r

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 HOMER THE

:
:

ILIAD,

By the Editor.
By the Same.

ODYSSEY,

HERODOTUS,
CAESAR,

......
. .

...
.
.

By George C. Swayne, M.A. By Anthony Trollope.

By the Editor.

VIRGIL

HORACE,
.AESCHYLUS,

.By

Theodore Martin.

By the Right Rev. the Bishop of Colombo.

.
.

XENOPHON,
CICERO
SOPHOCLES, PLINY By EURIPIDES
.

A.

... ...
.
. .

By Sir Alex. Grant, Bart., LL.D. By the Editor.

By Clifton W. Collins, M.A.

J.

Church, M.A., and W.

Brodribb, M.A.

By William Bodham Donne.

By Edward Walford, M.A. . . JUVENAL, the Editor. ARISTOPHANES, HESIOD AND THEOGNIS, By the Rev. James Davies, M.A. By the Editor. PLAUTUS AND TERENCE, By William Bodham Donne. TACITUS,
. .
.

.By

....

...
.

LUCIAN,

.......
.

By the Editor.

PLATO

THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY,

LIVY
OVID,

By Clifton W. Collins. .By Lord Neaves.

By the Editor.

By the Rev. A. Church, M.A.

CATULLUS, TIBULLUS, & PROPERTIUS, ByJ. Davies, M.A. By the Rev. W. J. Brodribb, M.A. DEMOSTHENES,
ARISTOTLE,

...
.

THUCYDIDES, LUCRETIUS,
PINDAR,

By Sir Alex. Grant, Bart., LL.D. By the Editor.

.
.

...

By W. H. Mallock, M.A.
F.

By the Rev.

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(

VI

PREFACE.
him
in claims of antiquity, even if
interesting,

nearest to

we

grant

that his style

attractive.

is less

and his matter not so

in the serie^ of

Indeed one argument for including Hesiod 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.

to

Such, therefore, ought be as thankful as the unlearned for an idea of

which the
to supply.

what he actually or probably wrote. And it is this larger portion of this volume endeavours
ancient and

been compiled from modern biographies with a constant eye

poet's life has

The

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

Miltonic.

Theogony,

almost

For the

'

Works and
accessible

Days,' the little-known version

of the Elizabethan

George Chapman

a biographical rarity

made

by Mr

Hooper's edition in J. E. Smith's Library of

Old Authors
our service.

has been here and there pressed into 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

to unravel Hesiodic

use, as the

most successful attempt

PREFACE.
difficulties

vii

and

incongruities.

Whatever

difference of

upon authorship of the Homeric

opinion
to the

may

exist

his views as to the date

and

epics, there can be none as

high value of his edition of Hesiod, which may rank with his iEschylus, Euripides, and Propertius.

For the three chapters about Theognis, which complete this volume, the translation and arrangement of

Mr John Hookham Frere have

In some
instances,

been used and followed.

where Gaisford's text seemed to

discourage freedom of paraphrase, the editor has fallen

back upon his own more

literal

versions.

whole, however, the debt of Theognis to

On the Mr Hookham

Frere, for acting as his exponent to English readers,

cannot be over-estimated

and we tender our thanks

These are

to his literary executors for permission to avail our-

selves of his acute

and

lively

versions.

marked

Those of Elton and Chapman in Hesiod are designated by the letters E and C respectively,
F.

and the

editor's

alternative

versions

by the

letter

affixed to them.

CONTENTS.

HESIOD.
PAOl

CHAP.

I.

THE LIFE OF HESIOD,

II.

THE WORKS AND DAYS,

hesiod's PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY,

21

III.

IV. V.

THE THEOGONY,

....

56 70
95
111

THE SHIELD OF HERCULES,

IMITATORS OF HESIOD,

VI.

THEOGNIS.
CHAP.
n m
I.

THEOGNIS IN YOUTH AND PROSPERITY,

II.

THEOGNIS IN OPPOSITION,
THEOGNIS IN EXILE,

....
.
,

129
141

III.

154

HE

D.

CHAPTER L
THE LIFE OF HESIOD.

Of

materials for a biography of the father of didactic

is,

poetry there

than

is felt in

as might be expected, far less scarcity the case of the founder of epic. Classed

as contemporaries

by Herodotus, Homer and Hesiod

the former the represent two schools of authorship objective and impersonal, wherein the mover of the

puppets that
to reader

fill

his

stage

is

himself invisible

the

latter the subjective

and

personal,

which communicates
its verse,

and

listener,

through the medium of

the private thoughts and circumstances of the individual 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 suca. c. vol. XV.

2
cess

HE SI OB.
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.
is

Eor an approximation to

this the chief

Herodotus, who, in discussing the Hellenic authority " Hesiod and theogonies, gives it as his opinion that Homer lived not more than four hundred years before "
his era,

and

places, it will

poet

first

in order of the two.

be observed, the didactic This would correspond

Hesiod Homer's senior by about thirty years

tained,

with the testimony of the Parian marble which makes and ;

Ephorus, the historian of the poet's fatherland, main-

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 incapable of decisive solution, and the key to it has to be sought, if anywhere, in the internal evidence

poems themselves, as to "the state of mancustoms, arts, and political government famiTradition certainly liar to the respective authors."
of the
ners,

conspires to affix a
stars

common

date to these pre-eminent

poetry, by clinging to a fabled contest for the prize of their mutual art ; and, so far

of

Hellenic

as

it

is

of any worth, corroborates the consistent be-

lief of

the ancients, that Hesiod flourished at least As to his parentage, nine centuries before Christ. although the names of his father and mother have not

been preserved, there

is

internal evidence of the most

'

In his ( Works and Days the trustworthy kind. us that his father migrated across the iEgean tells poet

THE LIFE OF
from

IIESIOD.
of

Cyme

in iEolia, urged

by narrowness

means

and

by a recurrence to the source and fountain-head of his race ; for he sailed

a desire to better his fortunes to Boeotia, the mother-country of the iEolian colonies.

There he probably gave up his seafaring

agriculture instead
;

life,

taking to

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, together with the intercourse between the mother and
daughter countries, cannot but have nursed a taste for
the
tinct

muse in Hesiod, which developed itself in a disand independent vein, and was neither an offset of the Homeric stock, nor indebted to the Homeric
for

poems

aught beyond the countenance afforded by

The account given by Hesiod parity of pursuits. of his father's migration deserves citation, and may be conveniently given in the words of Elton's translation of the
'

Works and Days

' :

"

Thus did our mutual

witless Perses, thus for honest gain, 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.

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
if
its

field, at first sight, for

the growth of

poesy; but,
"nurse/' in
poetic child."

the locality
associations

no unmeet and surroundings, "for a

is

studied,

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

Aganippe, and the source of the The fountain of HippoPermessus. memory-haunted crene was further to the south ; but it was near this
close to the spring of

fountain that the inhabitants of Helicon showed to

Works and Pausanias a very ancient copy of the Days' of the bard, whose name is inseparably associated
'

with the neighbourhood.

the
locality

Modern

travellers describe

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,

clusters of ilex

and almond

trees;
plains,

and arbutus deck its higher and the oleander and myrtle fringe the banks of
rills

the numerous

that gush from the

soil,

and stream

in shining cascades

down

its declivities

into the plain

between
adds,

it

and the Copaic Lake.

* P. 253, 254.

On

Helicon," he

"according to the ancient belief,

no noxious

TEE LIFE OF
herb was found.

I1EX10D.

Here

also the first narcissus bloomed.

The ground
industrious

is

diffuse a delightful fragrance.

luxuriantly decked with flowers, which It resounds with the

murmur

pastoral flutes,

of bees, and with the music of and the noise of waterfalls." The solu-

tion of the apparent discrepancy

settler's

account of Ascra and

traveller, is

its

between the ancient climate, and that of

the

modern

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 preIt is, insently see, by the Boeotian law-tribunals. deed, conceivable that, at certain seasons, Ascra may

have been swept by

the character given

fierce blasts,
it

and have deserved

;

in the above verses

all

but the
is

key to

its

general depreciation at

seasons

more

likely to

be hid under strong personal prejudice than found in an actual disparity between the ancient and

At any rate, it is manifest, from 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
the modern climate.
Hesiod's
;

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 incident 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

HESIOD.
To
They wont mazy measure, breathing grace
feet,"

"

lead the

Enkindling love, and glance their quivering

speech, gave
as

they accosted the favoured rustic with their heavenly him commission to be the bard of didactic,

of epic, poetry, and in token of such a him with a staff of bay, symbolic of Hesiod's own account of this vision poetry and song. in the opening of his ' Theogony is as follows

Homer was

function invested

'

"

They

to

Hesiod

erst

Have taught

He

their stately song, the whilst his flocks 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

said they, daughters of the mighty Jove, All eloquent, and gave into mine hand, Wondrous a verdant rod, a laurel branch,
!

Or So

a fiction false, yet seeming true, utter at our will the things of truth/

many

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

And

blessed race existing evermore, first and last resound the Muses' praise." E. 33-48.

The

details of this interview, as

above recorded, are

centred, indeed, in the poet replete with interest himself, but in some degree also attaching to his
.

and that If the verses are genuine reputed works. the ancients so accounted them is plain from two allu-

THE LIFE OF HESIOD.

sions of

Ovid* they show that with a faith quite in his simple, serious, superstitious character, with keeping 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 propagaThe " fictions tion of religion and moral instruction.
seeming true
"

in other words, the heroic poetry so

Hesiod conpopular in the land of his father's birth siders himself enjoined to forsake for a graver strain "the things of truth" which the Muses declare have
in

been hitherto regarded by mortals as not included He takes their comtheir gift of inspiration.

mission to be prophet and poet of this phase of minstrelsy, embracing, it appears, the past and future, and

And including his theogonic and ethical poetry. while the language of the Muses thus defines the poet's aim, when awakened from a rude shepherd-life
the devout service of inspired song, it implies, rather than asserts, a censure of the kinds of poetry
to

which admit of an
For himself,

easier

and

freer range

of fancy.

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

games

in Eubcea.
*

in a contest of song at funeral In the same passage (E. 915-922)

;

Fasti, vi. 13

Art of Love,

27.

HESIOD.

Hesiod testifies to the gravity of his poetic trust by averring that he speaks "the mind of aegis hearing the whose have Jove, Muses, daughters, 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 His own traditions and surroundings in the in zEolia.
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 and thought, his own observation and retentivepains ness, for the gift which he brought, in his measure, to
perfection.

A life
'

afield

conduced to mould him into

ra sort of Boeo-

the poet of the

tian
'

Works and Days/

Shepherd's Calendar/ interwoven with episodes The nearness of fable, allegory, and personal history.
of his native hills, as well as the traditions of elder
bards, conspired to impel

him to the task of shaping a And both aims are so congenial and comtheogony. 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.

brook an individual Hesiod than an individual Homer.

But be

this as

it

gives of himself, in the

may, the glimpses which the poet more autobiographical of his

reputed works, present the picture of a not very locomotive sage, shrewd, practical, and observant within
Ids range_of observation, apt to learn,
teach, storing

and apt

also to

up

life's

everyday lessons as they strike

him, and drawing for his poetry upon a well-filled bank

homely truth and experience. He gives the distinct idea of one who, having a gift and believing in a comof
mission, sets himself to illustrate his own sentiment, " in front of excellence the that gods have placed

and whilst in the 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
exertion ;"
c
'

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
practical agriculture, in the
'

'

floating legends of the gods

offspring,

which

till

congeries.

On

and goddesses and their must have been a chaotic day works akin to these two main and
his

extant poems we may conceive him to have spent that part of his mature life which was not given up
to husbandry.

any
it

rate,

if it
'

at Travelling he must have disliked involved sea-voyages. His lists of

'

rivers in the

are curiously defective where might have been supposed they would be fullest as regar Is Hellas generally ; whereas he gives many names

Theogony

of the Iliad and Odyssey were so called, as separating by the voice of previous tradition had been made one.

what

10

HESIOD.

of Asiatic rivers, and even mentions the Nile and the

Phasis, neither of

which occur

in

Homer.

But

this

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
to

would seem

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 The one voyage to which heard most in childhood.
lie

owned was made with

a view to
;

;the

musical contest
surely not with-

at Chalcis

above alluded to

and

it is

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 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
r

The

guilty walls of beauty-blooming Troy." < Works and Days/ E. 901-910.

This, the poet goes

tically

on to

say, is all

he knows prac-

for it
strait

about navigation, and truly it is little enough ; is no exaggeration, but a simple fact, that the

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 Thucydides a bridge had been thrown across it.

But experimental knowledge was reckoned superby one who could rest in the knowledge he possessed of the mind of Jove, and in the commission
fluous

he held from his daughters,

lief,

taught him

navigation, astronomy,

who, according to his beand the rest ol

when they made him an interpreter of " vates " in a double the divine will, and a to sense, dictate a series of precepts concerning the time for
the curriculum,

voyaging and the time for staying ashore.

Besides, in

the poet's eye seafaring was a necessity of degenerate In the golden age none were merchants. times.

('Works and Days,' 236.) Yet the even flow of the poet's rural life was not without its occasional and chronic disturbances and The younger brother, to whom allusion has storms. 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 agriculThe settlement of the shares in this tural pursuits.
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 Perses found means to bribery and corruption.

to

12

BES10D.
him
of the better half of the

purchase their award to

patrimony, 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

and, after this fraud, dissipated his ill-gotten

sessional courts
litigation

may be known by their lounging about the petty when open. Perhaps the taste for
thus fostered furnished

him with the

idea

of repairing his diminished fortunes by again proceeding against his brother, and hence Hesiod's invectives

judges,
is

against the unscrupulousness of the claimant, and of the who were the instruments, of his rapacity. It

not distinctly stated what was the issue of this

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-

second

Works and Days,' a persuasive to honest labour as contrasted with the idleness which is fertile in expedients for living at the
ence of which he wrote his
'

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

But

this

wealth go instigate the war 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.

The bribe-devouring judges, smoothed by thee, The sentence willed, and stamped the false decree

13

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

fraud.

preferable to the luxuries of plenty purchased by 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,

to his extravagant ways, and to the ready resource of recouping his failing treasure by endeavouring to levy a fresh tax upon

Perses had a wife

who kept him up

Hesiod.

