which must mean at the very least ten books. On the
other hand, Proclus makes the Homecomings* which
must have been a series of separate lays almost as elastic
as the Eoiai* themselves (see p. 60), into a single poem.
As for the date of these poems, they were worked mto
final shape much later than our Homer, and then appa-
rently more for their historical matter than for their poetic
value. They quote Iliad, Odyssey, and Theogony ; they
are sometimes brazen in their neglect of the digamma ;
they are often modern and poor in their language. On
the other hand, it is surely perverse to take their mentions
of ancestor-worship, magic, purification, and the like,
as evidence of lateness. These are all practices of date-
less antiquity, left unmentioned by ' Homer,' like many
other subjects, from some conventional repugnance,
whether of race, or class, or tradition. And the actual
matter of the rejected epics is often very old. We
have seen the relation of h to the Little Iliad* In the
Cypria* Alexander appears in his early glory as con-
queror of Sidon ; there is a catalogue of Trojans which
cannot well have been copied from our meagre list in J5,
and is perhaps the source of it ; there is a story told by
Nestor which looks like the original of part of our Hades-
legend in X. And as for quotations, the words " The
purpose of Zeus was fulfilled'' are certainly less natural
where they stand in the opening of the Iliad than in
the Cypria* where they refer to the whole design of
relieving Earth of her burden of men by means of the
Trojan War. We have 125 separate quotations from the
48 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
Cypria* which seems to have stood rather apart and
independent in the general epic tradition.
The Tclegoneia* too, though in its essence a mere
sequel, making Telegonus, son of Odysseus and Kirke,
sail in search of his father, just as Telemachus did, is
full of genuine saga-stuff. Odysseus is repeated in his
son, like Achilles, like Launcelot and Tristram. The
sons of the ' Far-wanderer ' are ' Far-tighter ' and ' Far-
born,' and a third, by Calypso, is ' Far-subduer ' (Tele-
damus). The bowman has a bowman son, and the son
wanders because the father did. And the end of the
Telegoneia* is in the simplest saga-spirit. Telegonus
unknowingly slays his father, who gives him Penelope to
wed and protect. He takes all the characters to Kirke
in the magic island ; she purifies him of blood, and
makes Telemachus and Penelope immortal ; finally, the
two young men marry their respective step-mothers,
Odysseus apparently remaining dead. That is not late
or refined work. 'Eugamon' (' Happy -marrier ') of
Cyrene must have seemed a grotesque figure to the
men of the fifth century ; he was at home among those
old saga -makers who let Heracles give Deianira to
Hyllus, and CEdipus take on the late king's wife as part
of the establishment.
The critical questions suggested by the rejected epics
are innumerable. To take one instance, how comes it
that the Little Iliad* alone in our tradition is left in so
thin a dress of conventional ' Epic ' language that the
^olic shows through ? One line actually gives the
broad a and probably the double consonants of ^olic,
vv^ fiev erjv fxecraa, Xafi'irpa S' iirereWe aeXdva. Others
are merely conventionalised on the surface. Possibly
some epics continued to be sung in Lesbos in the
THE HOMERIC HYMNS 49
native dialect till the era of antiquarian collection in
the fourth century B.C. or after ; and perhaps if this
poem were ever unearthed from an Egyptian tomb, we
should have a specimen of the loose and popular epic
not yet worked up by Ionic genius. Its style in general
seems light and callous compared with the stern tragedy
of the Milesian y^tJiiopis''' and Sack of I lion*
Among the other rejected epics were poems of what
might be called the World-cycle. Of these, Proclus uses
the Theogony* and the Titan War* of which last there
exists one really beautiful fragment. The Theban 'Ring,'
which was treated by grammarians as an introduction to
the Trojan, had an (Edipodea* a Thebais* and a Lay of
the After-born* treating of the descendarks of the Seven,
who destroyed Thebes. The Driving forth of Amphia-
raus* the Taking of Qichalia,* the Phocais* the Danais,*
and many more we pass over.
Hymns or Preludes
It was a custom in epic poetry for the minstrel to
'begin from a god,' generally from Zeus or the Muses.^
This gave rise to the cultivation of the ' Pro-oimion ' or
Prelude as a separate form of art, specimens of which'
survive in the so-called Homeric ' Hymns,' the word
vixvo<i having in early Greek no religious connotation.
