 And keep thyself out of the magistrate's claws." 
 
 xxix. 39. 
 
 Quite in Hesiod's groove, too, is Tusser's opinion about 
 borrowing and lending ; and his adagial way of dis- 
 couraging the claims of relations and connections to a 
 share in our farm profits savours curiously of the coun- 
 sel of the * Works and Days : 
 
 " Be pinched by lending for kiffe nor for kin, 
 Nor also by spending, by such as come in : 
 Nor put to thine hand betwixt bark and the tree, 
 Lest through thine own folly so pinched thou be. 
 
 As lending to neighbour in time of his need 
 Wins love of thy neighbour, and credit doth breed : 
 So never to crave, but to live of thine own, 
 Brings comforts a thousand, to many unknown." 
 
 xxvii. 30, 3L 
 
 We have seen, too, how Hesiod makes a point of pre- 
 scribing very strictly the staff which a farmer may 
 
122 HESIOD. 
 
 keep without detriment to his purse and garner, of 
 cautioning against too many helps, and so forth. 
 Tusser is a little in advance of the Boeotian farmer- 
 poet as to the full complement of hinds and dairy- 
 maids ; hut the spirit of the following stanza is in 
 exact keeping with the tone of the elder bard : 
 
 " Delight not for pleasure two houses to keep, 
 Lest charge above measure upon thee do creep ; 
 And Jankin and Jennykin cozen thee so, 
 To make thee repent it ere year about go." 
 
 xxx. 45. 
 
 It might be shown by other quotations that Tusser, 
 like Hesiod, attaches due importance to the perform- 
 ance of religious ceremonies, and inculcates in fitting 
 language seasonable offerings of thankfulness to a boun- 
 teous Providence ; that he upholds well-timed hospi- 
 tality, and commends a principle of liberality towards 
 man or beast, if they deserve it. Of course, too, even 
 in his shrewd homeliness, he does not so entirely as 
 Hesiod calculate his hospitalities and liberalities with 
 a sole eye to getting a quid pro quo. But it is perhaps 
 more to the purpose to cite a few additional stanzas of 
 Tusser's "Advice to Husbandmen," according to the 
 season or month, with a stray verse or two which, 
 mutatis mutandis, may serve to show that the spirit 
 of Tusser was in effect the same which animated 
 Hesiod so many centuries before him. This quatrain 
 from " December's Husbandry " is an obvious parallel, 
 to begin with : 
 
 " Yokes, forks, and such other let bailiff spy out, 
 And gather the same, as he walketh about ; 
 
IMITATORS OF IIESIOD. 123 
 
 Andafter, at leisure, let this be his hire, 
 To heath them and trim them at home by the fire."* 
 
 lx. 9. 
 
 Here again, in " June's Husbandry," is good provision 
 for hay-making and hauling : 
 
 " Provide of thine own to have all things at hand, 
 Lest work and the workman unoccupied stand : 
 Love seldom to borrow, that thinkest to save, 
 For he that once lendeth twice looketh to have. 
 
 Let cart be well searched without and within, 
 Well clouted and greased, ere hay-time begin : 
 Thy hay being carried, though carter had sworn, 
 Cart's bottom well boarded is saving of corn." 
 
 p. 163. 
 
 And here sound practical counsel (sadly neglected too 
 often) for insuring a safe corn-harvest : 
 
 " Make suer of reapers, get harvest in hand : 
 The corn that is ripe doth but shed as it stand. 
 Be thankful to God for His benefits 'sent, 
 And willing to save it by honest intent." 
 
 p. 182. 
 
 One would have liked to be able to think that so 
 sound a counsellor had niade a better trade of farming 
 than he seems to have done. His ideas of being him- 
 self captain of every muster of his hands (p. 169), of 
 encouraging them by extra wages at time of stress, and 
 indeed all his suggestive hints, are fresh and pertinent 
 even at this latter day ; and if Thomas Tusser were 
 more read, he would not fail of being ol'tener quoted. 
 
 * To heath or hath is to set green wood by the heat of a fire. 
 Norfolk and Suffolk Dialect. 
 
124 HESIOD. 
 
 How timely, for example, is this advice to the 
 farmer, which in a Christian land should find thorough 
 acceptance, no matter what may have "been the 
 demands upon him of the ill-advised amongst his 
 labourers ! 
 
 " Once ended the harvest, let none be beguiled ; 
 Please such as did help thee man, woman, and child : 
 Thus doing, with alway such help as they can, 
 Thou winnest the praise of the labouring man." 
 
 p. 188. 
 
 But, to complete our parallel with Hesiod, Tusser 
 has his descriptions of the winds and planets ; is alive 
 to the wisdom of the " farm and fruit of old," as well 
 as of the improved courses of husbandry in his own 
 day : and if he now and then strikes out paths which 
 have no parallel in Hesiod, even in such cases the 
 homeliness and naivete of his counsel savours of the 
 ancient poet in whose footsteps he so distinctly treads. 
 Though the domestic fowl does not figure in the 
 4 Works and Days,' and the domestic cat is equally 
 unmentioned by the Boeotian didactic poet, the follow- 
 ing mention of them both by- Tusser reminds us of his 
 practical economic views, and would not have been 
 deemed by him beneath the dignity of the subject, 
 had poultry and mousers asserted the importance in 
 old days which they now demand : 
 
 " To rear up much poultry and want the barn-door 
 Is nought for the ponlter, and worse for the poor ; 
 So now to keep hogs, and to starve them for meat, 
 Is as to keep dogs for to bawl in the street. 
 
IMITATORS OF HES10D. 125 
 
 As cat, a good mouser, is needful in house, 
 Because for her commons she killeth the mouse ; 
 So ravening curs, as a many do keep, 
 Makes master want meat, and his dog to kill sheep." 
 
 p. 48, 49. 
 
 Dr Thomas "Warton, indeed, was disposed to regard 
 Tusser as the mere rude beginner of what Mason per- 
 fected in his ' English Garden ; ' but it is a reasonable 
 matter of taste whether the latter work at all comes up 
 to the former in aught save an elegance bordering on 
 affectation ; and certainly there is nothing in Mason to 
 suggest the faintest comparison with Hesiod's didactic 
 poem. Tusser's work is probably its closest parallel 
 in all the intervening ages. 
 
 It remains to inquire whether Hesiod's ' Theogony ' 
 has found with posterity as close an imitator as the work 
 on which we have been dwelling. But this question 
 is easily answered in the negative. The attempts of 
 the so-called Orphic poets the most considerable of 
 whom were Cercops, a Pythagorean, and Onomacritus, 
 a contemporary of the Pisistratids to improve on the 
 elder theogonies and cosmogonies, can hardly be men- 
 tioned in this category, being more mystical than 
 mythical, and in the nature of refinements and ab- 
 stractions, higher than the Hesiodic chaos. Nor, 
 though full of mythologic learning even to cumbrous- 
 ness, can the five hymns of the Alexandrian Callima- 
 chus be said to have aught of resemblance to tl^e 
 venerable system of Greek theogonies, which owes its 
 promulgation to the genius of Hesiod. Studied and 
 laboured to a fault, the legends which he connects 
 
 J^* CALIFOK* 
 
126 HESIOD. 
 
 with the subjects of each hymn in succession are- 
 tricked out with poetic devices very alien to the more 
 direct muse of Hesiod ; and though Callimachus pro- 
 fesses to record the speeches of Zeus and Artemis, and 
 to divine the thoughts and feelings that animate the 
 Olympians, his readers cannot help feeling that he 
 lacks the " afflatus" in which Hesiod implicitly believed, 
 and which, though it suited the sceptical Lucian to 
 twit as assumed, and unattended by results, certainly 
 imparts an air of earnestness to his poetry.* Further- 
 more and this is the plainest note of difference the 
 hymns of Callimachus have little or no pretence to be 
 "genealogies," a form of poetry, to say the truth, not 
 sufficiently attractive to please an advanced stage of 
 literary cultivation, and a form, too, that lacks any 
 memorable imitation in Latin poetry. To glance at 
 our own poetic literature, the nearest approach to the 
 form and scope of the '. Theogony ' is to be found, it 
 strikes us, in Drayton's ' Polyolbion,' a poem charac- 
 terised by the same endeavour to systematise a vast 
 mass of information, and to genealogise, so to speak, 
 the British hills, and woods, and rivers, which are 
 personified in it. 
 