Such a surmise might well account

crotchets.

for the

is the " value set upon a " help-meet by Simonides, Archilo-

poet's curious misogynic

Low

as

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.

association of

accompanies his account of the myth of Pandora, the woman with unmixed evil in that legend,
practical advice to his brother in a later
'

and the more

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

It is true that in certain

establishment and character.

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 experiThe bridegroom was to be not far short of ence.
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
:

"

thy wife from those that round thee dwell, 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." Weighing,
lest
'

And choose

Works and

Days,' 700-705.

This,
sider

we

conceive,

was Hesiod's

advice, as

an out-

For himself, it is promight give it, bable he reckoned that the establishment would sufto others.
fice

class

which he elsewhere recommends to the farmer 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

brance.

which have kept it in rememThis was surely Plato's belief when he wrote
l

the following beautiful sentences in his

Symposium.'

16

HESIOD.
he thinks
of

"Who when

Homer and Hesiod and

other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones ? Who would not emulate

them in the
lasting glory

creation of children such as theirs,

" *

which

have preserved their memory, and given them ever1

proximately guessed from his poems,

and character can be apit would seem to have been temperately and wisely ordered, placid, and That one who so for the most part unemotional. clearly saw the dangers of association with bad women that he shrank from intimacy with good, should have
So
far as the poet's life

met

his death through an intrigue at (Enoe, in Ozolian

Locris, with
less just as

Clymene, the

sister of his hosts, is

doubt-

pure a bit of incoherent fiction as that his remains were carried ashore, from out of the ocean into

which they had been

that a faithful dog men we have seen
'

cast,

by the agency of dolphins ; or no doubt the sharp-toothed speciin the

'

recommended

Works and

out the authors of the murder, and Days the hands of justice. them to Some accounts brought attribute to the poet only a guilty knowledge of the
traced

crime of a fellow-lodger
is

but in either shape the legend

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 concluded 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 Orchomenus, possibly to be further from the importunities of
* Jowett's transl.,
i.

525.

THE LIFE OF HESIOD.

Perses,

17

and beyond the atmosphere of unrighteous Pausanias states that Hesiod, like Homer, judges. whether from fortune's spite or natural distaste, enjoyed no intimacy with kings or great people ; and this
consists

menes used

with Plutarch's story that the Spartan Cleo" the to call Hesiod 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 In Thespise, to which resident aliens in Boeotia. 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 contemplative 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-

he systematised as best he might, and at whose fanes, notwithstanding all his research and inquiry, he still ignorantly worshipped ; regulating his life on
tories

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 testimony of the epitaph by his countryman Chersias,

which
"

Pausanias
:

read on the poet's

sepulchre at

Orchomenus
Though
Yet
a. c.

fertile

rest his

Ascra gave sweet Hesiod birth, bones beneath the Minyan earth,
.

vol. xv.

18

HES10D.
The
Equestrian land. There, Hellas, sleeps thy pride, wisest bard of bards in wisdom tried."
Pausan.,
ix. 38,

4.

Hesiod's literary offspring has question been much debated, the Works and Days alone enjoying an undisputed genuineness. But it does not
of
'
'

The

seem that the 'Theogony' was impugned before the

time of Pausanias,* who records that Hesiod's Heliconian 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 corroboration 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

genial field, never so

would have opened a con-

much as hinted a question concerning 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
is
'

The Shield of
hesitation

Hercules.'

The

'

Shield

'

certainly of questionable merit, date,

little

though a

and authorship, would have been wise in

Colonel Mure, before expressing such wholesale condemnation 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:
(3) short

(1) didactic;

(2)

historical

and genealogical

mythical poems.

Under one or other of these heads it is easy to group the Hesiodic poems, no longer extant, of which notices Thus the Astronomy are found in ancient authors.
'
'

and the
teia,

or

'Eoiae,

Maxims of Chiron,' with the OrnithomanBook of Augury,' belong to the first class the or Catalogue of Women,' which is probably
'
'

the same
*

as the the Genealogy of Heroes Melampodia,' which treated of the renowned prophet, prince, and priest of the Argives, Melampus, and

poem

'

'

of his descendants in genealogical sequence ; and the 'iEgimius,' which gathered round the so-named mythical prince of the Dorians,

and friend and

ally of

Hercules,

many

genealogical traditions of the Heraclid

will,

and Dorian

races,

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
safer to
'

is

at least Hesiodic,

though

it is

thus vaguely than to affirm it Hesiod's. conveniently wide berth is afforded by the modern

put

it

solution, that several imputed works of Hesiod are the works of a school of authors of which Hesiod was the

name-giving patriarch. only be approximated.

The

truth in this matter can

when we

Enough, perhaps, is affirmed say that in style, dialect, and flavour of antiquity, 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 The two former poems are of the iEolo-Boeotic age.
type of the ancient epic dialect, while the Shield is nearer to the .^Eolo- Asia, tic branch of it, used by Homer. Discrepancies, where they occur, may be set
l
'

down

to the interpolations of rhapsodists, and to the accretions incident to passage through the hands of

many
The

different

style

workmen, after the and merits of each work

original master.

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 " poem appears to be properly Farming Operaand tions," "Lucky Unlucky Days," or, in short, "The Husbandman's Calendar;" but if the ethical
didactic

scope of it be taken into account, it might, as Colonel Mure has remarked, be not inaptly described as Letter of Kemonstrance and Advice to a Brother."

"A

And inasmuch
amend
by

as its object is to exhort that brother to

his ways,

and take

to increasing his substance

agriculture, rather

than dreaming of schemes to

rit by frequenting and corrupting the law the two not are inconsistent with courts, descriptions It has been imputed as blame to the each other.

enhance

poem
tion
is

that

it

hangs loosely together, that

in short, that

its
its

connecconstitu-

obscure and vague,

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

neither pattern nor master to refer to;

upon a task wdiere he had and besides

22
tills,

IIES10D.

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 arranging

its

venient,
it

hortatory topics pretty much as is most conand of enforcing its chief idea, be that what

may, by arguments and illustrations rather congruous in the main than marshalled in the best order of

their going.

Works and Days' is capable of tolerably neat division and subdivision. The first a setpart (vv. 1-383) is ethical rather than didactic,
But the
'

ting-forth

myth,

and by t}ie accessory aid of and proverb-lore, of the superiority of honest labour to unthrift and idleness, and of worthy emulation to unworthy strife and envying.
by
contrast,
fable, allegory,

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
a religious calendar of the months, with remarks upon the days most lucky or unpropitious for this or
is

three, however,

that duty or occupation of rural and nautical life. All 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.

tern
first

23

than would appear to a perfunctory reader.

part, as
is

The

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 introductions. 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 The elder and nobler of the twain is the enterprise.
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.

wandering minstrel and the professional beggar of the heroic age exercise equally legitimate callings in Hesiod's view, and the picture which he draws

The

24
'

HESIOD.
Odyssey.
for

recalls to us those of the "banquet-hall in the

When

Antinous rates the swine-herd Eumseus

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.
That such

Is it

nought
?

to thee

Of thy young master waste

Odyssey,

as these, here gathering, all the "

xvii.

means

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 inspired 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

plain from Irus's jealousy of a supposed rival beggar, which results in the boxing-match with Ulysses in the 18th Book.

assemblies

is

To
is

return to Hesiod.

The bettermost kind

of rivalry

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
and the

since

Prometheus

stole the fire

from heaven, because Zeus,

toilsome,
idle,

as a punishment,

made labour

THE WORKS AND DAYS.

to shirk their inevitable
lot,

25
" If

resort to injustice.

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
his heart
sire,
;

With fraud
Sore
ills

illusive

had incensed

to

man

devised the heavenly

fire.

And

hid the shining element of

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
ills

and sickness and human

had been unknown

they were introduced our mother Eve by Zeus's " beauteous

but after that transgression as sin into the world through

;

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
elder

takes her in spite of the remonstrances of his

as has

and more foresight ed brother, Prometheus. If, 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

who

a covert allusion to the foolish wife of Perses, encouraged his extravagance, and seems to have
is

it will inspired Hesiod with an aversion for her sex the home more the of this bring closely pertinence

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
said,

who

rules the earth

and sways the pole

Had

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, virgin's likeness with the looks of love.

He

bade Minerva teach the

skill that

sheds
;

A thousand colours in the gliding threads

He
To

called the magic of love's golden queen breathe around a witchery of mien,

And And

eager passion's never-sated flame, 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 golden garland twined of spring's purpureal flowers."

E. 103-106.

And when
"

the conclave deemed that they had perfected an impersonation of mischief,

The name Pandora

For
all

To

to the maid was given, the gods conferred a gifted grace crown this mischief of the mortal race.

THE WORKS AND DAYS.

The sire commands the winged herald bear The finished nymph, the inextricable snare To Epimetheus was the present brought,

27

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

and conscious knew too late The invidious gift, and felt the curse of fate."
received,

E. 114-124.

How
lific

" this gift of

woman " was

poet,
it

evil

and sorrow, the

be the source of promust be confessed, does

to

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 And when in v. 94 of the poem for propagating ills.

we

are brought face to face

with the chest and the

"

lid,

and Pandora's
got there."

fatal curiosity, the puzzle is

how

they

Homer, indeed, glances

gifts, in

at

two

chests,

one of good the other of evil mansion

:

Jove's heavenly

"

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
II.

fair."

Conington,

xxiv.

And those who

or to

hold Hesiod to have lived after Homer,

have availed himself here and there of the same

pre-existent legends, to be surmised that

may

infer that the poet leaves

it

Pandora was furnished with the

purpose of woe to
likely solution that Prometheus,

less desirable casket for the express

man.
the

But it is

more

embodiment of mythic philanthropy, had im-

28
prisoned
"

HESIOD.
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

is

Proclus.

In Hesiod, the first mention of the chest simultaneous with the catastrophe
"

The woman's hands an ample

She
lifts

casket bear
ills

the lid

she scatters

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.
rest, in quick dispersion hurled, woes innumerous roamed the breathing world With ills the land is rife, with ills the sea ; Diseases haunt our frail humanity

Issued the

And

Self-wandering through the noon, the night, they glide Voiceless a voice the Power all-wise denied.
.

Know
To

not given elude the wisdom of omniscient Heaven."

:

then this awful truth

it is

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-

The concluding lines of tial benefactor to the race. 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 disHis lot, he laments, is cast in tances its precursors. the fifth age of the world ; and here he takes occasion
to in troduce the epi sode of the five ages of the world ,

and of the increaseof corruption as each suc ceeds the In this episode, which Mr Puley considers to other.
bear a more than accidental resemblance to the Mosaic
writings,

the gol den a ge comes

first

times und^exlkonoaj^rj^

when

there

those happy 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

The
'And

virtuous
all

many dwelt

harvest uncompelled by toil in common blest,

all in

unenvying shared what

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 gives of them in the Hesiod's account
:

much with
*

Banquet of

the account Diotima Here is Plato.' *

"

When
By

on

this race the

verdant earth had lain,

' '

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
To mark

their all-observant glance around 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

further on in the

may be compared the poet's reference 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 For thrice ten thousand holy daemons rove The nurturirg earth, the delegates of Jove ;

sight.

Hovering they glide

to earth's extremest

bound,

A cloud aerial veils their forms around

* Jowett's transl.,
i.

519.

THE WORKS AND DAYS.

Guardians of

31

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 The blessedness of this race consisted in degeneracy. 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

But when the earth had hid

those respects they should have given. these, like the rest,
called the subterrestrial blest,

They then were

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 It obtained from men, after its demise, silver face.

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. 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.
men
of brass as "

so interprets represents these

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 not overlook the " heroes," a spirits in Hades, he must

whom formed an important part of the " " heroic of Hellas, age brings the religion apparently unmetallic into a place to which their prowess entitled them, next to the brazen age \ and at the same
veneration for
time, contrasting their virtues with the character of
their violent predecessors,

assigns to

them an

after-

THE WORKS AND DAYS.

state nearer to that of the gold

33

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

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 her leaves.

are the swelling seeds burnt
clods,

all

Nor

up within the
all

thirsty

So kindly blends the seasons there the king of

a. c. vol.

the gods.

xv.

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

age, corrupt, un-

to the worse.
restful,

Now

comes the iron

silver

and toilsome; wherein, in strong contrast to the age, which enjoyed a hundred years of childhood
senility is

and youth, premature

degeneracy
"
:

an index of physical

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
All
is

is right.

hand.

"

Lynch-lawyers get the upper violence, oppression, and sword law,"

and
"

Though

still

And
Hesiod's

still

some good

the gods a weight of care bestow, is mingled with the woe,"

yet, as this

own

iron age, at the transition point of which 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
" Till those
all

nobler impulses,

From
The

fair forms, in snowy raiment bright, the broad earth have winged their heavenward flight Called to th' eternal synod of the skies,

virgins,

Modesty and

And

leave forsaken
of evil

man

Justice, rise, to mourn below

The weight

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 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 " The HawT k and the it to be entitled but to bring

home

Dove," ought 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.
moral
is
:

later fabulists, the

Contrary to the use of 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
I

song,

must company

rend

my

banquet, or I loose

my way 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

Addressing Perses and the judges, he points out that injustice and overbearing conduct not only
appeal.

crush the poor man, but eventually the rich and powerful 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 communities.
" Lo
!

Here

are the results of injustice

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
and

here,

by

contrast, are

justice, practised

by

cities

the fruits of righteousness 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
The

soft reflects the father's face : Still flourish they, nor tempt with ships the
fruits of earth are

main; poured from every plain."

E. 303-314.

In the
the

lines

italicised the

old poet anticipates that

criterion of honest

wedlock which Horace shapes into

"

"
line,
iv.

The

father's features in his children smile

(Odes,

5-23, Con.);

and Catullus into the beautiful

their offspring

wish

for Julia

and Manlius, that

THE WORKS AND DAYS.

"
Strangers

37

May

strike

when

the boy they meet

;

As
Of

his father's counterfeit his face the index be

And

his mother's chastity."

Epithalam. (Theod. Martin).

to the opposite picture,

After a recurrence, suggested by this train of thought, and an appeal to the judges to

remember those

invisible watchers who evermore support 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 " what resorts to irony, and, like Job, asks profit there
is

in righteousness,
it 1

when wrong seems

for a

to

carry all

before

"

But only

moment.