The shortest of these preludes merely call on the god
by his titles, refer briefly to some of his achievements,
and finish by a line like, ^^ Hail to thee, Lo?'d ; and now
begin my lay," or, " Beginning from thee, I will pass to
another song!' ^ The five longer hymns are, like Pindar's
victory songs, illustrations of the degree to which a
1 Find., Nem. 2. Cf. 6, 499. 2 ggg ggp , j_
50 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
form of art can grow beyond itself before it is felt to
be artistically impossible. The prelude was developed as
a thing apart until it ceased to be a prelude.
The collection which we possess contains poems of
diverse dates and localities, and the tradition of the
text is singularly confused. The first 546 lines, for
instance, are given as one hymn 'to Apollo.' But they
comprise certainly two hymns : the first (1-178) by an
Ionic poet, on the birth of the Ionian God in the floating
island of Delos ; the second by a poet of Central Greece,
on the slaying of the great Earth-serpent, and the estab-
lishment of the Dorian God at Delphi. Further, these
two divisions are not single poems, but fall into separate
incomplete parts. Athenaeus actually calls the whole
'the hymns to Apollo.' The Ionic portion of this hymn
is probably the earliest work in the extant collection.
It is quoted as Homer's by Thucydides (iii. 104), and
Aristophanes {Birds, 575), and attributed by Didymus
the grammarian to the rhapsode Kyna^thus of Chios ;
which puts it, in point of antiquity, on a level with the
rejected epics. The hymn to Hermes partly dates itself
by giving seven strings to the original lyre as invented
by that god. It must have been written when the old
four-stringed lyre had passed, nLt only out of use, but
out of memory. The beautiful fragment (vii.) on the
capture of Dionysus by brigands looks like Attic work
of the fifth or fourth century B.C. The Prelude to
Pan (xix.) may be Alexandrian ; that to Ares (viii.)
suggests the fourth century A.D.
In spite of their bad preservation, our Hymns are
delightful reading. That to Aphrodite, relating nothing
but the visit of Aphrodite to Anchises shepherding his
kine on Mount Ida, expresses perhaps more exquisitely
HYMN TO DEMETER 51
than anything else in Greek hteratiire that frank joy in
physical life and beauty which is often supposed to be
characteristic of Greece. The long hymn to Demeter,
extant in only one MS., which was discovered last century
at Moscow 'among pigs and chickens,' is perhaps the
most beautiful of all. It is interesting as an early Attic
or Eleusinian composition. Parts are perhaps rather
fluent and weak, but most of the poem is worthy of
the magnificent myth on which it is founded. Take
one piece at the opening, where Persephone "was
playing with Okeanos' deep-breasted daughters, and pluck-
ing flowers, roses and crocus and pretty pansies, in a soft
meadow, and flags and hyacinth, and that great narcissus
that Earth sent up for a snare to the rose-face maiden, doing
service by Gods zvill to Him of the Many Guests. The bloom
of it was wonderful, a marvel for gods undying and mortal
men ; from the root of it there grew out a hundred heads,
and the incensed smell of it made all the wide sky laugh
above, and all the earth laugh and the salt swell of the sea.
And the girl in wonder reached out both her hands to take
the beautiful thing to play with ; then yawned the broad-trod
ground by the Flat of Nysa, and the deathless steeds brake
forth, and the Cronos-born king. He of the Many Names,
of the Many Guests ; and He swept her azvay on his golden
chariot." The dark splendour of Aidoneus, " Him of the
Many Thralls, of the Matiy Guests," is in the highest spirit
of the saga.
Comic Poems
Of the Comic Poems which passed in antiquity as
Homer's, the only extant example is the Battle of the
Frogs and Mice, rather a good parody of the fighting
52 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
epic. The opening is Bcieotian ; the general colour of
the poem Attic. An obvious fable — followed strangely
enough by A. Ludvvich in his large edition — gives it to
one Pigres, a Carian chief, who fought in the Persian
War. The battle began because a mouse named
Psicharpax, flying from a weasel, came to a pond to
quench his thirst. He was accosted by a frog of royal
race, Physignathos, son of Peleus — (the hero of Mount
Pelion has become 'Mudman,' and his son ' Puff-cheek' !)
— who persuaded him to have a ride on his back and see
his kingdom. Unhappily a 'Hydros' — usually a water-
snake, here perhaps some otter-like animal — lifted its
head above the water, and the frog instinctively dived.
The mouse perished, but not unavenged. A kinsman
saw him from the bank, and from the blood-feud
arose a great war, in which the mice had the best of it.
At last Athena besought Zeus to prevent the annihilation
of the frogs. He tried first thunderbolts and then crabs,
which hitter were more than the mice could stand ; they
turned, and the war ended.