 Drayton, it cannot be denied, has infinitely more 
 fancy, and lightens the burden of his accumulated 
 detail by much greater liveliness and idealism ; yet it 
 is impossible not to be struck also with his enumeration 
 of the streams and mountains of a given district, each 
 invested with a personality, each for the nonce regarded 
 as of kin to its fellow, as a singular revival of Hesiod's 
 * Dialogue between Lucian and Hesiod, i. 35. 
 
IMITATORS OF IIESIOD. 127 
 
 method in his ' Theogony ; ' a revival, to judge from a 
 passage in his first song, surely not undesigned : 
 
 " Ye sacred bards, that to your harps' melodious strings 
 Sung the ancient heroes' deeds (the monuments of kings), 
 And in your dreadful verse engraved the prophecies, 
 The aged world's descents, and genealogies ; 
 If as those Druids taught, which kept the British rites 
 And dwelt in darksome caves, there counselling with 
 
 sprites 
 (But their opinion failed, by error led away, 
 As since clear truth hath showed to their posterity), 
 When these our souls by death our bodies do forsake, 
 They instantly again do other bodies take ; 
 I could have wished your spirits redoubled in my breast, 
 To give my verse applause to time's eternal rest." 
 
 Polyolb., Song i. 30-42. 
 
 Our theory of a conscious reference to Hesiod's 
 1 Theogony ' by Drayton depends on the fourth verse 
 of this extract; but, independently of this, almost any 
 page in the ' Polyolbion would furnish one or more 
 illustrations of genealogism curiously Hesiodic. We 
 might cite the rivers of Monmouth, Brecon, and 
 Glamorgan, in the fourth song, or the Herefordshire 
 streams in the seventh ; but lengthy citations are im- 
 possible, and short extracts will ill represent the like- 
 ness which a wider comparison would confirm. In 
 Pope's "Windsor Forest," the enumeration of the " sea- 
 born brothers " of Old Father Thames, from " winding 
 Isis " to " silent Darent," 
 
 " Who swell with tributary urns his flood," 
 
 is indubitably a leaf out of Drayton's book, and so 
 
128 HESIOD. 
 
 indirectly a tribute to Hesiod. Darwin's ' Botanic 
 Garden/ and the ' Loves of the Plants/ affect indeed 
 the genesis of nymphs and sylphs, of gnomes and 
 salamanders ; but the fanciful parade of these, amidst 
 a crowd of metaphors, tropes, and descriptions, has 
 nothing in it to remind us of Hesiod's ' Theogony/ 
 unless it be a more tedious minuteness, and an exag- 
 gerated affectation of allegoric system. In truth, 
 however, Hesiod's l Theogony ' is a work of which 
 this or that side may be susceptible of parallel, but to 
 which, in its own kind, and taken as a whole, none 
 like nor second has arisen. , 
 
 The ' Shield' and the 'Fragments' are of too doubt- 
 ful authorship to call for the reflected light of parallel- 
 ism; and so our task of laying before the reader a 
 sketch of the life, works, and after-influence of the 
 Ascrsean poet is completed. 
 
THEOGNIS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THEOGNIS IN YOUTH AND PROSPERITY. 
 
 With the life of Hesiod politics have little or no con- 
 nection ; in that of Theognis we find them playing an 
 essential inseparable part. And it is curious that the 
 very feature which both poets have in common, their 
 subjectivity, is that which introduces us to this point of 
 contrast and token of the ancient world's advancement 
 namely, that whereas Hesiod' s political status is so 
 unimportant as to be overlooked even by himself, with 
 Theognis it occupies more space in his elegies than his 
 social relations or his religious opinions. In fact, his 
 personal and political life are so intermixed, that the 
 internal evidence as to both must be collected in one 
 skein, and cannot be separately unwound, unless at the 
 risk of missing somewhat of the interest of his remains, 
 which consists chiefly in the personality of the poet. 
 It is true that later Greek writers regarded Theognis 
 A. 0. vol. xv. I 
 
130 THEOGNIS 
 
 as a teacher of wisdom and virtue, by means of de- 
 tached maxims and apothegms in elegiac verse, and 
 would probably have been loath to recognise any ele- 
 ment in his poetry which was personal or limited to 
 particular times and situations ; yet it is now fully 
 established that he was one of the same section of 
 poets with Callinus, Tyrtaeus, Solon, and Phocyllides, 
 all of whom availed themselves of a form of versifica- 
 tion, the original function of which was probably to 
 express mournful sentiments, to inspire their country- 
 men with their own feelings as to the stirring themes 
 of war and patriotism, of politics, and of love. With 
 Theognis it is clear that the elegy was a song or poem 
 sung at banquets or symposia after the libation, and 
 between the pauses of drinking, to the sound of the 
 flute ; and, furthermore, that it was addressed not as 
 elsewhere to the company at large, but to a single 
 guest. Many such elegies were composed by him to 
 friends and boon-companions, as may be inferred from 
 his remains, and from the tradition which survives, 
 that he wrote an elegy to the Sicilian Megarians on 
 their escape from the siege of their city by Gelon 
 (483 B.C.) ; but owing to the partiality of a later age 
 for the maxims and moral sentiments with which these 
 elegies were interspersed, and which, as we learn from 
 Xenophon and Isocrates, were used in their day for 
 educational purposes, the shape in which the poetry of 
 Theognis has come down to us is as unlike the original 
 form and drift as a handbook of maxims from Shake- 
 speare is unlike an undoctored and un-Bowdlerised 
 play. Thanks to the German editor Welcker, and to 
 
IN YOUTH AND PROSPERITY. 131 
 
 the ingenious "restitution" of Hookham Frere, the 
 original type of these poems has been approximately 
 realised, and we are able, in a great measure, to con- 
 nect the assorted links into a consistent and personal 
 autobiography. For the clearer apprehension of this, it 
 seems best to give a very brief sketch of the political 
 condition of the poet's country at the time he flourished, 
 and then to divide our notice of himself and his works 
 into three epochs, defined and marked out by circum- 
 stances which gravely influenced his career and tone of 
 thought. 
 
 The poet's fatherland, the Grecian, not Sicilian, 
 Megara, after asserting its independence of Corinth, of 
 which it had been a colony, fell under the sway of a 
 Doric nobility, which ruled it in right of descent and 
 of landed estates. But before the legislation of Solon, 
 Theagenes, the father-in-law of Gelon, had become 
 tyrant or despot of Megara, like Cypselus and Periander 
 at Corinth, by feigned adoption of the popular cause. 
 His ascendancy was about B.C. 630-600, and upon his 
 overthrow the aristocratic oligarchy again got the upper 
 hand for a brief space, until the commons rose against 
 them, and succeeded in establishing a democracy of 
 such anarchical tendency and character, that it was not 
 long ere the expelled nobles were reinstated. The 
 elegies of Theognis, who was born about 570 B.C., date 
 from about the beginning of the democratic rule, and, 
 as he belonged to the aristocracy, deplore the sufferings 
 of his party, and the spoliation of their temples and 
 dwellings by the poor, who no longer paid the interest 
 of their debts. Frequent reference will be found in 
 