In a short but
his eyes to the

fine image, Perses is invited to lift

up

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
reminded in a

is

laid

up

your own granary

(he

is

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 with is found Shame poverty born of idleness; policy.

whereas a just boldness inspirits him whose wealth is gained by honest work and the favour of Heaven.
of these adagial maxims will form part of the " " Hesiod's Proverbial Philosophy ; and of chapter on

Some

the rest

it

may

suffice to say, that

quaint forceful

way

the poet has his own of prescribing the best rules for
to

dealing with friends and neighbours, as to giving and

entertaining,

and with regard

women,

children,

and

Tn most of these maxims the ruling motive In reference to the fair sex, appears to be expediency. it is plain that he is on the defensive, and regards
domestics.

them

the less a

as true representatives of Pandora, with whom 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
C. 585.

A woman trust doth trust a den of thieves."

As to family, his view is * The best thing is to have an only the more cares/' the patrimony; and if a consolidate and nurse to son,
that " the more children

man
this)

has more,

it is

to

be desired that he should die

grievance

old, so as

to prevent litigation (a personal

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
*

fortune.

" He that hath a wife and children hath given pledges to " Bacon.

THE WORKS AND DAYS.

a family
is

39

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
atic

and

cautions,

and

to devote himself to the system-

of the farming operations, which, to his the highroad to getting rich. constitute mind,
routine

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 agriHitherto his exhortation to his brother had culture. of " on the one work and
string

harped

work,

;*

now,

as agriculture to prescribe

was the Boeotian's work, he proceeds and illustrate the modus operandi, and

This is the seasons best adapted for each operation. the didactic of Hesiod's portion Georgics, if we really

may

so call his

interesting to study,

poem on agriculture and it is curiously 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.
To
quote
Elton's

on the farm came on instead.

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.

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.
too,

Know

Law

of the fields,

and known
soil

Who

turns the laboured

to every swain beside the main

Or who, remote from billowy

ocean's gales, Fills the rich glebe of inland- winding vales."

E. 525-536.

With us, ploughing and sowing began, for early crops, in late autumn ; and to be even with the world around him, and not dependent on his neighbours, a man must (he tells his ne'erHesiod, therefore, as

with

do-well brother) " strip to plough, strip to sow, and advice which Virgil has repeated strip to reap," He seems to imply, too, in v. in his first Georgic.

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 The first thing the farmer has to do resolved upon. 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

plements suited to his hand.

YS.

4'1

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

gadding out. Care-flying ease Gives labour ever competent increase He that with doubts Lis needful business crosses Is always wrestling with uncertain losses."
still is

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

The time to plough, a mortar, a pestle, and so forth. fell timber, so that it be not worm-eaten, and so that
it

may
"

not be cut

when

autumn the

the sap "

is

running,

is

when

in

Dog-star, Sirius,

gets more night and

less

in other words, when the summer heats abate, day ; and men's bodies take a turn to greater lissomness and The pestle and mortar prescribed were a moisture.

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

So minute is the poet in his directions Aristophanes. 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 But

axles of

modern

carts are
is,

his great concern

about six feet long. to give full particulars about

42
the proper plough.
is

HESIOD.
wood and shape for the various parts of his The plough-tail (Virgil's "buris,"Georg. i. 170) be of ilex wood, which a servant of Athena i.e.,

to

is to fasten with nails to the share-beam, a carpenter and fit to the pole. It is well, he says, to have two

And ploughs, in case of an accident to a single one. whilst one of these was to have plough - tail, sharewas
all

beam, and pole all of one piece of timber, the other to be of three parts, each of different timber, and
fastened with nails.

This

latter is apparently
is all

the

better of the two, that

which

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,, because, being past the mischievous and frolicsome age,
they are not likely to break the pole and leave the Directions follow this someploughing in the middle.

what dry

detail as to the choice of a

ploughman

" In one with bread forty's prime thy ploughman Of four-squared loaf in double portions fed.
;

He

steadily will cut the furrow true, his fellows glance a rambling view, a stripling throws Still on his task intent

Nor toward

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

and it is probable that, in prescribing garden-digger ; " double a loaf with eight quarterings, Hesiod means
rations," thereby

"

implying that
if

feed your
well.

men

well,

it is good economy to would have them work you

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
rely
;

and

it

will not do to

on borrowing a yoke of oxen from a neighbour at

the busy time.

The wideawake neighbour may up

and
"

say,

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."
:

Work up

C. 122-126.

farmer

who knows what he

is

about will have,

his slaves

Hesiod

says, all his gear ready.

He and

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 An odd addition to the hand, and bestow their fruits.
will turn to

farmer's staff

to break the clods,

who goes behind the plough and give trouble to the birds by In Wilkinson's Ancient covering up the seed. Egyptians' (ii. 13), an engraving representing the
is

the slave

'

44

HESIOD.

processes of ploughing and hoeing gives a slave in the rear with a wooden hoe, engaged in breaking the
clods.

little

interesting

further on, a reference to the same work explains Hesiod's meaning where he

says, that if

ploughing
will

is

done

at the point of

mid-

winter,

men

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 covered 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

The basket of which Hesiod speaks as carryother. ing the ears clipped from the straw, has its illustration This is the explanation given also in the same pages. On the whole, the also by Mr Paley in his notes.
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.

to

45

becomes more amusing.

be done and what avoided in the wintry season, he 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

"

To

That, famine-smitten, thou may'st ne'er be seen 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 This episode is so poetic, even if overin Boeotia.

wrought in some portions,

its

that critics have suggested being a later addition of a rhapsodist of the postHesiodic school; and there are two or three tokens " as the month that the mention of " Lenseon (e. g.,

answers to our Christmastide and beginning of January, whereas the Boeotians knew no such name, but
called the period in question

"Bucatius") which beyet a sensitiveness to of its phenomena, is

of

speak a later authorship.

cold,

And

and a
and

lively description

quite in keeping with

the poet's disparagement

Ascra

further,

of Hesiod

and

quite possible that, a propos his works, theories of interpolation have

it is

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 handiIndeed, 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

work.

give an idea of his calibre. tion of winter from Elton's version

left to

We
:

give the descrip-

"

Beware the January month beware Those hurtful days, that keenly-piercing
;

air
cast,

Which

flays the steers,

while frosts their horrors

blast.

Congeal the ground, and sharpen every

From

The northern wind,

Thracia's courser-teeming region sweeps 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 The

Swells the loud storm, and

then deepening round stoops to earth all the boundless woods resound.
;

And

beasts their cowering tails with trembling fold, 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
The

long-haired goat defenceless feels the gale

to
flock,

Yet vain the north wind's rushing strength

with sheltering

wound

fleeces fenced around.

And now
Whose

lair is in

the horned and unhorned kind, the wood, sore famished grind

Where oaks

Their sounding jaws, and frozen and quaking fly, the mountain-dells imbranch on high

UNIVERSITY
47

TUB WORKS AXD DATS.

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.'

E. 700-745.

The

lines italicised scarcely realise the poet's comparison 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 warmclad, thick-shod,

shoulders,

and a fur
ears."

and with a waterproof cape over the cap, lined with felt, about the

head and
hinds.

He

certainly
is

knew how

to take care

of himself.

But he

When

equally thoughtful for his at this season the rain betokened by a

misty morning sets in at night, and cold and wet " severe to flocks, nor interfere with husbandry, a time
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 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 " housecarrier") quits the earth and climbs the trees, to
shelter itself from the Pleiads, then vine-culture

must

give place (about the middle of

harvest.

May)
:

to the early

Then must men

!

rise

betimes

" Lo

the third portion of thy labours cares

early

The

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.

brief and picturesque episode follows about the permissible rest and enjoyment of the summer season, when artichokes flower, and the " cicala " (as Hesiod

song from its wings accurately puts it) pours forth " 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

Hesiod prescribes three the grape-juice. to one of wine of water and, as Cratinus's ; cups " Will it bear three in Athenseus question
as

THE WORKS AND DAYS.

parts

49

water?"

suggests,

only generous wine will

stand such dilution.

able, however, it mer, when the Dog Star burns. The rising of Orion is the time for threshing and winnowing (i.e., about the

If such potations are ever seasonwill be in the greatest heat of sum-

middle of July) ; and this operation appears to have been performed by drawing over the corn the heavytoothed plank or " tribulum," or trampling it by means In some of cattle on a smooth level threshing-floor.
parts of Europe, is still retained.

Mr

Paley informs us, the old process After the corn has been winnowed,
staff,
:

Hesiod counsels a revision of the household

language of

in

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. mastiff likewise nourish still at home,

And meat him

close as any comb, keep with stronger guard The day -sleep-night-wake man from forth thy yard."
well, to

Whose

teeth are sharp

and

346-352.

"When
turus

are in mid-heaven, and Arcthen the grapes are to be gathered, so that Hesiod's vintage would be in the middle of SepSirius
is rising,
;

and Orion

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. D A. C. Vol. XV.

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

And

sixth express the harvest of the vine, teach thy vats to foam with joy-inspiring wine."

E. 851-858.

When
to

the Pleiads, Hyads, and Orion set, plough again. But not to go on a voyage
!

it is

time

Though,
sailor,

as

we have

before stated, and as Hesiod seems particu-

larly anxious to

have

it

known, he was no

our

poet gives
tackle safe

now

directions

how

to

keep boats and

and sound in the wintry season, by means

of a rude breakwater of stones, and by taking the The plug out of the keel to prevent its rotting. best season for voyaging is between midsummer and

autumn, he says
winter rains.
spring,

only

it

The other and

requires haste, to avoid the less desirable time is in

when

grown

to the length

the leaves at the end of a spray have of a crow's foot a compara-

tive measurement,

retained

in

the

the ranunculus

which Mr Paley observes is still popular name of some species of crowfoot ; but Hesiod calls this a

"snatched voyage," and holds the love of gain that He concludes his remarks on essays it foolhardy.
this

head by prudent advice not

:

to

risk

all

your

exports in one venture, all your eggs proverb runs in one basket

as our

homely

" Trust not thy whole precarious wealth

Tossed in the hollow keel
:

to sea,
:

Thy

a portion send larger substance let the shore defend.

THE WORKS AND DAYS.

Fearful the losses of the ocean
fall,
:

51

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 "
!

When

E. 954-962.

After this fashion the poet proceeds to give the advice on marriage which has been already quoted,

and which probably belongs

the poem.

to

an

earlier portion of

From

this

he turns to the duties of friendto expe-

ship, still regulated

by caution and an eye

diency.

It is better to

be reconciled to an old friend

to contract

with

whom you
;

have fallen out than

to

new

friendships

and, above
it

countenance, that
misgivings.

all, put a control on your may betray no reservations or

careful

and temperate tongue

at a feast,

is

com-

mended, and geniality

feast, for

especially a club

"

When many
Where
Great
all

guests combine in

common

fare,
:

Be not morose, nor grudge a

is

liberal share

contributing the feast unite, the pleasure, and the cost is light."
E. 1009-1012.

And now come some precepts

ler moralities

touching what Professor Conington justly

of a ceremonial nature, " calls smalT

and decencies," some of w hich,

it

has

been suggested, savour of Pythagorean or of Judaic

obligation, whilst all bespeak excessive
superstition.

Prayers with

hands, fording a river without " bunch propitiatory prayer, paring the nails off your

unw ashen

52
1*

HESIOD.
(i.e.,

of fives

your

five fingers*) at a feast after sacri-

all fice, lifting the can above the bowl at a banquet, these acts of commission and omission provoke, says Some of his precepts Hesiod, the wrath of the gods.

have a substratum of common

sense,

but generally

they can only be explained by his not desiring to contravene 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.

the closing portion of the poem, " Hesiod's Book of Days," designated by Chapman in of a calendar of the and, fact, point lucky and

And now comes

unlucky days of the lunar month, apparently as connected with the various worships celebrated on those The poet divides the month of thirty days, as days.

was the use

at

Athens much

later, into

three decades.

the best day for overlooking farm-work done, and allotting the rations for the month coming on ; and it is a holiday, too, in the lawis

The

thirtieth of the

month

specially lucky as sixth the unlucky for birth or marApollo's birthday riage of girls, probably because the birthday of the
;

courts.

The seventh of the month is

The fifth is very unlucky, virgin Artemis, his sister. because on it Horcus, the genius who punishes perslang term for the Palev's note on v. 742.

*"A

fists,

in use

among

pugilists."

See

THE WORKS AND DAYS.

jury,

53

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

Hesiod lays down the law, however, of these days without giving much enlightenment as to the "why" or "wherefore," and our knowledge from
Hermes.
other sources does not suffice to explain them all. 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

In the

this the air-suspended spider treads, 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

first

Throw

the shuttle and the

woman's nimble hand web expand."

E. 1071-1082.

Hesiod's account of the twenty-ninth of the

is

month

also a characteristic passage, not without a touch of

" The the oracular and mysterious. prudent secret," " One man " is to few confessed.'* he
says,

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

Such

is

poem

omens and avoiding transgression." the appropriate ending of Hesiod's didactic termination which ascribes prosperity in

agricultural pursuits to ascertainment of the will of the gods, and avoidance of even unwitting transgresThe study of omens, the poet sion of their festivals.

would have
'

it

understood,
'

is

the

way

to

be

safe in

these matters.

The Works and Days

as Hesiod's
earliest

possesses a curious interest

as the

most undoubted production, and

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
or

partially

and more finished didactic poems have only and exceptionally borrowed Hesiod's manner matter does not really detract from the interest of a
later

poem which,
mind and
in

as far as

we know,

is

the

first

in classical

literature to afford

internal evidence of the writer's

which

to

the first to teach that subjectivity, thoughts, many readers lies the charm and attraction

No doubt Hesiod's style and manner beof poetry. 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 To these the forepoint and terseness of his maxims.
going chapter on the
*

Works and Days' has been

THE WORKS AND DAYS.

55

unable to do justice, because it seemed of more consequence 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

chiefly, if

is

not entirely, found in the

poem we have

been discussing.