There were many comic battle-pieces ; we hear of a
Spider-Jight* a Ci'ajic-fight* a Field/are-poem* Some
were in iambics, and consequently foreign to the Home-
ric style. The most celebrated comic poem was the Mar-
gites* so called after its hero, a roaring blade (/xapjo';),
high-spirited and incompetent, whose characteristic is
given in the immortal line —
TToXX' TjmaTaTO epya, KaKa>s 6' ^Tricrraro navTa.
" Many arts he knew, and he knew them all badly ; " and
again : " He was not meant by the gods for a digger or a
ploughman, nor generally for anything sensible ; he was
deficient in all manner of wisdom!' Late writers on metre
HESIOD 53
say the poem was in a mixture of heroic and iambic
verse, a statement which suggests a late metrical re-
furbishment of a traditional subject. It can scarcely be
true of the poem which Aristotle regarded as Homer's.
Margites must have been more amusing than Hierocles'
* Scholasticus,' the hero of the joke-book from which so
many of our 'Joe Millers' are taken. Scholasticus was
a pure fool, with nothing but a certain modesty to re-
commend him.
What is meant by calling these poems Homeric ?
Only that they date from a time when it was not thought
worth while to record the author's name ; and, perhaps,
that if you mean to recite a mock epic battle, it slii^htly
improves your joke to introduce it as the work of the
immortal Homer.
Hesiod
As the epos of romance and war was personified in
' Homeros,' the bard of princes, so the epos of plain
teaching was personified in the peasant poet ' Hesiodos.'
The Hesiodic poems, indeed, contain certain pretended
reminiscences, and one of them, the Erga, is largely made
up of addresses to * Perses,' assumed to be the poet's
erring friend — in one part, his brother. We have seen
that the reminiscences are fictions, and presumably Perses
is a fiction too. If a real man had treacherously robbed
Hesiod of his patrimony by means of bribes to ' man-
devouring princes,' Hesiod would scarcely have remained
on intimate terms with him. 'Perses' is a lay figure for
the didactic epos to preach at, and as such he does his
duty. Hesiod wants to praise industry, to condemn the
ways of men, and especially of judges : the figure must
54 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
be an idle dog, ignorant of the world and fond of law.
Hesiod wants to praise righteousness : the figure must
show a certain light-handedness in its dealings with
money. We have then no information of what Hesiod
^vas — only a tradition of what Hesiod was supposed to be.
He was born at Kyme, in ^olis ; his father migrated
to Boeotia, and settled in Ascra, a charming and fertile
village on the slopes of Mount Helicon, which the poet
describes as " bad in winter^ insufferable in summer!'
Here he herded flocks on Helicon, till one day the
Muses greeted him with the words : " Boors of the wild
fields, by-words of shame, nothing but belly ! We know
how to tell many false things true-seeming, but we know
how to speak the real truth when we will'.' This made
Hesiod a poet. We hear nothing more of him till his
death, except that he once went across the channel from
Aulis to Chalkis to take part in a competition at the
funeral games of Amphidamas, king of Euboea, and, al-
though much of his advice is about nautical matters, that
he ciid not enjoy the sea. He avoided Southern Greece
because of an oracle which foretold that he should die at
Nemea ; and so he did, at a little sanctuary near Oineon
in Locris, which happened to bear that name. He was
murdered and thrown into the sea by the brothers of one
Clymene or Ctimene, who was supposed to have borne a
son to the octogenarian poet ; but the dolphins brought
the body to land, and a stately tomb was built for it at
Oineon. The son was the great lyrist Stesichorus !
Certainly the faith of these legend-makers can move
mountains. Yet we can perhaps get some historical
meaning out of their figments. The whole evidence of the
poems goes to suggest that there was a very old peasant-
poetry in Boeotia, the direct descendant in all likelihood
LEGEND OF HESIOD'S LIFE 55
of the old ^olian lays of the Achaioi, from which
' Homer ' was developed ; and that this was at some
time enriched and invigorated by the reaction upon it
of the full-flown Ionian epic. That is, Ionian poets must
have settled in Boeotia and taken up the local poetry.
Whether one of those poets was called ' Hesiodos ' is a
question of little importance. It does not look like
an invented name. At any rate, the Boeotian poetry
flourished, and developed a special epic form, based on
the Ionian ' Homer,' but with strong local traits.