132 TIIEOGiVIS 
 
 his poetry to violent democratic measures, such as the 
 adoption of the periaeei, or cultivators-without-political- 
 rights, into the sovereign community ; and, as might 
 be imagined, in the case of one who was of the best 
 blood and oldest stock, he constantly uses the term "the 
 good" as a synonym for " the nobles," whilst the " bad 
 and base " is his habitual expression to denote " the 
 commonalty." In his point of view nothing brave 
 and honourable was to be looked for from the latter, 
 whilst nothing that was not so could possibly attach 
 to the former. This distinction is a key to the due 
 interpretation of his more political poems, and it ac- 
 counts for much that strikes the reader as a hurtful 
 and inexpedient prejudice on the part of the poet. 
 For some time he would appear to have striven to 
 preserve a neutralit}^, for which, as was to be expected, 
 he got no credit from either side ; but at last, whilst 
 he was absent on a sea voyage, the " bad rich " re- 
 sorted to a confiscation of his ancestral property, with 
 an eye to redistribution among the commons. From 
 this time forward he is found engaged in constant com- 
 munications with Cyrnus, a young noble, who was 
 evidently looked to as the coming man and saviour of 
 his party ; but the conspiracy, long in brewing, seems 
 only to have come to a head to be summarily crushed, 
 and the result is that Theognis has to retire into exile 
 in Eubcea, Thebes, and Syracuse in succession. How 
 he maintained himself in these places of refuge, turn- 
 ing his talents to account, and holding pretty staunch- 
 ly to his principles, until a seasonable aid to the popu- 
 lar cause at the last-named sojourn, and a still more 
 
IN YOUTH AND PROSPERITY. 133 
 
 seasonable douceur to the Corinthian general, paved 
 the way to his recall to Megara, will he seen in the 
 account we propose to give of the last epoch of his life, 
 which is supposed to have lasted till beyond 480 B.C., 
 as he distinctly in two places refers to the instant ter- 
 ror of a Median invasion. That life divides itself into 
 the periods of his youth and prosperous estate, his 
 clouded fortunes at home, and his long and wearisome 
 exile. The remainder of this chapter will serve for a 
 glance at the first period. 
 
 That our poet was of noble birth may be inferred 
 from the confidence with which, in reply to an in- 
 dignity put upon him in his exile at Thebes, to which 
 we shall refer in due course, he asserts his descent 
 from " noble iEthon," as if the very mention of the 
 name would prove his rank to his contemporaries ; and 
 in the first fragment (according to the ingenious 
 chronological arrangement of Frere, which we follow 
 throughout), Theognis is found in the heyday of pro- 
 sperity, praying Zeus, and Apollo, the special patron 
 of his fatherland, to preserve his youth 
 
 " Free from all evil, happy with his wealth, 
 In joyous easy years of peace and health." 
 
 Interpreting this language by its context, we learn 
 that his ideal of joyous years was to frequent the ban- 
 quets of his own class, and take his part in songs 
 accompanied by the flute or lyre, 
 
 " To revel with the pipe, to chant and sing 
 This also is a most delightful thing. 
 Give me but ease and pleasure ! what care I 
 For reputation or for property ? " (F.) 
 
134 TIIEOGNIS 
 
 But we are not to suppose that such language as the 
 last couplet wore so much the expression of his serious 
 moods as of a gaiety rendered reckless "by potations 
 such as, we are obliged to confess, lent a not infrequent 
 inspiration to his poetry. Theognis is, according to 
 his own theory, quite en regie when he retires from a 
 banquet 
 
 " Not absolutely drunk nor sober quite." 
 
 He glories in a state which he expresses by a Greek 
 word, which seems to mean that of being fortified or 
 steeled with wine, an ironical arming against the cares 
 of life to which he saw no shame in resorting. And 
 perhaps too implicit credence is not to be given to the 
 professions of indifference to wealth and character 
 which are made by a poet who can realise in verse 
 such an experience as is portrayed in the fragment 
 we are about to cite : 
 
 " My brain grows dizzy, whirled and overthrown 
 "With wine : my senses are no more my own. 
 The ceiling and the walls are wheeling round ! * 
 But let me try ! perhaps my feet are sound. 
 Let me retire with my remaining sense, 
 For fear of idle language and offence." (F.) 
 
 In his more sober moments the poet could appreciate 
 
 * Juvenal, in Satire vi. 477-479, describes drinking-bouts 
 in imperial Rome prolonged 
 
 " Till round and round the dizzy chambers roll, 
 Till double lamps upon the table blaze, 
 And stupor blinds the undiscerning gaze." 
 
 Hodgson, 107. 
 
IN YOUTH AND PROSPER!'. 
 
 pursuits more congenial to his vocation and intellec- 
 tual cultivation, as is seen in his apparently early 
 thirst for knowledge, and discovery that such thirst 
 does not admit of thorough satisfaction : 
 
 " Learning and wealth the wise and wealthy find \ 
 Inadequate to satisfy the mind > 
 
 A craving eagerness remains behind ; ) 
 
 Something is left for which we cannot rest, ) 
 
 And the last something always seems the best > 
 Something unknown, or something unpossest." (F.) ) 
 
 One wdio could give vent to such a sentiment may be 
 supposed to have laid up in youth a store of the best 
 learning attainable ; and the bent of his talents, which 
 was towards vocal and instrumental music and com- 
 position of elegies, was so successfully followed that in 
 time of need he was able to turn it to means of sub- 
 sistence. Indeed, that he knew what was really the 
 real secret of success in a concert or a feast is seen 
 in a remark which he addressed to a certain Simonides 
 (whom there is no reason to identify with the famous 
 poet), recommending 
 
 * Inoffensive, easy merriment, 
 Like a good concert, keeping time and measure ; 
 Such entertainments give the truest pleasure." (F.) 
 
 But if the poet was able to preserve the health 
 which he besought the gods to grant him, in spite of 
 what we should call hard living, there are hints in his 
 poetry that the " peace " which he coupled with it did 
 not bless him uninterruptedly. In one of his earlier 
 elegiac fragments there is a h'ut of a youthful passion, 
 
136 TIIE0GN1S 
 
 broken off by him in bitterness at the Megarian flirt's 
 " love for every one." Such, at least, seems to be the 
 interpretation of four lines which may be closely ren- 
 dered, 
 
 " While only I quaffed yonder secret spring, 
 'Twas clear and sweet to my imagining. 
 'Tis turbid now. Of it no more I drink, 
 But hang o'er other stream or river-brink." (D.) 
 
 He was determined, it seems, to be more discursive in 
 his admiration for the future. How that plan suc- 
 ceeded does not appear, though in several passages he 
 arrogates to himself a degree of experience as regards 
 women, and match-making, and the like. In the end 
 we have his word for it, that he proved his own 
 maxim, 
 
 " Of all good things in human life, 
 Nothing can equal goodness in a wife." (F.) 
 
 But this could not have been till long after he had 
 suffered rejection of his suit for a damsel whose 
 parents preferred a worse man i.e., a plebeian and 
 had carried on secret relations with her after her 
 "mating to a clown." His own account of this is 
 curious, as its opening shows that he vented his 
 chagrin on himself : 
 
 a Wine I forswear, since at my darling's side 
 A meaner man has bought the right to bide. 
 Poor cheer for me ! To sate her parents' thirst 
 She seeks the well, and sure her heart will burst 
 In weeping for my love and lot accurst. 
 I meet her, clasp her neck, he^lips I kiss, 
 And they responsive gently murmur this : 
 
IN YOUTH AND PROSPERITY. 137 
 
 ' A fair but luckless girl, my lot has been 
 To wed perforce the meanest of the mean. 
 Oft have I longed to burst the reins, and flee 
 From hateful yoke to freedom, love, and thee." 
 
 Perhaps, on the whole, he had no great reason to 
 speak well of the sex, for in one place, as if he looked 
 upon marriage, like friendship, as a lottery, he moralises 
 to the effect 
 
 " That men's and women's hearts you cannot try 
 Beforehand, like the cattle which you buy ; 
 Nor human wit and wisdom, when you treat \ 
 For such a purchase, can escape deceit : I 
 
 Fancy betrays us, and assists the cheat." (F.) ) 
 
 But, if his witness is true, mercenary parents were as 
 common of old as in our own day. He was led, both 
 by his exclusiveness as an aristocrat, and his impa- 
 tience of a mere money-standard of worth, to a disgust 
 of 
 
 " The daily marriages we make, 
 Where price is everything : for money's sake 
 Men marry ; women are in marriage given. 
 The churl or ruffian that in wealth has thriven 
 May match his offspring with the proudest race ; 
 Thus everything is mixt, noble and base ! " (F.) 
 