CHATTEK

IIL

hesiod's proverbial philosophy.

chief token of the antiquity of Hesiod's

'

'

Works

his use of familiar proverbs to illustrate his vein of thought, and to attract a primitive audience.
is

and Days

The scope and

the
his
fact,

structure of his other extant

poems
;

are

not such as to admit this mode of illustration

but

lost

that amidst the fragments which remain of 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

so.

at all events held it to

be

It

is,

of
so,

Homer

perhaps, needless to remark that the poems so much are full of like adagial sentences

James Duport, the Greek professor at Cambridge, published in 1680 an elaborate parallelism of the proverbial philosophy of the Iliad and Odyssey,
indeed, that

with the adages as well of sacred as of profane writers. Other scholars have since followed his lead, and elucidated the same
poetry,

common

and those who have opened a

point in the father of Greek like vein in

HESIOD S PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY.

1

57

this terse

Obviously an appeal to and easily-remembered and retained wisdom of the ancients is adapted to the needs of an early

other nations and languages.

stage of literature
to the brief

and its kinship, apparent or real, ; " dicta " of the oracles of antiquity, would and popularity with an
listeners.

constitute a part of its weight

audience

of wonder-stricken

And

come

to see the fitness of such bards as

so we 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.

draws upon a rare stock of proverbial authority for justice, honour, and good faith, but he also falls back

He

upon a well-chosen supply

affirm the policy of

of brief

and

telling

saws to

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.

biography
his life
less
(if

If,

as

we may

so call the

we have seen in his autoWorks and Days '),

'

was a

series of chronic wrestlings

it is all

with a worth-

brother and unjust judges,

the more natu-

58
ral that his stock

HESIOD.

of proverbs should partake of the twofold character indicated ; and we proceed to illustrate

both sides of

it

in their order.

In distinguishing the two kinds of contention, Hesiod ushers in a familiar proverb by words which
" This contenhave themselves taken adagial rank. " tion," he says, "is good for mortals (' Works and Days/

when potter vies with potter, craftscraftsman, beggar is emulous of beggar, and bard of bard." Pliny the younger, in a letter on the
24-26)
viz.,

"

man with

death of Silius Italicus, uses the introductory words of Hesiod apropos of the rivalry, of friends, in provoking 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
has

Hesiod attaches a nobler meaning than that which 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 confirmation 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
D.

" That

halfh more than

all ; true gain doth dwell

In

feasts of herbs,

mallow, and asphodel."

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.

moderation
"
;

59

and whilst in the

first

clause a sound

the end proposed, the latter part evidently has reference to the frugal diet, which bespeaks contentis

mind

ment and an absence

in Horace's prayer " Let
:

of covetousness, such as breathes

olives, endives,
all

mallows light
I.

Be

my

fare,"

Odes,

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

of herbs," or to " but good as a feast ;

this

Solomon respecting the " dinner our own adage that "enough is as
it

may be

pertinent to note that

Hesiodian

maxim

Plato,

who

in his

meaning,

" that

by Laws (iii. 690) explains Hesiod's when the whole was injurious and the
is,

like the former, quoted

half moderate, then the moderate was more and better

than the immoderate."

in the
to
*

The next which

'

presents itself

Works and Days owes

it

its interest as

much

the fact that

as

occurs almost

totidem verbis in

Homer,
later

to

its

resemblance to a whole host of

When proverbs and adages amongst all nations. 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.
word " acts
'

expression, save in the substitution of the

and it is exceedingly probable that both adapted to their immediate purposes the words of a pre-existing proverb.* Hesiod had already glanced
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
at the
'

" suffers " for ;

germ of very many adagial expressions about the teachsuch as those about "the stung ing of experience fisherman," "the burnt child," and "the scalded cat" of the Latin, English, and Spanish languages respectively.

The

Ojis, according to

Burton, say,

"

He whom

a serpent has bitten, dreads a slow-worm." Of a kindred tone of high heathen morality are several proverbial expressions in the

'Works and Days' touching

in

uprightness
viduals.

and

justice

communities

and

indi-

Thus

in one place

we

read that
fall,

The crimes

" Oft the crimes of one destructive of one are visited on all."

E. 319, 320.

In another, that mischief and malice author

:

recoil

on their

" 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.
" and the Proverbs Livy has Eventus stultorum magister "A prudent man foreseeth the evil and of Solomon, xx. 2, 3 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

" Bull of Phalaris

of these sentences recalls the story of the " 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
a

literally rendered,
"

man

the sentence might read, " Of that regardeth his oath the seed is more blessed
;

and so rendered, it curiously recalls the answer of the oracle to Glaucus in Herodotus
in the aftertime
(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 common 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
occurs a "

maxim
level
is

Wickedness," sings
;

lines of the proverb last cited almost scriptural in its phraseology. " the choose in
poet,

you might

a heap

One

is

the path, and it lies hard at hand." 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 The passage in Tennyson's outbursts of after-poetry. Ode, which expands the sentiment, is sufficiently
well known, but perhaps
slated
it

is itself

suggested by the
tran-

20th fragment of Simonides, which may be freely

:

" 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
intents worthless and good for nothing." and Days,' 294-297.) This passage, however, ('Works has been thought worthy of citation by Aristotle.

way,

is to all

Another passage of proverbial character, but subordinate moral tone, is that which declares
* Lo
!

the best treasure

lips of

The

is a frugal tongue ; moderate speech with grace are hung."

E. 1005, 1006.

And

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.
those which

When we turn to the other class of adages

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

Even the worBrother, avoid poverty and famine." ship and offerings of the gods are inculcated with an
Through the long gorge to the far His path upward, and prevailed,
light hath

"

won

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
as

is

life to

miserable men," in
;

much

the

same terms
all

Pindar after him

but this

is

only as a

dissuasive from unseasonable voyages,

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
upholds the
:

things the fitting season is maxim that "money

and because " in In effect he best."

" 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 " makes a mickle," or, as Hesiod hath it,

many a little

" Little to little added, if oft done, In small time makes a good possession."
It
is

C.

no

use,

he sagaciously adds, to spare the liquor

when
"

the cask is

empty

When
To

broached, or at the lees, no care be thine " 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.

" The

65

summer day
wliile

Endures not ever

toil

ye

ye may,"
E. 698, 699.

and

rising betimes in the morning,

on the

faith that
;

morn the third part of thy work doth gain The morn makes short thy way, makes short thy pain."

" The

C.
its

Shrewd and
straightforward.
v.

practical as

all

this teaching
is

is,

author deprecates anything that

not honest and

"Dishonest gains," he declares in

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

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.

66

HES10D.

in his treatment of these neighbours there was, to judge by his teaching, a very fair amount of liberality,

And

though scarcely that high principle of benevolence

which

content " to give, hoping nothing again." Self-interest, indeed, as might be expected, leavens
is

the mass of his precepts of conduct, which may be characterised as a good workaday code for the citizen
of a little narrow world,

mountains.

laugh 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 pretends 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

We

at the suspicion that

shut up within Boeotian animates

would turn out

is

to catch the thief,

surmised that there

tion for

allusion to

it has been an early "associa-

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

"

recommendation
it

Themistocles afterwards seems to have seen, when, as a to a held for sale, he advertised that

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 references to an already existing stock of such maxims.

Where,

in

pointing a moral a prqpos of Pandora, he

HESIOD'S PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY.

takes

67

up

his parable against

women, and likens them

to the drones,

"

Which
Of

gather in their greedy

maw

the spoils
E. 797, 798.

others' labour,"

Hesiod has in his mind's eye that ancient proverb " one sowing and another reaping," which touching 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 In most modern previously even to Hesiod's date.
languages
it

has

its

counterpart

and

it

was recognised

and applied by our Lord, and His apostle St Paul.* " Blest is he whom Earlier in the poem, the saw that
the Muses love
"
is

probably pre-Hesiodian

but

it is

too obviously a commonplace of poets in general to deserve commemoration as a proverb. cannot cite

We
l

any adages from The Shield,' and an examination of ' The Fragments adds but few to the total of Hesiod's These few are chiefly from the Maxims of stock. Chiron,' supposed to have been dictated by that philo'
'

One of these, sophic Centaur to his pupil Achilles. from an oration of Hyperiby Harpocration preserved
des,

may
The

be thus translated

u Works for the young, counsels for middle age

old

may

best in

vows and prayers engage."

'

Another savours of the philosophy of the and Days

' :

Works

St Matt. xxv. 24

Gal.

vi.

2 Cor.

ix. 6.

68
" Gifts can

HESIOD.
move
gods,

and

gifts

our godlike kings."

Whilst a third might well be a stray line from one of

the exhortations to Perses
ference of a
;

for it deprecates the pre-

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
ian."
It bids us

pseudo-Hesiod" not decide a case until both sides

have been heard."

ing with the

And

yet another saw, referred

to the Ascraean sage, appears -to us in excellent keep-

maxims work which abound in

are indebted for
it

respecting industry and hard his great didactic poem.

We

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
succinct

also the following extracts

'

from the extant

fragments of the

Catalogue of

Women/

though not
claim

enough

to

rank as adages,

may lay some

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.

a What joy, what pain
Dionysus give 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.
cloth

69

To men who drink

to excess.

The second

is

a curious relic of the ancient notions

:

about comparative longevity " Nine lives the

generations
;

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 By ten times more the phcenix life exceed."
Enough, however, has been
set

is

Zeus,

D.

down

of Hesiod's

proverbial philosophy, to show that herein consists one of his titles to a principal place among didactic poets. plain blunt man, and a poet of the people,

he knew how and when

that "

to

appeal with cogency to

been

wisdom of many and wit of one," which has stjled by our own proverb collector, James
" the people's voice."

Howell,

CHAPTER

IV.

THE TtlEOGONY.

The

geographer Pausanias was the

'

first

to cast a

doubt
'

upon the received belief of the ancients that the Theogony 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
in the of Hesiod, which apparently correspond with passages work that has come down to us as such. Unless, therefore,

there

is

rate authorship in the

strong internal evidence of sepatwo 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
'

sistent

wealth-giving divinity Plutus, and this is quite conwith 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 is nothing less kinds, and not of one only" (v. 11) than the poet's correction of a statement he had made

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, beginin his

ning with Trouble and ending with Oath.*

We

might add, and verse-structure, such

istic

too, curious

coincidences
as the use

of expression of a character-

by itself for the substantive would commonly qualify (e. g., " the bone" " " the " the less to represent caterpillar," and silvery " for the sea "), and the peculiarity of the commencement 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
epithet standing
it

which

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 consisted in the passing notices of gods and goddesses which are scattered up and down the Iliad and the

For Hesiod may be claimed the first incorOdyssey. poration and enumeration of the generation and genealogy of the gods and goddesses in a coherent system ;

and

so it

was from

" shown, that

men

Theogony,' as Mr Grote has took their information respecting

his
'
;

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 derived his information, which is older than the so-called
* 'Hist, of Greece,
I., c. vi.
|*

Ibid.,

i.

15, 16.

THE TIIEOGONY.
Orphic Theogony
Persia, or.
as
it

73

whether from Egypt, India, and some have thought, from the Mosaic
lost labour to inquire.

writings

is

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

of
its earliest

position

which antiquity

has almost unanimously accorded to him, in the history

Hesiod's
*

poetry and religion. Theogony consists of three divisions

its

powers, and its fabric ; a theogony proper, recording the history of the dynasties of Cronus and Zeus ; and a fragmen-

cosmogony, or creation of the world,

tary generation of heroes, sprung from the intercourse of mortals with immortals. Hesiod and his contemporaries considered that in their was the lord of Olympus ; but

day Jupiter or Zeus 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 generation found
itself.

And

so, after

a preface containing
visit

amongst other matters the episode of the Muses'

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.
By
Unnerves the limbs, dissolves the wiser "breast reason steeled, and quells the very soul."
E. 171-175.

Chaos spontaneously produces Erebus and the latter of whom gives birth to Ether and Night, whilst Earth creates in turn the heaven, the Day;
first

At

mountains, and the

sea,
T

the cosmogony so far corre-

sponding generally w ith the Mosaic. * point Eros or Love begins to work.

But at this The union of

Earth with Heaven

results in the birth of Oceanus and the Titans, the Cyclopes, and the hundredhanded 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. Groaning 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.

principle of

The conspiracy is justified on the retributive justice. Uranus is disabled

and dethroned, and, by a not very clear nor presentable legend, the foam - born goddess Aphrodite is Here is fabled to have sprung from his mutilation.
the poet's account of her rise out of the sea
:

So severing with keen steel sacred spoils, he from the continent Amid the many surges of the sea

"

The

Hurled them.
Till

Full long they drifted o'er the deeps,

now swift-circling a white foam arose From that immortal substance, and a nymph

THE THEOGONY.
Was
nourished in their midst.

75

The wafting waves

:

First bore her to Cythera the divine

To wave-encircled Cyprus came she

then,

And

forth

Of awful

beauty.

emerged a goddess in the charms Where her delicate feet

the sands, green herbage flowering sprang.

Had pressed

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.

verses of this passage are notable as enumerating the fabled assessors of Venus ; and the
italicised lines,

The concluding

Scott,

which find modern parallels in Milton, 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 To the Creator " &c.
;

altar send

up

silent praise
ix.

Paradise Lost,

"

A foot more light,

a step more true, Ne'er from the heath-flower dash'd the

dew ;

E'en the slight harebell raised Elastic from her airy tread."

its

head
of the Lake,
i.

Lady

18.

76

BESIOD.

cation of the benignant goddess in the opening of Lucretius

:

" Before the winds are hushed, thee, goddess, thee Before thy coming are the clouds dispersed ; The plastic earth spreads flowers before thy feet ;
!