What of Hesiod's death ? We know that the Hesiodic
poetry covered Locris as well as Boeotia ; the catalogues
of women are especially Locrian. The Clymene story is
suggested, doubtless, by a wish to provide a romantic and
glorious ancestry for Stesichorus. Does the rest of the
story mean that Locris counted Hesiod as her own, and
showed his grave ; while Boeotia said he was a Boeotian,
and explained the grave by saying that the Locrians had
murdered him ? As for the victory at the funeral games
of Amphidamas, it is a late insertion, and the unnamed
rivals must be meant to include Homer. The story of a
contest between Homer and Hesiod, in which the latter
won, can be traced back, as we saw (p. 6), to the fifth
century at least.
Of Hesiod's poems we have nominally three preserved,
but they might as well be called a dozen, so little unity
has any one of them — the Theogony, the Works and Days
{Erga)y and the Shield of Heracles.
The Works and Days is a poem on ' Erga,' or Works of
agriculture, with an appendix on the lucky and unlucky
Days of the month, and an intertexture of moral sen-
tences addressed to Perses. It is a slow, lowly, simple
poem ; a little rough and hard, the utterance of those
56 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
Muses who like to tell the truth. There is no swing in
the verses ; they seem to come from a tired, bent man at
the end of his day's work — a man who loves the country
life, but would like it better if he had more food and less
toil. There is little sentiment. The outspoken bitterness
of the first ' Gnome ' is characteristic : ^^ Potter is wroth
with potter, and carpenter with carpenter ; aye^ beggar is
envious of beggar, and minstrel of minstrel !" So is the
next about the judges who rob the poor man : ** Fools,
they knoiv not how the half is more than the whole, nor the
great joy there is in mallow aitd asphodel." Mallow and
asphodel were the food and flowers of the poor. The
moral sentences increase in depth in the middle of the
poem, and show a true and rather amiable idea of duty.
" Hard work is no shame ; the shame is idleness." " Help
your neighbour, and he will help you. A neighbour matters
more than a kinsman!' " Take fair measure, and give a
little over the measure — if you can!' " Give willingly ; a
willing gift is a pleasure!' " Give is a good girl, and
Snatch is a bad girl, a bringer of death I " " // is best to
marry a wife ; but be very careful, or your neighbours may
be merry at your expense. There is no prize like a good
wife: nothing that makes you shudder like a bad; she
roasts you without fire, and brings you to a raw old age!'
At the end these sentences degenerate into rules of
popular superstition — "not to put the Jug on the mixing-
bowl when drinking; that means death!" " not to sit on
immovable things," and so on. One warning, ''not to
cross a river without washing your hands and your sins"
approaches Orphism.
The agricultural parts of the Erga are genuine and
country-like. They may be regarded as the gist of the
poem, the rest being insertions and additions. There
THE ERGA 57
is the story how the gods had "hidden away his Hfe
from man," till good Prometheus stole fire and gave
it him. Then Zeus, to be even with him, made a shape
like a gentle maiden, and every god gave it a separate
charm, and Hermes last put in it the heart of a dog and
the ways of a thief. And the gods called it Pandora,
and gave it to Epimetheus, who accepted it on behalf
of mankind. There is the story of the four ages : at
least there ought to be four — gold, silver, bronze, and
iron ; but, under the influence of Homer, the heroes
who fought at Troy have to come in somewhere. They
are put just after the bronze and before ourselves. We
are iron ; and, bad as we are, are likely to get worse.
The gods have all left us, except Aidos and Nemesis
— those two lovely ideas which the sophist Protagoras
made the basis of social ethics, and which we miserably
translate into Shame and Righteous Indignation. Some
day, Hesiod thinks, we shall drive even them away, and
all will be lost. Two passages, indeed, do suggest the
possibility of a brighter future : all may be well when
the Demos at last arises and punishes the sins of the
princes (175, 260 ff.). It is interesting to compare the
loyalty of the prosperous Ionian epos towards its primi-
tive kings with the bitter insurgency of the Boeotian
peasant-song against its oligarchy of nobles.
The Erga is delightful in its descriptions of the seasons
— a subject that touched Greek feelings down to the
days of Longus. Take the month of Lenaion, ^^ bad
days, enough to flay an ox, when the north wind rides
down from Thrace, and earth and the plants shut them-
selves up ; and he falls on the forest and brings down great
oaks and pines; and all the wood groans, and the wild beasts
shiver and put their tails between their legs. Their hides
58 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
are tJiick with fur, but the cold blows through them, and
through the builds hide and the goat's thick hair ; but it
cannot blow through to the gentle little girl who sits m the
cottage with her mother" and so on. And how good
the summer is, in which foolish people have made it
a reproach against Hesiod's poetic sensitiveness that he
liked to sit in the shadow of a rock and have a picnic
with milk and wine and plenty of food.