 And that he did ponder the regeneration of society, 
 and strive to fathom the depths of the education ques- 
 tion agitated in the old world, we know from a passage 
 in his elegies, which, though we have no clue to the 
 time he wrote it, deserves to be given in this place, 
 both as connected with his notions about birth, and as 
 
138 TIIEOGNIS 
 
 a set-off to the passages which have led us to picture 
 him as more or less of an easy liver : 
 
 " To rear a child is easy, hut to teach 
 Morals and manners is heyond our reach ; 
 To make the foolish wise, the wicked good, 
 That science yet was never understood. 
 The sons of Esculapius, if their art 
 Could remedy a perverse and wicked heart, 
 Might earn enormous wages ! But in fact 
 The mind is not compounded and compact 
 Of precept and example ; human art 
 In human nature has no share or part. 
 Hatred of vice, the fear of shame and sin, 
 Are things of native growth, not grafted in : 
 Else wives and worthy parents might correct 
 In children's hearts each error and defect : 
 Whereas we see them disappointed still, "j 
 No scheme nor artifice of human skill > 
 
 Can rectify the passions or the will." (F.) ) 
 
 Not often, however, despite his sententiousness, which 
 has been the cause of his metamorphose by posterity 
 into a coiner of maxims for the use of schools and the 
 instruction of life and morals, does Theognis muse in 
 such a strain of seriousness. Ofrser far his vein is 
 bnght and gay, as when he makes ready for a feast, 
 which, if we are not mistaken, was destined to take 
 most of the remainder of his " solid day." 
 
 " Now that in mid career, checking his force, 
 The bright sun pauses in his pride and force, 
 Let us prepare to dine ; and eat and drink 
 The best of everything that heart can think : 
 
IS YOUTH AND PROSPERITY, 139 
 
 air } 
 ul air > 
 iair : ) 
 
 And let the shapely Spartan damsel fair 
 
 Bring with a rounded arm and graceful ai 
 
 Water to wash, and garlands for our hair : 
 
 In spite of all the systems and the rules 
 
 Invented and observed by sickly fools, 
 
 Let us be brave, and resolutely drink ; 
 
 Not minding if the Dog-star rise or sink." (F.) 
 
 I very pretty vignette might be made of this, or of a 
 
 indred fragment that seems to belong to his later 
 
 ays. And to tell the truth, the poet's rule seems to 
 
 ave been that you should " live while you may." 
 
 Whether, as has been surmised by Mr Frere, he refers 
 
 o the catastrophe of Hipparchus or not, the four lines 
 
 which follow indicate Theognis's conviction that 
 
 everything is fated, a conviction very conducive to 
 
 enjoyment of the passing hour. ' Let us eat and drink, 
 
 for to-morrow we die ' : 
 
 " No costly sacrifice nor offerings given 
 Can change the purpose of the powers of Heaven ; 
 Whatever Fate ordains, danger or hurt, 
 Or death predestined, nothing can avert." (F.) 
 
 This conviction, no doubt, to a great degree influenced 
 the poet's indifference to the honours of a pompous 
 funeral, for which, considering his birth and traditions, 
 he might have cherished a weakness. But his tone of 
 mind, we see, was such that he could anticipate no 
 satisfaction from " hat-bands and scarves," or what- 
 ever else in his day represented handsome obsequies. 
 When some great chiif, perhaps a tyrant, perhaps one 
 of the heads of his party at Megara, was to be borne to 
 his long home with a solemn pageant, Theognis has 
 
140 THEOQN1S. 
 
 no mind to take a part in it, and expresses his reasons 
 in language wherein the Epicurean vein is no less 
 conspicuous than the touching common-sense : 
 
 " I envy not these sumptuous obsequies, 
 The stately car, the purple canopies ; 
 Much better pleased am I, remaining here, 
 With cheaper equipage, and better cheer. 
 A couch of thorns, or an embroidered bed, 
 Are matters of indifference to the dead." (F.) 
 
 This old-world expression of the common-place that 
 the grave levels all distinctions is not unlike, save that 
 it lacks the similitude of life to a river, the stanzas on 
 " Man's Life," by a Spanish poet, Don Jorge Manrique, 
 translated by Longfellow : 
 
 " Our lives are rivers, gliding free 
 To that unfathomed boundless sea, 
 The silent grave ! 
 Thither all earthy pomp and boast 
 Roll to be swallowed up and lost 
 In one dark wave. 
 
 Thither the mighty torrents stray : 
 Thither the brook pursues its way ; 
 And tinkling rill. 
 There all are equal : side by side, 
 The poor man and the son of pride 
 Lie calm and still." 
 
 But before Theognis could give proof of this levelling 
 change, he had a stormy career to fulfil^ as we shall 
 find in the next chapter. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THEOGNIS IN OPPOSITION. 
 
 From the indistinctness of our knowledge as to the 
 sequence of events in Megara, it is impossible to fix 
 the point of time when Theognis began to be a politi- 
 cal plotter ; but as, during the whole of his mature 
 life, his party was in opposition, it will be enough to 
 trace the adverse influence of the dominant democracy 
 upon his career till it terminated in exile. We have 
 seen that he was a member of a club composed of 
 exclusive and aristocratic members, meeting ostensibly 
 for feasting and good-fellowship, but really, as their 
 designation " the good " in a sense already explained 
 clearly indicated, designed and pledged to cherish 
 the traditions of a constitution to which they were 
 devoted, and which for the time being was suffering 
 eclipse. 
 
 Of this club a certain Simonides was president, one 
 Onomacritus a boon-companion, and Cyrnus, to whom 
 are addressed some two-thirds of the extant verses of 
 Theognis, a younger member, of whom, politically, the 
 greatest things were expected. Though its soirees seem 
 
142 THEOGNIS 
 
 to have been often noisy and Bacchanalian, we must 
 suppose the Aristocratic Club at Megara to have been 
 as busy in contemporary politics as the " Carlton " 
 or the " Eeform " in our general elections ; and there 
 are tokens that Theognis was a sleepless member of 
 the Committee, although some of his confreres, of whom 
 little more than the names survive, cared more for 
 club -life than club-politics. There was one notable 
 exception. In spite of the waywardness of youth, 
 and the fickleness characteristic of one so petted and 
 caressed by his friends, Cyrnus must have lent his 
 ears and hands to various schemes of Theognis for up- 
 setting the democracy, and restoring the ascendancy of 
 the " wise and good." At times it is plain that Cyrnus 
 considered himself to have a ground of offence against 
 Theognis ; and there are verses of the latter which 
 bespeak recrimination and open rupture, though of 
 course the poet compares himself to unalloyed gold, 
 and considers his good faith stainless. The elder of 
 the pair was probably tetchy and jealous, the younger 
 changeable and volatile ; but there is certainly no 
 reason for supposing that Cyrnus's transference of his 
 friendship to some other political chief resulted in either 
 party-success or increase of personal distinction, for his 
 name survives only in the elegiacs of Theognis, as 
 indeed that poet has prophesied it would, in a frag- 
 ment the key to which Hookham Frere finds in a com- 
 parison of bardic celebration with the glory resulting 
 from an Olympic victory ; 
 
 " You soar aloft, and over land and wave 
 Are borne triumphant on the wings I gave, 
 
IN OPPOSITION. H3 
 
 (The swift and mighty wings, Music and Verse). 
 Your name in easy numbers smooth and terse 
 Is wafted o'er the world ; and heard among 
 The banquetings and feasts, chaunted and sung, 
 Heard and admired : the modulated air 
 Of flutes, and voices of the young and fair 
 Eecite it, and to future times shall tell ; 
 When, closed within the dark sepulchral cell, 
 Your form shall moulder, and your empty ghost 
 Wander along the dreary Stygian coast. 
 
 Yet shall your memory flourish green and young, 
 Recorded and revived on every tongue, 
 In continents and islands, every place 
 That owns the language of the Grecian race. 
 
 No purchased prowess of a racing steed, 
 But the triumphant Muse, with airy speed, 
 Shall bear it wide and far, o'er land and main, 
 A glorious and imperishable strain ; 
 A mighty prize gratuitously won, 
 Fixed as the earth, immortal as the sun." (F.) 
 