Thy

And

presence makes the plains of ocean smile, 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

up

in their prison-house.

to the history of this

would seem, remaining shut But before the poet proceeds dynasty and succession of rulers,
it

he apparently conceives

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

And

before thee in their beds, 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 occasional points of interest in the process, which would be interminable if not so relieved. It is curious, for

" example, to find the Hesperian maids "

Whose charge

o'ersees the fruits of

bloomy gold

Beyond the sounding " Of golden fruitage

ocean, the fair trees

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 glimmering of the Fall and its consequences, because death and woe were in the plucking of the fruit of " that forbid-

den

tree."

god par

excellence,

Again, from the union of Nereus, the seaand 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
list

correspond in

many

instances with Homer's

in the Iliad (xviii.

by both poets.

and point to a pre-existent legend approached In due order, also, are recorded the to wit, children of Tethys and the Titan Oceanus, the endless rivers and springs, and the water-nymphs, or Oceanids, whose function is to preside over these,
39-48),

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 and the Eridanus, supposed to the name of iEgyptus

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 geographiknowledge of the colonies than of the mother The names of the water-nymphs are refercountry. e. g., able to islands and continents Europa, Asia,
cal

Doris, Persia

or to physical characteristics, such as

clearness, turbidness, violet hue,

and the

like.

But

the poet gives

selection
:

.a

good reason for furnishing only a

Three thousand nymphs

" More remain untold.

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 To awful
rivers also yet untold,

Rushing with hollow dashing sound, were born

Tethys, but their every

name

Is not for mortal

man

to

memorate,
the dwellers round."
E. 492 501.

Arduous, yet known to

all

We

must not

trespass

upon our

readers' patience,

by
the

enumerating with the conscientious genealogist

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

goddess of
stars,

order.

Asteria, the

a Titanid in the second generation, bears to Perses, a god of light, and a Titan of the original The attributes of stock, one only daughter, Hecate.

OF THE

MB

UNIVERSITY
MEOGONY.

\^cg%
arts,

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

this goddess, as described

magic

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

when in solemn games the youth Con tending strive there is the goddess nigh With succour he whose hardiment and strength
Propitious
;
:

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 offspring those iron-handed ministers of Jove, Strength (Kratos) and Force (Bia), whom the classical reader

meets again in the opening of the Prometheus of Their nearness to Zeus is ascribed by iEschylus. Hesiod to the decision with which their mother
'
'

espoused his cause in the struggle with Cronus and the Titans :

80
" Lo
!

HESIOD.
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 According to Hesiod, Cronus or stage of the poem.
Saturn was alive to the faults of his
self-protection,
sire's policy

of

and conceived an improvement

in the

Mindful of the " to his own child he should bow down that destiny his strength," he proceeded to swallow up his progeny
with such regularity, that the maternal feelings of his
consort,

part of his offspring, by imprisoning bowels rather than their mother's.

means of checking revolutionary development on the them in his own

When

Ehea, roused her to a spirit of opposition. about to be delivered of her sixth child, Zeus,

she called in the aid of her parents,

in the concealment of his birth
"
:

Heaven and Earth,

And
Of

her they sent to Lyctus, to the clime and when her hour was come, The birth of Zeus, her youngest born, then Earth
fruitful Crete
;

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.
And

81

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 who soon with hands Invincible, secure
;
!

Of strength o'ercoming him, should cast him forth. From glory, and himself the immortals rule."
E. 641-659.

is

the gods in ancient mythology grow apace, Zeus soon ripe for the task of aiding his mother, whose craft persuades Cronus to disgorge first the stone

As

which he had mistaken

then the
voured.
five children

for his

youngest-born, and

he had previously destone, probably meteoric, was shown at

whom

Delphi in Pausanias's day as the stone in question, and an object of old memorial to the devout Greek.
liverer.

The rescued brethren at once take part with their deThe first act of Zeus was, as we have seen, to advance Force and Strength, with their brothers " a bodyVictory and Eivalry, to the dignity of guard," and to give their mother Styx the style and His next was to free functions of " oath-sanctioner." 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.
assured
a. c.

His success in the struggle was

by the
voL

oracles of Gaea (Earth), if only he could p xv.

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
Ten
years and

" Each with each 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.

lish poet
T

had bathed his

spirit in
'

Our EngHesiod before he

'

and it was well and wisely done by the translator of the following description of the war betwixt Zeus and the Titans to aim at a Miltonic style and speech
essa}

ed the sixth book of his

Paradise Lost

" 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 burst Terrible, strong, of force enormous

;

A hundred arms from

From
all their

all their
fifty

shoulders huge

shoulders

O'er limbs of sinewy mould. Against the Titans in fell combat stood, And in their nervous grasp wielded aloft
Precipitous rocks.

heads upsprang They then arrayed

On

the other side alert

THE THEOGONY.
The Titan phalanx closed then hands of strength Joined prowess, and displayed the works of war. Tremendous then the immeasurable sea
:

83

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
it

at this point

may be

excused, seeing that

affords the opportunity of noting the contrast be-

tween the heathen and the Christian conceptions of In Milton the Messiah has a superdivine strength.
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
his

conflict

with the Titans, Zeus has to exert

:

all

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

the whirling flash Cast sacred splendour, and the thunderbolt Fell roared around the nurture-yielding earth
Keiterated swift
:

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

Suffused

liquid heat air's pure expanse divine 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 So vast the din "Fell ruinous from high. When, gods encountering gods, the clang of arms Commingled, and the tumult roared from heaven."
:

E. 908-939.

To heighten the
on the
huge
auxiliaries

turmoil, the

winds and elements

fight

side of Zeus.

The

tide of battle turns.

Jove's
succes-

overwhelm the Titans with a

sion of great missiles, send them sheer beneath the " as far beneath, earth, and consign them to a durance

under

earth, as

heaven

is

from

earth, for equal is the

THE THEOGONY.

85

There, iu the space from earth to murky Tartarus/' from which there is no of an chamber abyss deeper
escape, the Titans are thenceforth imprisoned, with the hundred-handed giants set over them as keepers,

and with Day and Night acting

in front of the brazen threshold
:

as sentries or janitors

" There Night

And Daj

near passing, mutual greeting still Exchange, alternate as they glide athwart
T
,

The brazen threshold

Forth
issues,

This enters, that vast. 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
Is brass

unpitying
:

Stern he

yea, the heart within his breast whom of men he grasps, retains e'en to immortal gods
:

A foe."
Of
Lost
'

E. 992-1014.
*

these sentries the readers of Milton's

Paradise

opening of the .sixth book; whilst the counterparts of the twin cliil*

may

recall the description at the

86
dren of Night
in the iEneid.t

HESIOD.

may

be found in the Iliad,* as well as

Another wonder of the prison-house, in Hesiod's

account of
it, is

Cerberus
"

grisly dog, implacable, "Watching before the gates. stratagem them who enter there, Is his, malicious

With
But

tail

and bended

suffers not that

:

ears he fawning soothes, 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

Iris, the rainbow, whose function of carrying up water when any god has been guilty of falsehood

of

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 The far-famed water, from

Distilling in cold stream.

a golden ewer,
steep, sky-capt rock

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.
With
It falls into the

87

twined with many a maze, one stream alone Glides from the rock, a mighty bane to gods.
silver whirlpools

deep

Who
And

Olympus topped with snow,

of immortals, that inhabit still libation pours is forsworn, he one whole year entire

Lies reft of breath, nor yet approaches once The Hectare d and ambrosial sweet repast
:

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

But

still

reclines

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, howhe rest from his toil he had yet to scotch could ever, the half-serpent, half-human Typhosus, the offspring of
:

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
less

HMSIOD.
welcome master should
Zeus,
this pest attain full devel:

opment.

we

are told, foresaw the dangei

" Intuitive

and vigilant and strong 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

He

Uprose, beneath his everlasting feet

Trembled Olympus : groaned the steadfast earth. 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

From

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.

the god, the fulness of his might Gathering at once, had grasped his radiant arms, The glowing thunderbolt and bickering flame,

Now when

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
:

He

Had

He

fell

quelled him, thunder-smitten, mangled, prone, 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.
As fusile tin, by art of youths, above The wide-brimmed vase up-bubbling, foams with
Or

89

heat

By

iron hardest of the mine, subdued 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 hich
T

Milton's editor,

Todd, pronounces grander in conception than Hesiod's. But, as Elton fairly answers, it is only in Milton's " The mere reservation that he is of
superior.
rising

Zeus causing mountains to rock beneath his everlasting 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 absolute

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
breast, and, according to
* "

own

mythology, found this task

The

steadfast

Under his burning wheels empyrean shook throughout,

of God,"
vi.

All but

the throne itself

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
Pallas, fierce,

He

from his head disclosed, himself, to birth

The blue-eyed maid Tritonian

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
his
first wife,

summary

a putting

away of
remain

Zeus,

it

appears,

had no mind
;

to

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 Demeter

and Latona

also

he had tender

relations, before

finally resigned himself to his sister Hera (Juno), who took permanent rank as Queen of the Gods.

he

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.
Hesiod has

91

the marriages consequent upon these children of the gods

espousing
to
tell,

nymphs

or mortals,

still

much

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 Theogony' proper, as it has come down to us. It is indeed
'

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

A race resembling gods."

Thus
*

Of mortal men, themselves immortal, gave

E. 1324-1236.

virtually ends the Theogony in its extant of sketch it would our not be complete were but form,
'

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
In the I. Works' this legend sequence of the poem. an episode ; in the Theogony it is a piece of genealogy, apropos of the offspring of Iapetus, the brother
is
*
'

of Cronus, and Clymene.

Atlas, one of their sons,

was

doomed by Zeus
eternal penalty
;

to bear

up the vault of heaven as an

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

evil

he did

so,
is

and brought

Theogony that upon man by his act.

'

Nothing

said of heedlessness of his brother's cau-

r a ^p* \Tb OF THE "UNIVERSITY

92
tion

HESIOD.

; 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 between the two accounts is to be found in the fact that in the Works Hesiod narrates the
difference
'
'

consequences of the sin of Prometheus ; in the TheIn the order ol ogony,' the story of the sin itself.
'

Prometheus enrage? 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
:

events that story would run thus

Zeus by scoffing

at sacrifices,

with the belly on one hand, the bones under a cover of white fat on the other. Zeus chooses after the
to imply, chooses wittingly, for the sake of having a grievance. Thenceforth in sacrifice it was customary to offer the

outward appearance, but, as Hesiod seems

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.
upon Prometheus
he
as well as his clients.

93

On

the latter

winsome womankind, represented by Pandora, and placed them in the dilemma of either not marrying, and dying heirless, or of finding in marriage the lottery which it is still accounted.
inflicted the evil

of

As

to

Prometheus and his punishment, Hesiod's

is

ac-

count

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.

sprang with life, and grew In the night season, and the waste repaired Of what by day the bird of spreading wing
it

For

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
it is

sum up

the tale

" Nathless

not given thee to deceive

;

The

For Could

god, nor yet elude the omniscient mind not Prometheus, void of blame to man,
'scape the burden of oppressive wrath vain his various wisdom vain to free
;

And

From

pangs, or burst the inextricable chain." E. 816-821.

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
'

The

generation of the gods of Hellas, relieved of excessive

94
detail

HESIOD.
stirring battle-pieces, noble

by fervid descriptions, images, and graceful fancies.

to

Such

as it was, it appears

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-

" contains the Hesiodic ideas and persons, pression,

enlarged and mystically disguised."

But those who

have the time and materials

carrying out the combe will led to discover in the for themselves, parison in the bias towards a of religious belief, development
for,

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, indirect 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 Hesiodic poems consisted of epics in petto on some subject The ' Shield of Hercules surof heroic mythology.
'

vives as a sample, if indeed it is to be received as Its theme is a single adventure of Hesiod's work. Hercules, his combat with Cycnus and his father, the

Shorn of a war-god, near Apollo's Temple at Pagasae. 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

rest of the

which 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-

upon it by Mure, in his History of the Lanand Literature of Ancient Greece/ it can hardly guage be maintained that the Shield of Hercules is a poem
tion cast
' '

'

96
of the same age
*

HESIOD.
and authorship
as the
'

Works

or the

Theogony.'
it
t>f

The sounder
by

criticism of

Muller deems

worthy

to be set side

side

with Homer's account

13th book of the

the Shield of Achilles

in the

characterises it as executed in the genuine Were it desirable, it spirit of the Hesiodian school.
Iliad,

and

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 Hercules, 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

to

ill-fortune of this

poem

have attracted more than

interpolators,

its fair

share of botchers

and

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

allowance for interpolated passages, a residuum of fine heroic poetry will survive the proconsiderable
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

This Cycnus used to infest the Ares and Pelopia. 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

The poem opens exact reparation from the robber. 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, Both bright in arms, Ares, his sire, beside.

Bright in the sheen of burning flame they stood On their high chariot, and the horses fleet

Trampled the ground with rending hoofs In parted circle smoked the cloudy dust,

around

Up-dashed beneath the trampling hoofs, and cars Of complicated frame. The well-framed cars
Rattled aloud

In their

The

loud clashed the wheels, while wrapt speed the horses flew. Rejoiced noble Cycnus for the hope was his
;

full

Jove's warlike offspring

and

his charioteer

To

slay,

But Turned a deaf ear

of their gorgeous mail. to his vaunts the prophet god of day

strip
:

and

them
for

he himself

set

on
E. 81-97.

The

assault of Heracles."

Kone but Hercules, we are told, could have faced the unearthly light with which the sheen of the wargod's armour and the glare of his fire-flashing eyes lit
up. the sacred enclosure and its environs. ever, is equal to the occasion. Probably, if

He, how-

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.
'

98

HESIOD.

that the labours (in which, by the way, his soul delighted) were all occasioned by the folly of that charihis
It was an odd time to twit comrade and his brother's son with that brother's errors, when a fight with Ares, the god of war, was
oteer's father, Iphiclus.

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,

Elate of thought

and Heracles smiled stern his joy, for he had spoken words
:

Most welcome.

Then

in winged accents thus

'Jove-fostered hero,

The

battle's rough In martial prudence

e'en at hand, encounter thou, as erst,

it is
:

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
its

prominence to being of divine

would appear that the horse here mentioned owes strain, and the off-

is

The other member of the pair spring of the sea-god. not named, because of the transcendent breed of its
yoke-fellow, who is, in the twenty-third Iliad, said to belong to Adrastus.
'

book of the

But now the hero begins his war-toilet, donning his greaves of mountain-brass, the corselet which is Athena'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.