The Theogony is an attempt, of course hopelessly in-
adequate, to give a connected account of the gods, their
origins and relationships. Some of it is more than old ;
it is primeval. Several folk-gods occur whose names are
found in Sanskrit, and who therefore may be imagined
to date from Indo-European times, though they are
too undignified for Homer to mention : Hestia, Rhea,
Orthros, Kerberos. We are dealing with most ancient
material in the Theogony ; but the language, the present
form of the poem, and perhaps the very idea of syste-
matising the gods, are comparatively late. The Erga 702
is quoted by Semonides (about 650 B.C.). But it is im-
possible to date the poems. We have seen (p. 37) that
the Theogony is quoted by the //zW— whereas the Theo-
gony often quotes the Jliad and Odyssey, and at the end
refers to the matter of several of the rejected epics.
The text is in a bad condition ; it is often hard to see
the connection or the sense. It almost looks as if there
were traces of a rhapsode's notes, which could be ex-
panded in recitation. There are remains of real, not
merely literary, religion. Eros (120), Love, is prominent,
because he was specially worshipped in Thespiae, Ascra's
nearest big town. Hecate has a hymn (411-452) so
earnest that it can only come from a local cult. A
great part of the poem, the mutilation of Ouranos, the
THEOGONY. CATALOGUES OF WOMEN 59
cannibalism of Cronos, only ceases to be repulsive when
it is studied as a genuine bit of savage religion. To
those of the later Greeks who took it more seriously,
it was of course intolerable. There is real grandeur in
the account of the Titan War, which doubtless would
be intelligible if we had the Homeric Titan War* before
us. And there is a great sea-feeling in the list of Nereids
(347 ff.)-
The Theogony ends (967-1020) with a list of the
goddesses who lay in the arms of mortals and bore
children like the gods. In the very last lines the poet
turns from these — ''Now, sweet Muses, sing the race of
mortal women!' Of course, the Muses did sing of them,
but the song is lost. It is referred to in antiquity by
various names — ' TJie Catalogue of Wojnen,' * The Poems
about Women,' * The Lists of Heroic Women ' ; particular
parts of it are quoted as * The Eoiai,' ' The Lists of the
Daughters of Leukippos,' ' of the Daughters of ProitoSy and
so on.
Why were lists of women written ? For two reasons.
The Locrians are said to have counted their genealogies
by the woman's side ; and if this, as it stands, is an exag-
geration, there is good evidence, apart from Nossis and
her fellow-poetesses, for the importance of women in
Locris. Secondly, most royal houses in Greece were
descended from a god. In the days of local quasi-
monotheistic religion this was simply managed : the local
king came from the local god. But when geographical
boundaries were broken down, and the number of known
gods consequently increased, these genealogies had to be
systematised, and sometimes amended. For instance,
certain Thessalian kings were descended from Tyro and
the river Enipeus. This was well enough in their own
6o LITERATURE OE ANCIENT GREECE
valley ; but when they came out into the world, they
found there families descended from Poseidon, the god
of the great sea, perhaps of all waters, and they could not
remain content with a mere local river. In Odyssey \ we
have the second stage of the story : the real ancestor was
Poseidon, only he visited Tyro disguised as the river !
The comparatively stable human ancestresses form the
safest basis for cataloguing the shifting divine ancestors.
There were five books in the Alexandrian edition of the
Catalogues of lVo;nen* the last two being what is called
Eoiai.* This quaint title is a half -humorous plural of
the expression ^ o'it], ' Or like, . . . which was the form
of transition to a new heroine, " Or like her who dwelt
in Phthia^ with the CJiarites^ own loveliness, by the waters
of Peneus, Cyrene the fair!' There are one hundred
and twenty - four fragments of the Catalogue * and
twenty -six of the ^ Or likes!* If they sometimes
contradict each other, that is natural enough, and it
cannot be held that the Alexandrian five books had all
the women there ever were in the Hesiodic lists. When
once the formula ' Or like' was started, it was as easy to
put a new ancestress into the list as it is, say, to invent a
new quatrain on the model of Edward Lear's. P'urther
more, it was easy to expand a given Eoic * into a story,
and this is actually the genesis of our third Hesiodic
poem, the Shield of Heracles, the ancestress being, of
course, the hero's mother, Alcmene.
The Shield begins : " Or like Alcmene, when she fled her
home and fatherland, and came to Thebes ; " it goes on to
the birth of Heracles, who, it proceeds to say, slew
Kyknos, and then it tells how he slew Kyknos. In the
arming of Heracles before the battle comes a long