 But, to catch the thread of Theognis's story, we 
 must go back to earlier verses than these, addressed to 
 the young noble whom he regarded with a pure and 
 almost paternal regard the growth, it may be, in the 
 first instance of kindred political views. The verses 
 of Theognis which refer to the second period of his 
 life begin with a caution to Cyrnus to keep his strains 
 as much a secret as the fame of his poetry will allow, 
 and evince the same sensitiveness to public opinion 
 as so many other of his remains. He cannot gain and 
 keep, he regrets to own, the goodwill of his fellow- 
 citizens, any more than Zeus can please all parties, 
 whilst 
 
144- THEOGNIS 
 
 * Some call for rainy weather, some for dry" 
 
 What the advice was which required such a seal of 
 secrecy begins to appear shortly, in a fragment which 
 presages a revolution, in which Cyrnus is looked-to 
 to play a leader's part. It is interesting as a picture 
 of the state of things which one revolution had 
 brought about, and for which Theognis was hatching 
 a panacea in another. Slightly altered, to meet the 
 political sense of the " good " and " bad," the " better- 
 most " and the " worse M in Megarian parlance, the fol- 
 lowing extract from Mr Frere is a faithful transcript : 
 
 11 Our commonwealth preserves its former frame, 
 Our common people are no more the same ; 
 They that in skins and hides were rudely dressed, 
 Nor dreamed of law, nor sought to be redressed 
 By rules of right, but, in the days of old, 
 Without the walls, like deer, their place did hold, 
 Are now the dominant class, and we, the rest, 
 Their betters nominally, once the best, 
 Degenerate, debased, timid, and mean ; 
 Who can endure to witness such a scene ? 
 Their easy courtesies, the ready smile 
 Prompt to deride, to flatter, to beguile ! 
 Their utter disregard of right or wrong, 
 Of truth or honour ! Out of such a throng 
 Never imagine you can choose a just 
 Or steady friend, or faithful to his trust. 
 
 But change your habits ! let them go their way t 
 Be condescending, affable, and gay ! 
 Adopt with every man the style and tone, 
 Most courteous, most congenial with his own! 
 But in your secret counsels keep aloof 
 From feeble paltry souls, that at the proof 
 
IN OPPOSITION. 145 
 
 Of danger and distress are sure to fail, 
 
 For whose salvation nothing can avail." (F.) 
 
 The last lines assuredly betoken the brewing of a 
 conspiracy ; but the poet goes on to lament a state of 
 things where a generation of spiritless nobles replaces 
 an ancestry remarkable for spirit and magnanimity. 
 Though a government by an aristocracy of caste, if of 
 this latter calibre, could not be upset, he has evident 
 misgivings in reference to the present leaders of the 
 party, whose pride he likens to that which ruined the 
 centaurs, destroyed " Smyrna the rich and Colophon 
 the great," and made " Magnesian ills " in reference 
 to the punishment of the oppressive pride of the 
 Magnesians by the Ephesians at the river Mseander 
 a by-word and a proverb in the verse of Archilochus, 
 as well as of Theognis. In such a posture of affairs 
 our poet professes an intention to hold aloof from 
 pronounced politics and party 
 
 " Not leaguing with the discontented crew, 
 Nor with the proud and arbitrary few : " (F.) 
 
 just as elsewhere he advises Cyrnus to do, in a coup- 
 let which may be translated 
 
 " Fret not, if strife the townsmen reckless make, 
 But 'twixt both sides, as I, the mid- way take." (D.) 
 
 He was old enough to foresee the danger of reprisals, 
 and, from policy, counselled younger blood to abstain 
 from injustice and rapine, when the tide turned, 
 
 " Cyrnus, proceed like me ! walk not awry ! 
 
 Nor trample on the bounds of property." (F.) 
 A. c. vol. xv. K 
 
146 THEOGNIS 
 
 but he soon found that his neutrality only procured 
 him the hatred and abuse of both friends and foes 
 a discovery which he expresses thus : 
 
 " The city's mind I cannot comprehend 
 Do well or ill, they hold me not their friend. 
 From base and noble blame is still my fate, 
 Though fools may blame, who cannot imitate." (D.) 
 
 It was hard, he thought, that his friends should look 
 coolly upon him, if, with a view to the wellbeing of 
 his party, he gave no offence to the opposite faction, 
 if, as he puts it, 
 
 " I cross not my foe's path, brtt keep as clear, 
 As of hid rocks at sea the pilots steer." (D.) 
 
 And he is almost querulous in his sensibility to public 
 opinion, when he sings, 
 
 u The generous and brave in common fame 
 From time to time encounter praise or blame : 
 The vulgar pass unheeded : none escape 
 Scandal or insult in some form or shape. , 
 Most fortunate are those, alive or dead, 
 Of whom the least is thought, the least is said." (F.) 
 
 It is as if he administered to himself the comfort 
 which Adam gives Orlando 
 
 " Know you not, master, to some kind of men 
 Their graces serve them but as enemies ? 
 No more do yours ; your virtues, gentle master, 
 Are sanctified and holy traitors to you." 
 
 ' As you like it/ II. hi. 
 
 But a candid study of the character of Theognis in- 
 duces the impression that his neutrality was only fit- 
 
IN OPPOSITION. U7 
 
 ful or temporary. A great deal of his counsel to his 
 friend exhibits him in the light of a politic watcher of 
 events, at one time deprecating what at another he 
 advocated. Who would recognise the champion of 
 the "wise and good" and of their policy, pure and 
 simple, in these verses, breathing a spirit of progress 
 and expediency ? 
 
 " Waste not your efforts : struggle not, my friend, 
 Idle and old abuses to defend. 
 Take heed ! the very measures that you press, 
 May bring repentance with their own success." (F.) 
 
 There is also an inconsistency to be accounted for 
 doubtless upon politic grounds, in the discrepant advice 
 which he gives Cyrnus as to the friend to be chosen 
 in the crisis then imminent. At one time he is all 
 for "determined hearty partisans," and deprecates associ- 
 ation with reckless associates, as well as with fair- 
 weather friends : 
 
 " Never engage with a poltroon or craven, 
 Avoid him, Cyrnus, as a treacherous haven. 
 Those friends and hearty comrades, as you think, 
 Keady to join you, when you feast or drink, 
 Those easy friends from difficulty shrink." (F.) 
 
 But anon he is found subscribing to the principle that 
 "no man is wholly bad or wholly good," and recommend- 
 ing his friend to cor^iliate, as we say, Tom, Dick, and 
 Harry, so as to be " O things to all men." 
 
 " Join with the world ; adopt with every man 
 His party views, his temper, and his plan ; 
 
U8 TIIEOGNIS 
 
 Strive to avoid offence, study to please 
 Like the sagacious inmate of the seas,* 
 That an accommodating colour brings, 
 Conforming to the rock to which he clings : 
 "With every change of place changing his hue ; 
 The model for a statesman such as you. 1 ' (F.) 
 
 Perhaps the clue to this riddle is, that circumstances 
 about this time drove Theognis into a more pronounced 
 course, as men get desperate when they lose those 
 possessions which, whilst intact, justify them in 
 being choice, and conservative, and exclusive. Either 
 in a fresh political revolution and a new partition of 
 the lands of the republic, or, as Mr Grote thinks, in 
 a movement in favour of a single- headed despot accom- 
 plished by some of Theognis's own party, who were 
 sick of the rule of the " bad rich," he lost his estate 
 whilst absent on an unfortunate voyage. Thenceforth 
 he is a conspirator at work to recover his confiscated 
 lands by a counter-revolution : thenceforth his verses 
 are a mixture of schemes for revenge, of murmurs 
 against Providence, and of suspicion of the comrades 
 whose partisanship he hoped might yet reinstate 
 the old possessors of property. The two or three 
 fragments which refer more or less directly to this loss 
 may be given together. Here is one which speaks to 
 the extent and nature of it : 
 
 " Bad faith has ruined me : distrust alone 
 Has saved a remnant : all the rest is gone 
 
 * The creature referred to is the Sea-Polypus Sepia 
 Octopodia of Linnaeus which is referred to in Hesiod's ' "Works 
 and Days ' (524) under the epithet of " the boneless." 
 