" Shuddering horrors these and the agony of death
:

99

Inflicted,

Sudden, that chokes the suffocative voice points were barbed with death and bitter-steeped "With human tears burnished the length'ning shafts, And they were feathered from the tawny plume

The

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,
it

with a dragon for

centre,

and the parts \between

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.

siderable

The

first

con-

band which surrounds the

and two peaceable
it

centre-piece in the

circle consists of four

warlike,

departments, of which two contain subjects, so that the entire

were, a sanguinary and a tranquil by the

shield contains, as
side.

The rim

of the shield is surrounded

ocean.

An

idea of the

poem

is

some of the

details of the several parts.

best gathered from 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.

image grouped the appro" " " " Tuof forms Bout," Terror," Eailying," priate " Discord " but in " and close mult," Carnage," ; proximity to the dragon's head came twelve serpent-heads,
this central
are

Around

freezing with dread all mortal combatants, and

it

endowed,

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

sound was heard.

their clashing fangs Such miracles displayed

The

Resplendent

buckler's held with living blazonry 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,
like that in
'

may have been

a mechanical device

the Theban Shields

of Euripides, v. 11-26
;

mentioned in the
or a bit of the mar-

Phoenissse

'

such as ancient poets affect in enhancing the wonder of some work of the Whichever it was, a like demand on our gods.
vellous

a " Munchausenism,"

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

a fight betwixt boars and lions
of spirited description
:

shield was

wrought

an occasion

to the poet

" Wild from the

And

forest, herds of boars were there, mutual glaring these in wrath Leaped on each other and by troops they drove

lions,

Their onset

Nor quaked

nor yet these nor those recoiled, 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
:

in fear

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 Both bands are those in the first book of the Iliad.
wrought in
silver,
it is

their

arms and missiles in

gold.

noteworthy, have not yet assumed the double form of man and beast, of which the first
the rude monsters

The Centaurs,

mention occurs in Pindar (Pyth. ii. 80), but are hero we find under the same name in the

a fact which is of some importance Iliad and Odyssey 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 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,

Consternation

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 ideas, occurs a curious presentment of a harbour

and 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. later addition The little fish are wrought in brass.

to the picture
critus
(i.

obviously interpolated from Theo39), namely, the fisherman on a crag

is

"

Observant, in his grasp

who held

Like one that poising

rises to the

a net, throw."

What

is

needed to
is,

Alexandrian poet

complete the picture however, de trop here.

in

the

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
like

group were wrought two cities, one at war, The details of the former are lifethe other at peace.
this
;

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
blood
:

to a

coming banquet of

" Hard by there stood

Clotho, and Lachesis, and Atropos Somewhat in years inferior nor was she
:

yet those other Fates Exceeding, and of birth the elder far." E. 346-350.
;

A mighty goddess

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 the most decrepit of the weird sisters. ApAtropos near this group is seen propriately
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
She stood
:

HESIOD.
And
a cloud of dust her shoulders spread, 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
692), and to some extent point to a kindred authorship of the two poems.

Days

(v.

From this ghastly picture the poet soon carries his readers to a contrast on the same band of the shield
for Thebes.
gates,

a city at peace, which has been supposed to be meant recognise the towers and the seven

We

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 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^^^

its parallel in comparison of this passage with Homer's shield of Achilles (II. xviii.), encourages the the theory that hoth poets had a common ideal, though and prolix in Hesiod. We representation is more full

from an unpublished quote the Homeric description

translation

*
:

"

Two

mankind he wrought. In one made and revelry went on. was Marriage 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,
cities of
;

And women

at their doors stand wondering."

having nothing to do with the nuptial procession, though perhaps an accessory illustration of a city at peace, is formed in the operations
distinct subject,

of husbandry ; plough ers tucked up and close girt are making the furrow, as on the Homeric shield, yield The equipment of these ploughbefore the coulter.

men

carries us

husbandman
stripped,

back again to the Works/ where the is advised "to sow stripped, plough

'

of

Ceres

and reap stripped," if he would enjoy the gift " means probably and where " stripping
;

getting rid of the cloak,

and wearing only the

" Next arose

close

tunic

thick set with depth of corn where some "With sharpened sickle reaped the club-like stalks,
field
:

Some bound them

For thrashing."
*

into bands,

and strewed the

floor

E.
Garnett.

By Mr Richard

106

RESIOD.
in close proximity

And

was the delineation of a vinsome the fruit, vine-sickle in hand, and tage; gathering
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, completed the picture, which
parallel passage.
is less

perfect than

Homer's
this

But there was room found,

it

would seem, on

part of the shield, for athletic and field sports of various 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
nor conquest yet at any time Achieved they, but a doubtful strife maintained."
Endless
:

E. 413-420.

Around the shield's verge was represented the circumambient 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
so like the
life,

0I<

HERCULES.

107

the poet adds, as to exact the admira-

tion of even Zeus, the artificer's sire

for the shield
:

and patron. what remains concerns the So much combat betwixt Hercules, and Cycnus with the wargod 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

is

finds

against the decrees of fate.

Nor

does the goddess

stop at advice, but vouchsafes her invisible presence As the combatants come to close in the hero's car.
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. Hercules

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

And And

lifted voices, and Iolchos famed, Arne, and Anthea's grass-girt walls, Thus with amazing shout Helice.
:

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

to his high-daring son."

Of onset gave

E. 506-522.

The
Iliad

Hector's

simile of the dislodged rocks reminds us of onslaught in the thirteenth book of the

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 imagination.

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

The present of a god preserved. not. the other side, he of Amphitryon named, Strong Heracles, between the helm and shield

On

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.

or reprisals

109

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.

diverts the javelin's force.

les,

In vain; for Pallas Ares rushes upon Hercu-

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 bitter 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 afterwards 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 In requital for repeated sacrilege honour.
u Anaurus foaming high with wintry rains Swept it from sight away. Apollo thus

110
:

HESIODCommanded for that Cycnus ambushed By violence the Delphic hecatombs."

spoiled

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

Shield

'

has
accept

its
it

literature, if

we can even

as

place "

in

classical

Hesiodian."

CHAPTEK

VI.

IMITATORS OF HESIOD.
Although
it

would be impossible

to point to

any

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
direct imitation

most part indirect and unconscious, which his poetry, especially his didactic Those shorter epic poetry,, has had upon later poets.
briefly the influence, for the

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 'Theogony we have one or two modern parallels, though it, too, has served rather for a mine into which Christian
scraps, of
'
'

'

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 remodelled, according to the demands of their subjects, by the poetical grammarians of Alexandria, was handed over as an example to the Alexandrianising poets " The ' of Eome. Phenomena of Aratus," writes Professor Conington, in his introduction to the ' " found at least two distinguished transGeorgics 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
Sammonicus."
its

as Gratius, Nemesianus,

and Serenus But the 'Phaenomena' of Aratus, and

the
*

Astronomica' of Manilius, a with conversant though portion of the same topics as Hesiod's didactic poem, essay a loftier flight of admonitory poetry ; and in them the advance of time
parallel,

Poman

has substituted for the simplicity and directness of

Hesiod, rhetorical turns and
artifices,

and the

efforts of

It is the same with Ovid's picturesque description. Gratius Faliscus, if we may judge of contemporary,

him by

his fragmentary

'

Cynegetica.'

In carrying
its

out his design of a didactic

poem on the chase and

surroundings, he barters simplicity for a forced elevation 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

to have so completely

wrote two centuries or more after Gratius, seems made Virgil his model that the
is

influence of Hesiod

imperceptible in his poetry,

instinct

which

is

diffuse

and laboured, and

with exag-

IMITATORS OF HESIOD.
gerated imitation of the Augustan
poets.

113

On

the

whole,

it is

ground
this

for

only between Hesiod and Virgil that solid comparison exists and such as institute
;

comparison will be

constrained
'

to

admit

Mr

Conington's conclusion, that the

as

Works and Days'

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 fragmentariness 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 Yet vine-culture as well as corn-crops (iii. 26, v. 77). enough of direct imitation survives in the large portion

of the
treads

first

common ground)

book of the Georgics (wherein Virgil to show that, with many

points of contrast, there are also many correspondences between the old Boeotian bard and his smoother Roman

admirer
is

and that where Virgil does copy,

it

his copying

as unequivocal as

is

instructive for a study of

and refinement. Each poet takes for his theme " the same " glorification of labour which Dean Merivale discerns as the chief aim of the Georgics, the
finish

difference consisting in the homeliness of the

manner

of the Greek poet and the high polish of that of the Each also recognises the time of man's Roman.

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.

114
priate

HESIOD.
ground on which to trace their likeness and As Hesiod's passage was not quoted in
its

unlikeness.

our second chapter,

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

Of many-Ian guaged men
:

on earth

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 The

e'er decrepit age misshaped their frame, hand's, the foot's proportions still the same. 3d by : Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed
:

iiigfc 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
; :

^ V
)

Yielded

its

copious fruits, unbribed by

toil.

quiet lands All willing shared the gathering of their hands." E. 147-162.

They with abundant goods 'midst

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,

which

and decrepit old age, " in the golden days were conspicuous by their

These absence," and of which Hesiod had made much. a to him of lines, in couple apparently only suggest which mortal cares are made an incentive to work,
instead of a destiny to be succumbed to
;

and the death

IMITATORS OF HESIOD.
of the
nature.

115

body To

is

transferred to the sluggish lethargy of

quote a very recent translator of the

Georgics,

Mr

D. Blackmore
first

" 'Twas Jove

who

made husbandry
to lie

a plan.
;

And
Nor

care a whetstone for the wit of

suffered he his

man

own domains

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.

spirit Yirgil, in the second book of the idealises the serenity of a rural existence, Georgics, when he says of him who lives it

In the same

" 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, considerThe curved ing the interval between the two poets.

wood (or buris) of Virgil; the eight-footpole (temo) joined by pins to the hurts (or basse, as it is called in the south of France) ; the bent
piece of

handle

(stiva)

and the wooden share

(dentale),

have

116
all

HESIOD.
their counterparts
'

in

the directions for

;

making

and the learned implement given by Hesiod author of Lectures on Eoman Husbandry considers that both the Boeotian and the Eoman plough may be
this
'

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
;

least half-a-dozen,

though, in place of one point, the latter makes at and works up out of his predecessor's
It

hints a masterpiece of elaborate description.

scarcely be remarked, for
it

need

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

To quit the matters of the same rural importance. first book of the Georgics, we see Hesiod's influence
occasionally exerting itself in the third
l

for,

a propos

of the sharp-toothed dog which Hesiod prescribes in

his

(604, &c), and would have the farmer feed well, as a protection from the nightprowling thief, we find a parallel in Yirgil t
:

Works and Days

'

"

Nor last, nor least, the dogs must have their place With fattening whey support that honest race
:

With
*

Swift Spartan whelps, Molossian mastiffs bold these patrolling, fear not for the fold,

Rom. Husb., 100-102.

+ Georg.

iii.

403-408.

IMITA TORS OF HESIOD.

Though nightly
thieves

117

and wolves would

fain attack,

And

fierce Iberians

never spare thy hack." Blackmore, 94, 95.

muse would be struck in the and perusal of the four Georgics, again, again with expansions of some germ from the older poet, calculated to make him appreciate more thoroughly the

And

a lover of Hesiod's simple

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

plicity

and though with Hesiod it was simand 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 forth
:

so spontaneous

and unstudied
It is

to the purposes of art

and

culture.

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 original is obscure and the end of his poem. 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 pass to to Hesiod are very faint and indistinct.
poetry, it is natural to inquire, Have we kindred character and scope, that can claim a of aught to be accounted in any degree akin to Hesiod's Works

our

own

'

and Days'? It need hardly be said that there is not a shadow of resemblance between him and Darwin
*
v.

276-286

118
or Bloomfield,

HESIOD.
though we have somewhere seen
their

He is their names, as poets, set in juxtaposition. master as a poet ; he is their superior in simplicity.

He
tic

is

essentially ancient

modern

in thought, form,

style,

they are wholly and entirely and expression. The didacno doubt, has lent Hesiod's form to many
;

Augustan period of English have had," says Mr Conington, in his introduction to the Georgics, "Essays on Satire,
literature.

of the compositions of the

"We

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

But, with his usual clear-sightedness, Sugar-cane." the late Oxford Professor of JLatin saw that all these

have grasped simply the form, and

their model.

let

The

real parallel is to

go the spirit, of be found between

the Ascrsean farmer -poet and the quaint " British Yarro " of the sixteenth century
"

shrewd

Who

sometime made the points of husbandry "

Thomas
hundred

Tusser,
points,

gentleman

as well for the

a worthy whose " five 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

and

compound of the singing-man (of St Paul's 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
his poetry brought

poetry,

neither his
;

fanning nor

generation of sharpening others

him success or profit and his own regarded him as one who, with "the gift
by
his advice of wit,"

combined

an inaptitude to thrive in his own person. He was His 'Five Hundred born in 1523, and died in 1580.
Points of

Good Husbandry was

'

printed in 1557

and

no one

will gainsay, after perusal of them, the opinion

that, in the

w ords
r

of

English Georgic has Hesiod than of the elegance of Virgil." Homely, quaint, and full of observation, his matter is curiously
for the world's

Dr Thomas Warton,* " this old much more of the simplicity of

akin to that of the old Boeotian, after a due allowance 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
in his use

facility

author's musical attainments,

and variety consistent with the which are demonstrated 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-

by a slip of the pen, denies the English Hesiod the versatility which indulges in digressions and invo" Ceres and Pan are not once cations, and avers that
deed,

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

And

tilth well

fence well kept is one good point, done in season due ;

salve, in

Yet needing
Is all in

time

t'

anoint,
:

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
"

the liquor at the bottom of the cask stanzas as

;

'tis ill sparing reappears in such

"

"

Son, think not thy

But keep

it

for profit to serve thine

money purse-bottom to burn. own turn

:

IMITATORS OF HESIOD.