IN OPPOSITION. 149 
 
 To ruin and the clogs : the powers divine 
 
 I murmur not against them, nor repine : 
 
 Mere human violence, rapine, and stealth 
 
 Have brought me down to poverty from wealth." (F.) 
 
 In another he invokes the help of Zeus in requiting 
 his friends and foes according to their deserts, whilst 
 he describes himself as one who ' 
 
 " Like to a scared and hunted hound 
 That scarce escaping, trembling and half drowned, 
 Crosses a gully, swelled w T ith wintry rain, 
 Has crept ashore in feebleness and pain." (F.) 
 
 The bitterness of his feelings at the wrong he has 
 suffered is intensified, in the sequel of this fragment, 
 into the expression of a wish " one day to drink the 
 very blood " of them that have done it. Eut perhaps 
 the most touching and specific allusion to his spolia- 
 tion is where the return of spring to send another's 
 plough over his ancestral fields brings up to his 
 remembrance the change in his fortunes : 
 
 " The yearly summons of the creaking crane, 
 That warns the ploughman to his task again, 
 Strikes to my heart a melancholy strain 
 When all is lost, and my paternal lands 
 Are tilled for other lords with other hands, 
 Since that disastrous wretched voyage brought 
 Riches and lands and everything to nought." (F.) 
 
 A kindred feeling of pain breathes in another passage 
 apropos of autumn and its harvest-homes. And this 
 pain he seeks to allay sometimes by reminding himself 
 that womanish repinings will but gratify his foes, and 
 
150 THEOGN1S 
 
 at other times by plans for setting Providence to 
 rights. Now he admits that patience is the only 
 cure, and that, if impatient, 
 
 " We strive like children, and the Almighty plan 
 Controls the froward, weak children of man." 
 
 Now again, he seems to think sullen resistance is a 
 better policy; and in another curious musing he argues 
 against the justice of visiting the sins of the fathers 
 on the children : 
 
 " The case is hard where a good citizen, 
 A person of an honourable mind, 
 Religiously devout, faithful, and kind, 
 Is doomed to pay the lamentable score 
 Of guilt accumulated long before. 
 
 Quite undeservedly doomed to atone, 
 
 In other times, for actions not his own." (F.) 
 
 In the midst of these conflicting emotions it is pleasant 
 to find that he can extend a welcome out of the 
 remnant of his fortunes to such hereditary friends as 
 one Clearistus, who has come across the sea to visit 
 him and it is consistent with his early habits that he 
 should try the effect of drowning care in the bowl, 
 though he is forced to admit that this factitious 
 oblivion soon gives place to bitter retrospects, and 
 equally bitter prospects. 
 
 We must not however suppose that Theognis and 
 his fellow-sufferers brooded altogether passively over 
 their wrongs. His famous political verses, likening the 
 state to a ship in a storm, betray a weakness in the 
 
IN OPPOSITION. 151 
 
 ruling powers, eminently provocative of the emeute or 
 insurrection which was to follow: 
 
 " Such is our state ! in a tempestuous sea, 
 With all the crew raging in mutiny ! 
 No duty followed, none to reef a sail, 
 To work the vessel, or to pump or bale : 
 All is abandoned, and without a check 
 The mighty sea conies sweeping o'er the deck. 
 Our steersman, hitherto so bold and steady, 
 Active and able, is deposed already. 
 No discipline, no sense of order felt, 
 The daily messes are unduly dealt. 
 The goods are plundered, those that ought to keep 
 Strict watch are icily skulking, or asleep ; 
 All that is left of order or command 
 Committed wholly to the basest hand. 
 In such a case, my friend, I needs must think 
 It were no marvel though the vessel sink. 
 This riddle to my worthy friends I tell, 
 But a shrewd knave will understand it well!" (F.) 
 
 It is easy to discern in the last couplet a hint to his 
 partisans to take advantage of this posture of affairs, 
 and the fragments which serve as a context revert to 
 the drowning state, discuss who is staunch and what 
 is rotten in it, and imply generally that the sole reason 
 for not striking is distrust of the number and fitness 
 of the tools : 
 
 " The largest company you could enroll, 
 A single vessel could embark the whole ! 
 So few there are : the noble manly minds, 
 Faithful and firm, the men that honour binds ; 
 Impregnable to danger and to pain 
 And low seduction in the shape of gain." (F.) 
 
15l2 THEOGNIS 
 
 But the time comes when such a chosen few have to be 
 resorted to, as a last resource, in preference to the ruin 
 certain to overtake them if, after their plots have "been 
 divulged, they sit still and await it. There is extant 
 a passage of some length, which Mr Frere ingeniously 
 conceives to have been the heads of Theognis's speech 
 to the conspirators. Its conclusion represents the 
 oath of the malcontents, a formula pledging assistance 
 to friends and requital to foes to the very uttermost. 
 It breathes the courage of desperation, but does not 
 hold out a prospect of success which could justify 
 the resort to action. The precise nature of what fol- 
 lowed we know not. An elegiac and subjective poet 
 like Theognis is readier to moralise than to describe. 
 The outbreak may have had a gleam of success, or 
 may have been crushed at the beginning by the fore- 
 sight of its opponents, or the despair and faint heart of 
 its promoters. It seems quite clear, however, that, 
 perhaps by the aid of an armed force from some demo- 
 cratic state, most likely Corinth, the insurrection is 
 beaten to its last breathing-place. Here is a fragment 
 which vividly pictures the hurried resolve of the party 
 of Cyrnus and Theognis to abandon their country and 
 ill-starred enterprise : 
 
 " A speechless messenger, the beacon's light, 
 Announces danger from the mountain's height I 
 Bridle your horses and prepare to fly ; 
 The final crisis of our fate is nigh. 
 A momentary pause, a narrow space, 
 Detains them ; but the foes approach apace ! 
 
IN OPPOSITION. 153 
 
 We must abide what fortune lias decreed, 
 And hope that Heaven will help us at our need. 
 Make your resolve ! At home your means were great ; 
 Abroad you will retain a poor estate ; 
 Unostentatious, indigent, and scant, 
 Yet live secure, at least from present want." (F.) 
 
 Such, then, was tho issue ol all our poet's plotting and 
 club-intrigues, bis poetic exhortations, and his hopes 
 of a saviour in Cyrrms. Not only did he fail of the 
 aggrandisement of his party and the recovery of his 
 estate : he had henceforth also to realise the miseries 
 of exile. 
 
CHAPTER TIL 
 
 THEOGNIS IN EXILE. 
 
 Driven from his country through an unsuccessful ris- 
 ing against the party in power, Theognis next appears 
 as a refugee in Eubcea, where a faction of congenial 
 political views has tempted him to take up his residence. 
 But his sojourn must have been brief. The aristocracy 
 of the island was no match for the commonalty, when 
 the latter was backed by Corinthian sympathisers, 
 whose policy was to upset hereditary oligarchies, and 
 to lift an individual to supreme power on the shoulders 
 of the people. Before this strong and sinister influence 
 our poet probably had to bow in Euboea, as he had 
 already bowed in Megara. The principles to which he 
 clung so tenaciously were doomed to ill luck, and he 
 felt the disasters of his party little short of a personal 
 disgrace. It was the old story of the good and bad, 
 in the political and social sense already noticed ; and, 
 as at Megara, the good got the worst of it : 
 
 " Alas for our disgrace ! Cerinthus lost * 
 The fair Lelantian plain ! A plundering host 
 
 * Cerinthus was a city of Euboea, and Lelantum a well-watered 
 plain, which was an old source of cortention betwixt the Ere- 
 trians and Chalcidians. 
 
TIIEOGNIS IN EXILE. 155 
 
 Invade it all the brave banished or fled ! 
 Within the town lewd ruffians in their stead 
 Rule it at random. Such is our disgrace. 
 May Zeus confound the Cypselising race ! " (F.) 
 
 Breathing from his heart this curse against the policy 
 of the Corinthians above referred to, and conveniently 
 named after the usurper who founded the system, 
 Theognis soon retired to Thebes, as a state which, 
 from its open sympathy with the politics of the ban- 
 ished Megarians, would be likeliest to offer them an 
 asylum, and to connive at their projects for recovering 
 their native city by force or subtlety. The first 
 glimpse we have of him at Thebes is characteristic of 
 the man in more ways than one. At the house of a 
 noble host, his love of music led him to an interfer- 
 ence with, or a rivalry of, the hired music-girl Argyris 
 and her vocation, which provoked the gibes of the 
 glee-maiden, and possibly lowered him in the estima- 
 tion of the company. But the love of music and 
 song, which led him into the scrape, sufficed also to 
 furnish him with a ready and extemporised retort to 
 the girl's insinuation that perhaps his mother was a 
 flute-player (and, by implication, a slave) a retort 
 which he, no doubt, astonished his audience by sing- 
 ing to his own accompaniment : 
 
 " I am of iEthon's lineage. Thebes has given 
 Shelter to one from home and country driven. 
 A truce to jests : my parents mock thou not, 
 For thine, not mine, girl, is the slavish lot. 
 Full many an ill the exile has to brave : 
 This good I clasp, that none can call me slave, 
 
156 THEOGNIS 
 
 Or bought with price. A franchise I retain, 
 Albeit in dreamland, and oblivion's plain." (D.) 
 
 The verses seem to be instinct with a hauteur bred 
 from consciousness of his aristocratic connections, even 
 whilst the singer's dependence upon his own talents 
 rather than on hired minstrelsy bespeaks him a citi- 
 zen of the world. But, apart from such scenes 
 and such entertainments in hospitable Thebes, our 
 poet found time there for schemes of revenge and 
 reprisals, and for the refugee's proverbial solace, the 
 pleasures of hope. Whilst a portion of his day was 
 spent in the congenial society of the cultivated noble 
 the contretemps at whose house does not seem to have 
 interrupted their friendship another portion was de- 
 voted to projects of return, which a fellow-feeling 
 would prevent from appearing tedious to the ear of his 
 partner in exile, Cyrnus. To him it is amusing to 
 lind him comparing his hardships to those of Ulysses, 
 and gathering hope of vengeance from the sequel of 
 the wanderings of that mythical hero : 
 
 " Doomed to descend to Pluto's dreary reign, 
 Yet he returned and viewed his home again, 
 And wreaked his vengeance on the plundering crew, 
 The factious, haughty suitors, whom he slew : 
 Whilst all the while, with steady faith unfeigned, 
 The prudent, chaste Penelope remained 
 With her fair son, waiting a future hour 
 For his arrival and return to power." (F.) 
 
 According, indeed, to Theognis's testimony, it should 
 soem that his Penelope at Megara was as blameless as 
 
IN EXILE. 157 
 
 the Ithacan princess of that name, for he takes Cyrnus 
 to witness, in a quaint fashion enough, that 
 
 " Of all good things in human life, 
 Nothing can equal goodness in a wife. 
 In our own case we prove the proverb true ; 
 You vouch for me, my friend, and I for you." (F.) 
 
 It must be allowed that this is a confirmation, under 
 the circumstances, of the poet's dictum, " that absence 
 is not death to those that love ; " but still one is 
 tempted to wonder what their wives at Megara thought 
 of these restless, revolution-mongering husbands, as 
 they beheld them in the mind's eye hobbing and nob- 
 bing over treason in some " Leicester Square " tavern 
 of Eubcea or of Thebes. In such tete-a-tetes Theognis, 
 no doubt, was great in aesthetics as well as moralities ; 
 and the sole deity still left to reverence, Hope, became 
 more winsome to his fancy as he dwelt on the refine- 
 ments he had to forego, now that he was bereft of 
 home and property. The following fragment repre- 
 sents this state of feeling : 
 
 " For human nature Hope remains alone 
 Of all the deities the rest are flown. 
 Faith is departed ; Truth and Honour dead ; 
 A nd all the Graces too, my friend, are fled. 
 The scanty specimens of living worth 
 Dwindled to nothing and extinct on earth. 
 Yet while I live and view the light of heaven 
 (Since Hope remains, and never hath been driven 
 From the distracted world) the single scope 
 Of my devotion is to worship Hope : 
 Where hecatombs are slain, and altars burn, 
 With all the deities adored in turn, 
 
158 THEOGNIS 
 
 Let Hope be present : and with Hope, my friend, 
 Let every sacrifice commence and end." (F.) 
 
 Mr Frere notes the characteristic touch in the fourth 
 line, "The victim of a popular revolution lamenting 
 that democracy has destroyed the Graces." But as 
 time passed, and the exiles still failed to compass their 
 return, distrust and impatience begin to be rife amongst 
 them. Theognis applies the crucible, which frequently 
 figures in his poetry, and might almost indicate a 
 quondam connection with the Megarian Mint, and fails 
 to discover a sterling unadulterated mind in the whole 
 range of his friends. In bitterness of spirit he finds 
 out at last that 
 
 "An exile has no friends ! no partisan 
 Is firm or faithful to the banished man ; 
 A disappointment and a punishment 
 Harder to bear and worse than banishment." (F.) 
 
 And under these circumstances he is driven in earnest 
 to the course which, in his * Acharnians,' Aristophanes 
 represents Dicaeopolis as adopting namely, private 
 negotiations with the masters of the situation at Megara. 
 Ever recurring to his " pleasant gift of verse " when 
 he had " a mot " to deliver, a shaft of wit to barb, or 
 a compliment to pay, Theognis makes it the instrument 
 wherewith to pave the way to his reconciliation and 
 restoration. If the whole poems were extant, of which 
 the lines we are about to cite represent Frere's mode of 
 translating the first couplet, it would, as the translator 
 acutely surmises, be found to contain a candid review 
 of the past, an admission of errors on his own side, an 
 
IJV EXILE. 159 
 
 advance towards making things pleasant with the 
 other, and a first overture to the treaty he was desir- 
 ous to negotiate with the victorious party. 
 
 " No mean or coward heart will I commend 
 In an old comrade or a party friend ; 
 Nor with ungenerous hasty zeal decry 
 A noble-minded gallant enemy." (F.) 
 
 But the bait, though specious, did not tempt those 
 for whom it was designed. In another short fragment 
 is recorded the outburst of the poet's disappointment 
 at finding it " labour lost." He seems to have aban- 
 doned hope at last in the words 
 
 * Not to be born never to see the sun . 
 No worldly blessing is a greater one ! 
 And the next best is speedily to die, 
 And lapt beneath a load of earth to lie." (F.) 
 
 But even a man without hope must live that is, 
 unless he terminate his woes by self-slaughtur, a der- 
 nier ressort to which, to do him justice, Theogi makes 
 no allusion. And so it would seem because Thebes, 
 though it gave sympathy and hospitality, did ivot give 
 means of earning a subsistence to the Meghan re- 
 fugees we find him in the next fragment tlx last 
 fjf those addressed to Cyrnus announcing a resolu- 
 tion to flee from poverty, the worst of miseries :- 
 
 " In poverty, dear Cyrnus, we forego 
 Freedom in word and deed body and mind, 
 Action and thought are fettered and confined. 
 Let us then fly, dear Cyrnus, once again i 
 Wide as the limits of the land and maim 
 
160 THEOGNIS 
 
 From these entanglements ; with these in view, 
 Death is the lighter evil of the two." (F.) 
 
 Possibly, as we hear no more of him, the poet's 
 younger and less sensitive comrade did not respond to 
 the invitation. Certainly Theognis shortly transferred 
 his residence to Sicily, that isle of the west, which 
 was to his countrymen what America is to ours, the 
 refuge of unemployed enterprise and unappreciated 
 talent. Arrived there, he quickly shakes off the gloom 
 which the impressions of a sea-voyage w ould not tend 
 to lighten, and prepares to grapple in earnest the 
 problem u how to manage to live." Though he gives 
 vent to expressions which show what an indignity 
 work must have seemed to 
 
 " A manly form, an elevated mind, 
 Once elegantly fashioned and refined," 
 
 his pluck and good sense come to his aid, and he con- 
 soles himself with the generalisation that 
 
 " All kinds of shabby shifts are understood, 
 All kinds of art are practised, bad and good, 
 All kinds of ways to gain a livelihood." (F.) 
 