121

fool

Which
"

and his money be soon at debate, 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
Of

careth nor spareth till spent he hath all, 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.

is

Quite in Hesiod's groove, too,

Tusser's opinion about

borrowing and lending

and his adagial way of dis; and connections to a of relations the claims couraging share in our farm profits savours curiously of the counsel 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 Wins love of thy neighbour, and

So never
to crave,

of his need
:

credit doth breed 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-

maids

poet as to the full complement of hinds and dairyhut 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

it

ere year about go." xxx. 45.

like Hesiod, attaches

might be shown by other quotations that Tusser, due importance to the perform-

ance of religious ceremonies, and inculcates in fitting language seasonable offerings of thankfulness to a bounteous Providence
tality,

that he upholds well-timed hospi; and commends a principle of liberality towards

it.

man

or beast, if they deserve

Of

course, too, even

in his

shrewd homeliness, he does not so entirely as Hesiod calculate his hospitalities and liberalities with

more

a sole eye to getting a quid pro quo. But it is perhaps 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
"

And

Yokes, forks, and such other let bailiff spy out, gather the same, as he walketh about ;

IMITATORS OF
Andafter,
at leisure, let this

IIESIOD.
hire,

123

be his
at

To
Here
for

heath them and trim

them

home by
is

the fire."*
lx. 9.

again, in

"

June's Husbandry,"
:

good provision

hay-making and hauling

" Provide of thine

Lest work and the

own to have all things at hand, 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 His ideas of being himthan he seems to have done.
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

latter
;

even at this

more
*

read,

day and if Thomas Tusser were he would not fail of being ol'tener quoted.
fire.

To heath or hath is to set green wood by the heat of a Norfolk and Suffolk Dialect.

124

HESIOD.
timely,
for

How

example,

is

this

advice

to

the

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
farmer,

labourers

" Once ended the harvest, let none be beguiled ; Please such as did help thee man, woman, and child

Thus

Thou

doing, with alway such help as they can, 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
and
if

of the " farm

and

fruit of old," as well

as of the
:

improved courses of husbandry in his

own

he now and then strikes out paths which day 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 Works and Days,' and the domestic cat is equally unmentioned by the Boeotian didactic poet, the following mention of them both by- Tusser reminds us of his
4

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
:

"

up much poultry and want the barn-door for the ponlter, and worse for the poor So now to keep hogs, and to starve them for meat,

To
Is

rear

nought

Is as to

keep dogs

for to

bawl in the

street.

IMITATORS OF HES10D.
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

125

dog

to kill sheep." p. 48, 49.

Dr Thomas "Warton, indeed, was disposed to regard Tusser as the mere rude beginner of what Mason perfected in his

English Garden ; but it is a reasonable whether the latter work at all comes up taste of matter
'

'

to the former in aught save

affectation
;

an elegance bordering on
is

and certainly there

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.

whether Hesiod's Theogony has found with posterity as close an imitator as the work on which we have been dwelling. But this question
It remains to inquire
'

'

is

easily

the so-called Orphic poets

answered in the negative. The attempts of the most considerable of

whom

were Cercops, a Pythagorean, and Onomacritus, to improve on the a contemporary of the Pisistratids elder theogonies and cosmogonies, can hardly be men-

tioned in this category, being more mystical than mythical, and in the nature of refinements and abstractions,
full of

though

higher than the Hesiodic chaos. Nor, mythologic learning even to cumbrous-

ness, can the five

hymns

of the Alexandrian Callimatl^e

chus be said to have aught of resemblance to venerable system of Greek theogonies, which owes

its

Studied and promulgation to the genius of Hesiod. laboured to a fault, the legends which he connects

J^* CALIFOK*

126

HESIOD.

with the subjects of each hymn in succession aretricked out with poetic devices very alien to the more
direct

muse

of Hesiod

fesses to record the speeches of

and though Callimachus proZeus and Artemis, and

feelings that animate the

to divine the thoughts

and

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.* Furthermore and this is the plainest note of difference the

hymns

little or no pretence to be of a form poetry, to say the truth, not "genealogies," attractive to please an advanced stage of sufficiently

of Callimachus have

cultivation, and a form, too, that lacks any memorable imitation in Latin poetry. To glance at
literary

our

own

poetic literature, the nearest approach to the

'
'.

form and scope of the

strikes
us, in

Theogony
'

is to

be found,

it

Drayton's Polyolbion,' a poem characterised by the same endeavour to systematise a vast

the British

mass of information, and to genealogise, so to speak, hills, and woods, and rivers, which are
personified in
it.

Drayton,
fancy,
detail
is

cannot be denied, has infinitely more and lightens the burden of his accumulated by much greater liveliness and idealism ; yet it
it

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
method
in his
'
'

IIESIOD.

127

Theogony ;

passage in his
"

first

a revival, to judge from a song, surely not undesigned

:

Ye

Sung the ancient

sacred bards, that to your harps' melodious strings heroes' deeds (the monuments of kings),

And

in your dreadful verse engraved the prophecies,

The aged

world's descents, If as those Druids taught,

and

genealogies

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
They

these our souls

by death our bodies do

;

forsake,

instantly again do other bodies take

To

I could have wished your spirits redoubled in my breast, give my verse applause to time's eternal rest."
Polyolb.,

Song

i.

30-42.

Our theory of a conscious reference to Hesiod's Theogony by Drayton depends on the fourth verse
'

page in the

of this extract; but, independently of this, almost any ' Polyolbion would furnish one or more

illustrations of

might

genealogism curiously Hesiodic. the rivers of Monmouth, Brecon, and Glamorgan, in the fourth song, or the Herefordshire streams in the seventh ; but lengthy citations are imcite

We

possible, and short extracts will ill represent the likeness which a wider comparison would confirm. In " seaPope's "Windsor Forest," the enumeration of the

born brothers
Isis

"

" of Old Father Thames, from " winding " to silent Darent,"

"
is

Who

swell with tributary urns his flood,"

indubitably a leaf out of Drayton's book, and so

128

HESIOD.
Darwin's
'

indirectly a tribute to Hesiod.

Botanic

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

Garden/ and the

'

be a more tedious minuteness, and an exagaffectation

l

gerated

of allegoric
'

however, Hesiod's
this or that side

Theogony

is

In truth, system. a work of which

which, in

its

may be susceptible of parallel, but to 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
Ascrsean poet
life,

works, and after-influence of the

is

completed.

THEOGNIS.
CHAPTER

I.

THEOGNIS IN YOUTH AND PROSPERITY.

With

the
;

life

of Hesiod politics have

nection

in that of Theognis

we

find
it is

little or no conthem playing an

essential inseparable part.

And

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
it occupies more space in his elegies than his social relations or his religious opinions. In fact, his

Theognis

personal and political life are so intermixed, that the internal evidence as to both must be collected in one
skein,

risk of missing

and cannot be separately unwound, unless at the somewhat of the interest of his remains,
consists chiefly in the personality of the poet. true that later Greek writers regarded
I

which
It
is

Theognis

A. 0. vol. xv.

130
as a teacher of

THEOGNIS
wisdom and
virtue,

by means

of de-

tached maxims and apothegms in elegiac verse, and

would probably have been loath to recognise any element 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 versification, the original function of

which was probably

to

express mournful sentiments, to inspire their countrymen with their own feelings as to the stirring themes
of

war and

Theognis

it is

patriotism, of politics, and of love. clear that the elegy was a song or

With
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

Many such elegies were composed by him to 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
guest.

friends

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

were interspersed, and which, as we learn from Xenophon and Isocrates, were used in their day for
elegies

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 Shakespeare
play.
is

unlike an undoctored
to the

and un-Bowdlerised

Thanks

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

and we are able, in a great measure, to connect the assorted links into a consistent and personal
realised,

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,
autobiography.

and then

into three epochs, defined

and his works and marked out by circumstances which gravely influenced his career and tone of
to divide our notice of himself

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-politicalrights, 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."

and honourable was

to the former.

In his point of view nothing brave to be looked for from the latter,

whilst nothing that was not so could possibly attach 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 resorted 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 communications 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

is

only to

have come to a head to be summarily crushed,

result

and the

that Theognis has to retire into exile

How in Eubcea, Thebes, and Syracuse in succession. he maintained himself in these places of refuge, turning his talents to account, and holding pretty staunchly to his principles, until a seasonable aid to the popular 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 beyond 480 B.C., as he distinctly in two places refers to the instant terThat life divides itself into ror of a Median invasion. the periods of his youth and prosperous estate, his clouded fortunes at home, and his long and wearisome
to

have lasted

till

The remainder of this chapter will serve for a exile. glance at the first period. That our poet was of noble birth may be inferred
from the confidence with which, in reply to an indignity 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

ingenious chronological arrangement of Frere, which we follow throughout), Theognis is found in the heyday of pro-

first

fragment (according to

the

praying Zeus, and Apollo, the special patron of his fatherland, to preserve his youth
sperity,
" 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 banclass, and take his part in songs the flute or lyre, accompanied by " 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

quets of his

own

For reputation or

for property

"
?

(F.)

134

TIIEOGNIS
are not to suppose that such language as the

But we

last couplet

wore so much the expression of his serious

are obliged to confess, lent a not infrequent

moods
such
as,

as of a gaiety rendered reckless "by potations

we

inspiration to his poetry.

his

own

theory, quite en regie

Theognis is, according to 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

is

resorting.

And

not to be given to the professions of indifference to wealth and character which are made by a poet who can realise in verse
perhaps too implicit credence

we

such an experience as are about to cite

:

is

portrayed in the fragment

"

My brain
But
Let
let

"With wine

grows dizzy, whirled and overthrown my senses are no more my own. The ceiling and the walls are wheeling round *
:

me

try

me

retire

perhaps my feet are sound. 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
roll,

"

Till

Till

round and round the dizzy chambers 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 intellectual 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 and the bent of his talents, which learning attainable
;

was towards vocal and instrumental music and composition of elegies, was so successfully followed that in
time of need he was able to turn
sistence.
it to

means of subreally the

Indeed, that he

knew what was

to a certain

real secret of success in a concert or a feast is seen

in a remark

which he addressed
is

Simonides

(whom
poet),

there

no reason to identify with the famous

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 " " the that peace which he coupled with it did poetry In one of his earlier not bless him uninterruptedly.

elegiac fragments there is a h'ut of a youthful passion,

136
broken

TIIE0GN1S

off by him in bitterness at the Megarian flirt's " love for Such, at least, seems to be the every one." four of lines which may be closely reninterpretation

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.)

determined, it seems, to be more discursive in his admiration for the future. How that plan suc-

He was

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
his
suit

till

suffered

rejection

of

for

long after he had a damsel whose

a plebeian
after

parents preferred a worse

man

i.e.,

and
her

had

carried

on
its

secret relations

with her

"mating
curious,

to a clown." as

His own account of

this is

opening shows that he vented his

:

chagrin on himself
a

Wine

I forswear, since at

my

A meaner man has bought the right to

Poor cheer for

darling's side bide.

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

perforce the meanest of the mean.

To wed

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 \

Fancy betrays
But,
if his

For such a purchase, can escape deceit us, and assists the cheat."
:

(F.) )

witness

is true,

common
by
of

of old as in our

own

mercenary parents were as He was led, both day.

his exclusiveness as

tience of a

an aristocrat, and his impamere money-standard of worth, to a disgust

" The daily marriages
is

Where

we make, 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
price

everything

for

Thus everything

is

" mixt, noble and base

!

(F.)

And
and

strive to

that he did ponder the regeneration of society, 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

him

a set-off to the passages which have led us to picture as more or less of an easy liver
:

"

To

rear a child

is

easy,
is

hut to teach

Morals and manners

To make the
The

foolish

heyond our reach ; wise, the wicked good,

if

That science yet was never understood.

sons of Esculapius,
their art

Could remedy a perverse and wicked heart, But in fact Might earn enormous wages 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, > No scheme nor artifice of human skill
!

"j

Can

rectify the passions or the will."

(F.) )

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

Not

and morals, does Theognis muse in 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
instruction of
life

such a strain of seriousness.

most of the remainder of his " solid day."

"

Now
The

that in

mid

career,

checking his force,

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

AND PROSPERITY,
}
>

139

air let the shapely Spartan damsel fair ul ai air Bring with a rounded arm and graceful iair 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
I

if

the Dog-star rise or sink."

(F.)

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

" live while ave been that you should you may." Whether, as has been surmised by Mr Frere, he refers
o

which

the catastrophe of Hipparchus or not, the four lines follow indicate Theognis's conviction that
is

everything

fated,

enjoyment of the passing hour. for to-morrow we die

'
:

a conviction very conducive to Let us eat and drink,

'

"

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,

But his tone of he might have cherished a weakness. mind, we see, was such that he could anticipate no
satisfaction

from " hat-bands and scarves," or what-

ever else in his day represented

When

some great

handsome obsequies. a chiif, perhaps 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

Much

stately car, the purple canopies ; better pleased am I, remaining here, With cheaper equipage, and better cheer.

couch of thorns, or an embroidered bed,

of indifference to the dead."
(F.)

Are matters

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

sea,

To that unfathomed boundless 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

side by side, The poor man and the son of pride

:

There

tinkling rill. all are equal

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
cal plotter
;

when Theognis began

as,

to

be a

politi-

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

but

upon

his career

till

it

terminated in

exile.

We

have

seen that he was a

exclusive

member

of a club composed of

for feasting

and aristocratic members, meeting ostensibly and good-fellowship, but really, as their
" " the good

designation

clearly indicated, designed

in a sense already explained 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

are addressed

whom

some two-thirds of the extant verses of

Theognis, a younger member, of

greatest things were expected.

whom, Though

politically, the
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 In of the spite waywardness of youth, exception.

and the
caressed
ears

fickleness characteristic of one so petted

and

by

his
to

friends,

and hands

Cyrnus must have lent his various schemes of Theognis for up-

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
setting the democracy,

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

ment the key

to

which Hookham Frere

would, in a fragfinds 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.
(The swift and mighty wings, Music and Verse). in easy numbers smooth and terse and heard among Is wafted o'er the world The banquetings and feasts, chaunted and sung, Heard and admired the modulated air Of flutes, and voices of the young and fair

H3

Your name

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.

purchased prowess of a racing steed, But the triumphant Muse, with airy speed, Shall bear it wide and far, o'er land and main,

No

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
first

almost paternal regard the growth, it may be, in the The verses instance of kindred political views.
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

as so

to public opinion

cannot gain and keep, he regrets to own, the goodwill of his fellow-

many

other of his remains.

He

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 " " " " good and bad," the betterpolitical sense of the " most and the " worse M in Megarian parlance, the fol-

lowing extract from

11

Mr Frere

is

a faithful transcript

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, like deer, their place did hold, Are now the dominant class, and we, the rest,

Without the walls,

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, Out of such a throng Of truth or honour
!