 Not that he descends in his own person to any un- 
 worthy art or part. Having satisfied himself that his 
 voice and skill in music were his most marketable 
 gifts, he set up as an assistant performer at musical 
 festivals ; and, in one of his pieces, he apologises for 
 his voice being likely to fail at one of those entertain- 
 ments, because he had been out late the night before 
 serenading for hire. The poor gentleman no doubt 
 
OF THE X 
 
 'VERSITY J 
 
 IN EXILE. 161 
 
 had to do dirty work, and to put up with snubs he 
 never dreamed of in his palmy club-life at home. His 
 sensibilities were outraged by vulgar nouveaux riches 
 who employed his talent, as well as by professionals 
 who quizzed him as an amateur. Fortunately he 
 could get his revenge in a cheap way upon both 
 classejs. Here is his thrust at the former : 
 
 " Dunces are often rich, while indigence 
 Thwarts the designs of elegance and sense. 
 Nor wealth alone, nor judgment can avail ; 
 In either case art and improvement fail." (F.) 
 
 As to the latter, nothing can be more fair and open 
 than the test to which he proposes to submit his own 
 pretensions, and those of one Academus, who had 
 twitted him with being a cross between an artist and 
 an amateur : 
 
 " I wish that a fair trial were prepared, 
 Friend Academus ! with the prize declared, 
 A comely slave, the conqueror's reward ; 
 For a full proof betwixt myself and you, 
 Which is the better minstrel of the two. 
 Then would I show you that a mule surpasses 
 In his performance all the breed of asses. 
 
 Enough of such discourse : now let us try 
 To join our best endeavours, you and I, 
 With voice and music ; since the Muse has blessed 
 Us both w r ith her endowments ; and possessed 
 With the fair science of harmonious sound 
 The neighbouring people, and the cities round." ^F.) 
 
 The retort was two-edged. Whilst Theognis turns 
 a. c. voL xv. l 
 
162 THEOONIS 
 
 the laugh against an ungenerous rival, and this in the 
 spirit of a true gentleman, he finds a sly means of 
 paying a delicate compliment to the taste of the public, 
 upon whose appreciation of music he had to depend 
 for support. It is plain that he gauged that public ac- 
 curately. By degrees it becomes evident that he is 
 getting on in his chosen profession not indeed to the 
 extent of being able, as he puts it in a terse couplet, 
 " to indulge his spirit to the full in its taste for the 
 graceful and beautiful," but, at all events, of having 
 wherewithal to discourse critically on the question of 
 indulgence and economy, from which we infer that he 
 had made something to save or to lose. After weigh- 
 ing the pros and cons in a more than usually didactic 
 passage, he confides to his hearers and readers the 
 reason why he inclines to a moderate rather than a 
 reckless expenditure : 
 
 " For something should be left when life is fled 
 To purchase decent duty to the dead ; 
 Those easy tears, the customary debt 
 Of kindly recollection and regret. 
 Besides, the saving of superfluous cost 
 Is a sure profit, never wholly lost ; 
 Not altogether lost, though left behind, 
 Bequeathed in kindness to a friendly mind. 
 
 And for the present, can a lot be found 
 Fairer and happier than a name renowned, 
 And easy competence, with honour crowned ; 
 The just approval of the good and wise, 
 Public applauses, friendly courtesies ; 
 Where all combine a single name to grace 
 
IN EXILE. 163 
 
 With honour and pre-eminence of place, 
 Coevals, elders, and the rising race ? " (F.) 
 
 "With these laudable ambitions he pursued with pro- 
 fit his calling of " director of choral entertainments," 
 until, it would seem, upon the incidence of a war 
 between Hippocrates, the tyrant of Gela, and the 
 Syracusans, he was induced to go out in the novel 
 character of a champion of freedom to the battle of 
 Helorus. When Corinth and Corcyra combined to 
 deliver Syracuse from the siege which followed the 
 loss of this battle, it is probable that the Corinthian 
 deputies were surprised to find the poet, whom they 
 had known as an oligarchist at Megara, transformed 
 into a very passable democrat, and seeking their good 
 offices, with regard to his restoration to his native city. 
 These, however, he found could not be obtained except 
 through a bribe ; and accordingly, whilst he no doubt 
 complied with the terms, he could not resist giving 
 vent to his disgust in a poem wherein the Corinthian 
 commander is likened to Sisyphus, and which ends 
 with the bitter words 
 
 " Fame is a jest ; favour is bought and sold ; 
 No power on earth is like the power of gold." (F.) 
 
 It should seem that the bribe did pass, and that while 
 the negotiations consequent upon it were pending, 
 Theognis drew so near his home as friendly Lacedae- 
 mon, where he composed a pretty and Epicurean strain 
 that tells its own story : 
 
164 TIIEOONIii 
 
 " Enjoy your time, my soul ! another race 
 Will shortly fill the world, and take your place, 
 With their own hopes and fears, sorrow and mirth : 
 I shall be dust the while and crumbled earth. 
 But think not of it ! Drink the racy wine 
 Of rich Taygetus, press'd from the vine 
 Which Theotimus, in the sunny glen 
 (Old Theotimus loved by gods and men), 
 Planted and watered from a plenteous source, 
 Teaching the wayward stream a better course : 
 Drink it, and cheer your heart, and banish care : 
 A load of wine will lighten your despair." (F.) 
 
 When in the concluding fragments (we follow Mr 
 Hookham Frere's arrangement here as in most in- 
 stances) Theognis is found reinstated in his native 
 country, the sting of politics has been evidently 
 extracted, as a preliminary ; and the burden of his 
 song thenceforth is the praise of wine and of banquets. 
 These are his recipes, we learn in a passage which con- 
 tributes to the ascertainment of his date, for driving 
 far 
 
 " All fears of Persia, and her threatened war," 
 
 an impending danger, to which he recurs vaguely in 
 another passage. It has been surmised from his 
 speaking of age and death as remote, and of convivial 
 pleasures as the best antidote to the fear of these, that 
 he was not of very advanced age at the battle of 
 Marathon. It is to be hoped that, when restored to 
 home after his long exile, his wife was alive to receive 
 him with warmer welcome than his children, to whom 
 
IN EXILE. 165 
 
 lie alludes as ungrateful and undutiful. Probably they 
 had been estranged from him during his absence by 
 the influence of the party in power, and they may also 
 have been ill pleased at his devotion to the artistic 
 pursuits which ministered to his substance in exile 
 and loss of fortune. To the end of his days, peace- 
 ful it should seem and undisturbed thenceforward, 
 he fulfilled his destiny as a " servant of the Muses," 
 recognising it as a duty to spread the fruit of his 
 poetic genius, rather than, as in his earlier years, to 
 limit it to his inner circle of friends and relatives : 
 
 " Not to reserve his talent for himself 
 In secret, like a miser with his pelf." (F.) 
 
 It would be unhandsome in us to take leave of 
 Theognis without a word of felicitation to the poet's 
 shade on the happy rehabilitation which he has met 
 with at the hands of modern scholars. Time was a 
 time not so very long ago when the comparatively 
 few who were acquainted with the remains of Theognis 
 saw in him simply a stringer together of maxims in 
 elegiac verse, such as Xenophon had accounted him ; 
 and Isocrates had set him down in the same category 
 with Hesiod and Phocylides. But, thanks to the Ger- 
 mans, Welcker and Muller, and to the scholarly English- 
 man, John Hookham Erere, the elegiac poet of Megara 
 has been proved to be something more than a compiler 
 of didactic copy- slips a scholar, poet, and politician in 
 one. with a biography belonging to him, the threads of 
 
166 THEOGNIS IN EXILE 
 
 which are not hard to gather up. The result is, not 
 that his maxims are less notable, but that we realise 
 the life and character of him who moulded them into 
 verse verse which is often elegant in expression, and 
 always marked by a genuine and forcible subjectivity. 
 The task of tracing this life in his works has been 
 rendered easier to the author of the foregoing pages by 
 the ingenious and skilful labours of Mr Frere. 
 
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