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.
Of danger and distress are sure to fail, For whose salvation nothing can avail."

145

(F.)

The

last lines
;

conspiracy

assuredly betoken the brewing of a 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 " " in reference and made the great," Magnesian ills
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, In such a posture of affairs as well as of Theognis. 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

let

Cyrnus to

do, in a coup-

which may be translated

" Fret not,
if strife

the

townsmen

reckless

make,
(D.)

But 'twixt both

sides, as I,

the mid- way take."

He was

old enough to foresee the danger of reprisals, from and, 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.

146

THEOGNIS

him the hatred and abuse

"

but he soon found that his neutrality only procured of both friends and foes
:

a discovery which he expresses thus

The

city's

mind

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."
It

(D.)

was hard, he thought, that his friends should look upon him, if, with a view to the wellbeing of his party, he gave no offence to the opposite faction,
coolly
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
opinion,
u

is

almost querulous in his sensibility to public

sings,

when he

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 Of whom the least

It
is

those, alive or dead, is thought, the least

is

said."

(F.)

as if

he administered to himself the comfort

gives Orlando

which
"

Adam

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 induces the impression that his neutrality was only fit-

IN OPPOSITION.
ful or temporary.

U7

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

would recognise the champion of the "wise and good" and of their policy, pure and
advocated.
simple, in these verses, breathing a spirit of progress

Who

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.
for

At one time he

is

all

"determined hearty partisans," and deprecates association 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 recommending his friend to cor^iliate, as we say, Tom, Dick, and " things to all men." Harry, so as to be

" 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. (F.)
:
1'

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
justify

lose those

possessions

which,

whilst

intact,

them in
Either

being choice, and conservative, and exclusive.

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 accomplished by some of Theognis's own party, who were sick of the rule of the " bad rich," he lost his estate

Thenceforth whilst absent on an unfortunate voyage. he is a conspirator at work to recover his confiscated
thenceforth his verses lands by a counter-revolution are a mixture of schemes for revenge, of murmurs
:

and of suspicion of the comrades he hoped might yet reinstate The two or three the old possessors of property. refer less which more or directly to this loss fragments is one Here which speaks to be given together. may
against Providence,

whose

partisanship

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

is

the

Sea-Polypus
'

Octopodia of Linnaeus

which

referred to in Hesiod's

Sepia "Works

and Days

(524)

" under the epithet of the boneless."

IN OPPOSITION.
To ruin and the
I
clogs
:

149

the powers divine

:

murmur not against them, nor repine Mere human violence, rapine, and stealth Have brought me down to poverty from wealth."
and

(F.)

In another he invokes the help of Zeus in requiting

his friends

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,

Has

Crosses a gully, swelled w ith wintry rain, crept ashore in feebleness and pain."
T

(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

"

very blood the most touching and specific allusion to his spoliation is where the return of spring to send another's

wish " one day to drink the of them that have done it. Eut perhaps

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

When
Are

all is lost,

heart a melancholy strain and my paternal lands

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
apropos
of

autumn and

pain breathes in another passage its harvest-homes. And this

pain he seeks to allay sometimes by reminding himself that womanish repinings will but gratify his foes, and

150
at other times
rights.

THEOGN1S

Now
We

by plans for setting Providence to he admits that patience is the only

cure,

and
"

that, if impatient,
strive like children,

Controls the froward,

weak children

and the Almighty plan of man."

Now

again,

better policy;

he seems to think sullen resistance is a and in another curious musing he argues

:

against the justice of visiting the sins of the fathers

on the children

" The case

is

A person of an honourable
Of guilt accumulated long

hard where a good citizen, mind,

Religiously devout, faithful, and kind, Is doomed to pay the lamentable score
before.

Quite undeservedly doomed to atone, In other times, for actions not his own."

(F.)

to find

In the midst of these conflicting emotions it is pleasant 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

should try the

consistent with his early habits that he effect of drowning care in the bowl,

though

he

is

forced to

admit that this factitious

to
bitter
retrospects,

oblivion soon gives place

and

equally bitter prospects.

We must
his
their wrongs.

fellow-sufferers

not however suppose that Theognis and brooded altogether passively over

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

With

No
All

our state in a tempestuous sea, the crew raging in mutiny duty followed, none to reef a sail,
is
!

all

To work
is

the vessel, or to

pump

or bale

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.
felt,

No

discipline,

no sense of order

The daily messes are unduly dealt. The goods are plundered, those that ought
Strict

to

keep

watch are
is

All that

skulking, or asleep left of order or command

icily

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
So few there Faithful and

could embark the whole

:

the noble manly minds, firm, the men that honour binds
are

Impregnable to danger and to pain And low seduction in the shape of gain."

(F.)

15l2

THEOGNIS
to be
to, as a last resource, in preference to the ruin

But the time comes when such a chosen few have

resorted
certain to overtake

them

if,

after their plots

have "been

There is extant divulged, they sit still and await it. 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 precise nature of what folthe resort to action.

lowed we know

not.

An

elegiac

and subjective poet

than to describe.
of success, or

like Theognis is readier to moralise

The outbreak may have had a gleam

may have been crushed at the beginning by the foresight of its opponents, or the despair and faint heart of
its

It seems quite clear, however, that, promoters. the aid of an armed force from some demoperhaps by
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
final crisis of

the beacon's light,

I

Announces danger from the mountain's height Bridle your horses and prepare to fly
;

our fate

is

nigh.

A momentary pause,
Detains them
;

a narrow space, but the foes approach apace

IN OPPOSITION. We
And
must abide what fortune
!

153

lias

decreed,

hope that Heaven will help us at our need. At home your means were great Make your resolve 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

Not only did he fail of the of a saviour in Cyrrms. aggrandisement of his party and the recovery of his he had henceforth also to realise the miseries estate
:

of exile.

CHAPTER

TIL

THEOGNIS IN EXILE.
Driven from
his country through an unsuccessful rising 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 lift

to upset hereditary oligarchies,

and

an individual to supreme power on the shoulders of the people. Before this strong and sinister influence
our poet probably had to
already

bowed

clung so felt the disasters of his party little short of a personal It was the old story of the good and bad, disgrace.
in the political

in Euboea, as he had The principles to which he tenaciously were doomed to ill luck, and he in Megara.

bow

and

social sense already noticed

it
:

and,

as at Megara, the

good got the worst of

! !

" Alas for our Cerinthus lost * disgrace The fair Lelantian plain plundering host

plain, trians

Cerinthus was a city of Euboea, and Lelantum a well-watered which was an old source of cortention betwixt the Ere-

and Chalcidians.

TIIEOGNIS IN EXILE.
Invade
it

155
!

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

to, and conveniently 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-

of the Corinthians above referred

after

named

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 interference 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-

But the love of music and him into the scrape, sufficed also to which led song, furnish him with a ready and extemporised retort to
tion of the company.

the

girl's

flute-player (and,

insinuation that perhaps his mother was a by implication, a slave) a retort

which

he,

no doubt, astonished his audience by

sing-

ing to his

own accompaniment
of iEthon's lineage.
to jests

"

am

Thebes has given

Shelter to one from

A truce
For

home and country driven. my parents mock thou not,

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,
(D.)

Albeit in dreamland, and oblivion's plain."

The

verses

seem to be

instinct

with a hauteur bred

even

from consciousness of his

aristocratic connections,

whilst the singer's dependence upon his own talents rather than on hired minstrelsy bespeaks him a citi-

of the world. But, apart from such scenes and such entertainments in hospitable Thebes, our poet found time there for schemes of revenge and

zen

reprisals, and for the refugee's proverbial solace, the Whilst a portion of his day was pleasures of hope. spent in the congenial society of the cultivated noble

the contretemps at whose house does not seem to have another portion was deinterrupted their friendship

voted to projects of return, which a fellow-feeling would prevent from appearing tedious to the ear of his
partner in exile, Cyrnus.
lind

To him

it is

amusing to
of

him comparing

his hardships to those of Ulysses,

and gathering hope of vengeance from the sequel

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
all good things in human Nothing can equal goodness in a

" Of

life,

wife.

In our own case we prove the proverb true ; You vouch for me, my friend, and I for you."
It

(F.)

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 refinements he had to forego, now that he was bereft of

home and
" For

The following fragment repreproperty. sents this state of feeling

:

human
is

nature

Hope remains

alone

Of

all

the deities

the rest are flown.

;

Faith

A nd all

departed ; Truth and Honour dead 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

From

Hope remains, and never hath been driven 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
Let every
sacrifice
:

and with Hope,

my

friend,

commence and

end."

(F.)

Mr
line,

Frere notes the characteristic touch in the fourth

"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

and impatience begin to be rife amongst Theognis applies the crucible, which frequently figures in his poetry, and might almost indicate a quondam connection with the Megarian Mint, and fails
return, distrust

them.

to discover a sterling unadulterated

mind

in the whole

range of his friends. out at last that

In bitterness of

spirit

he finds

"An

exile has

no friends

no partisan
banished

Is firm or faithful to the

man ;
(F.)

A disappointment and
Harder
to bear

a punishment

and worse than banishment."

is

And

under these circumstances he

*

driven in earnest

to the course which, in his

Acharnians,' Aristophanes

adopting namely, private negotiations with the masters of the situation at Megara.
represents
Dicaeopolis

as

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

first

mode of

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
translating the
couplet,
it

IJV

EXILE.

159

advance towards making things pleasant with the other, and a first overture to the treaty he was desirous to negotiate with the victorious party.
"

A
for
is

No mean or coward heart will I commend In an old comrade or a party friend Nor with ungenerous hasty zeal decry noble-minded gallant enemy." (F.)
;

But the

bait,
it

whom

though specious, did not tempt those was designed. In another short fragment

at finding it

recorded the outburst of the poet's disappointment " labour lost." He seems to have abanlast in

doned hope at
*

the words
never to see the sun
!
.

Not

to

be born

No worldly blessing is a greater one And the next best is speedily to die, And lapt beneath a load of earth to lie."
unless he terminate his woes

(F.)

But even a man without hope must live that is, by self-slaughtur, a dernier 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 rewe find him in the next fragment tlx last fugees
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
Death
these entanglements with these in view, is the lighter evil of the two." (F.)
;

Possibly, as

we hear no more

younger and

less sensitive

of him, the poet's 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

talent.

Though gives manage problem vent to expressions which show what an indignity work must have seemed to
"

unemployed enterprise and unappreciated 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 u how to he to live."
of

A manly form, an elevated mind, Once elegantly fashioned and refined,"

to his aid,

his pluck

and good sense come

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

art or part.
skill

own

worthy voice and

gifts,

Having

satisfied

person to any unhimself that his

in music were his most marketable

as

he
;

set

up

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

'VERSITY J
IN EXILE.
had
161

to do dirty work, and to put up with snubs he His never dreamed of in his palmy club-life at home.
sensibilities

were outraged by vulgar nouveaux riches

talent, as well as

who employed his who quizzed him

by

professionals

as

an amateur.

Fortunately he

could get his revenge in a cheap way upon both Here is his thrust at the former classejs.
:

" Dunces are often rich, while indigence

Nor wealth

Thwarts the designs of elegance and sense. alone, nor judgment can avail In either case art and improvement fail."

(F.)

As

to the latter,
test to

than the
twitted

pretensions,

nothing can be more fair and open which he proposes to submit his own and those of one Academus, who had
cross

him with being a

:

between an

artist

and

an amateur

" I wish that a fair trial were prepared, Friend Academus with the prize declared,
!

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 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.

a. c.

voL xv.

Whilst Theognis turns 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 accurately. By degrees it becomes evident that he is not indeed to the getting on in his chosen profession extent of being able, as he puts it in a terse couplet,

" to indulge his spirit to the full in

graceful

its taste for

the

and

beautiful," but, at all events, of having

wherewithal to discourse

critically on the question of and from which we infer that he indulgence economy, 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 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,

is fled

never wholly

lost

altogether lost, though left behind, Bequeathed in kindness to a friendly mind.

Not

And for the present, can a lot be found Fairer and happier than a name renowned, And
The
easy competence, with honour crowned just approval of the good and wise, Public applauses, friendly courtesies ;
all
;

Where

combine a single name to grace

IN EXILE.
With honour and pre-eminence
Coevals, elders,
of place,
"
?

163

and the

rising race

(F.)

fit

"With these laudable ambitions he pursued with proof " director of choral his
calling

entertainments,"

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
until,
it

champion of freedom to the battle of Corinth and Corcyra combined to deliver Syracuse from the siege which followed the
character of a

Helorus.

When

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

is

No power on
It

earth

like the

bought and sold ; power of gold."

(F.)

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

that tells its

strain

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. Drink the racy wine But think not of it Of rich Taygetus, press'd from the vine
! !

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

Which Theotimus,

Drink

A
When

and cheer your heart, and banish care load of wine will lighten your despair." (F.)
it,

in the

Hookham
country,

Frere's arrangement

concluding fragments (we follow Mr here as in most in-

stances) Theognis is

found reinstated in his native

of
politics
;

the

sting

has been evidently

extracted, as a preliminary

song thenceforth is the praise These are his recipes, we learn in a passage which contributes to the ascertainment of his date, for driving
far

and the burden of his of wine and of banquets.

" All fears of Persia, and her threatened war,"

an impending danger,
another passage.
It

to

which he recurs vaguely in 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.
lie

165

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, peaceful it should

seem and undisturbed thenceforward,

as

he

fulfilled his
it

recognising

" servant of the Muses," destiny as a 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."
It

(F.)

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

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 Englishman, John Hookham Erere, the elegiac poet of Megara has been proved to be something more than a compiler
a scholar, poet, and politician in of didactic copy- slips one. with a biography belonging to him, the threads of

166

THEOGNIS IN EXILE
are not hard to gather up. The result is, not maxims are less notable, but that we realise

which
the

that his
life

and character of him who moulded them into which is often elegant in expression, and marked by a genuine and forcible subjectivity. always The task of tracing this life in his works has been
verse
verse

rendered easier to the author of the foregoing pages by the ingenious and skilful labours of Mr Frere.

END OF HESIOD AND THEOGNIS.

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