blind the reader to the fact that they have a personal
reference to the poet and his brother, and represent the
anxiety of the former that the latter should adopt,
though late, his own life-conviction, and act out the
truth that a dinner of herbs with a clear conscience
is preferable to the luxuries of plenty purchased by
fraud. Consistent with this desire is the unselfish
tone in which he constantly recurs to the subject
throughout the * Works and Days,' and that not so
much as if he sought to work this change in his
brother for peace and quietness to himself, as for a real
interest in that brother's amendment we do not
learn with what success. Perhaps, as has been surmised,
Perses had a wife who kept him up to his extravagant
ways, and to the ready resource of recouping his failing
treasure by endeavouring to levy a fresh tax upon
Hesiod. Such a surmise might well account for the
poet's curious misogynic crotchets. Low as is the
value set upon a " help-meet " by Simonides, Archilo-
chus, Bacchylides, and, later still, by Euripides, one
might have expected better words in favour of marriage
from one whose lost works included a catalogue of
celebrated women of old, than the railing tone wlrich
14 HES10D.
accompanies his account of the myth of Pandora, the
association of woman with unmixed evil in that legend,
and the more practical advice to his brother in a later
part of his ' Works and Days/ where he bids him shun
the wiles of a woman "dressed out behind" (crinolines
and dress-improvers being, it would seem, not by any
means modern inventions), and unsparingly lashes the
whole sex in the style of the verses we quote :
" Let no fair woman robed in loose array,
That speaks the wanton, tempt thy feet astray;
Who soft demands if thine abode be near,
And blandly lisps and murmurs, in thine ear.
Thy slippery trust the charmer shall beguile,
For, lo ! the thief is ambushed in her smile."
E. 511-516.
Indeed, it might be maintained, quite consistently
with the internal evidence of Hesiod's poems, that
he lived and died a bachelor, seeing perhaps the
evil influences of a worthless wife on his brother's
establishment and character. It is true that in certain
cases (which probably should have come more close in
the text to those above cited, whereas they have got
shifted to a later part of the poem, where they are less
to the point) he prescribes general directions about
taking a wife, in just the matter-of-fact way a man
would who wrote without passion and without experi-
ence. The bridegroom was to be not far short of
thirty, the bride about nineteen. Possibly in the in-
junction that the latter should be sought in the ranks
of maidenhood, lurked the same aversion to " marrying
a widow " which animated the worldly-wise father of
THE LIFE OF IIESIOD. 16
Mr Samuel Weller. Anyhow, he would have had the
model wife fulfil the requirements of the beautiful
Latin epitaph on a matron, for he prescribes that she
should be " simple - minded " and " home - keeping "
(though he says nothing about her being a worker in
wools), in lines of which, because Elton's version is
here needlessly diffuse, we submit a closer rendering
of our own :
" And choose thy wife from those that round thee dwell,
Weighing, lest neighbours jeer, thy choice full well.
Than wife that's good man finds no greater gain,
But feast-frequenting mates are simply bane.
Such without fire a stout man's frame consume,
And to crude old age bring his manhood's bloom."
' Works and Days,' 700-705.
This, we conceive, was Hesiod's advice, as an out-
sider might give it, to others. For himself, it is pro-
bable he reckoned that the establishment would suf-
fice which he elsewhere recommends to the farmer
class an unmarried bailiff, a housekeeper without
encumbrances ; for a female servant with children, he
remarks, in bachelor fashion, is troublesome and a
dog that bites (see < Works and Days,' 602-604). It
is indirectly confirmatory of this view that tradition,
which has built up many absurd figments upon the
scant data of Hesiod's autobiography, has signally
failed to fasten other offspring to his name than the
intellectual creations which have kept it in remem-
brance. This was surely Plato's belief when he wrote
the following beautiful sentences in his l Symposium.'
16 HESIOD.
"Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and
other great poets, would not rather have their children
than ordinary human ones ? Who would not emulate
them in the creation of children such as theirs, which
have preserved their memory, and given them ever-
lasting glory 1 " *
So far as the poet's life and character can be ap-
proximately guessed from his poems, it would seem to
have been temperately and wisely ordered, placid, and
for the most part unemotional. That one who so
clearly saw the dangers of association with bad women
that he shrank from intimacy with good, should have
met his death through an intrigue at (Enoe, in Ozolian
Locris, with Clymene, the sister of his hosts, is doubt-
less just as pure a bit of incoherent fiction as that his
remains were carried ashore, from out of the ocean into
which they had been cast, by the agency of dolphins ; or
that a faithful dog no doubt the sharp-toothed speci-
men we have seen recommended in the ' Works and
Days ' traced out the authors of the murder, and
brought them to the hands of justice. Some accounts
attribute to the poet only a guilty knowledge of the
crime of a fellow-lodger ; but in either shape the legend
is an after-thought, as is also the halting story that
Stesichorus, who lived from B.C. 643 to B.C. 560, was
the offspring of this fabled liaison. All that can be con-
cluded from trustworthy data for his biography, beyond
what has been already noticed, is that in later life he
must have exchanged his residence at Ascra for Orcho-
menus, possibly to be further from the importunities of
* Jowett's transl., i. 525.
THE LIFE OF HESIOD. 17
Perses, and beyond the atmosphere of unrighteous
judges. Pausanias states that Hesiod, like Homer,
whether from fortune's spite or natural distaste, en-
joyed no intimacy with kings or great people ; and this
consists with Plutarch's story that the Spartan Cleo-
menes used to call Hesiod " the poet of the Helots,"
in contrast with Homer, " the delight of warriors," and
with the inference from an expression in the ' Works
aud Days' that the poet and his father were only
resident aliens in Boeotia. In Thespise, to which
realm he belonged, agriculture was held degrading to a
freeman, which helps to account for his being, in his
own day, a poet only of the peasantry and the lower
classes. Pausanias and Paterculus do but retail tradi-
tion ; but this suffices to corroborate the impression,
derived from the poet's own works, of a calm and con-
templative life, unclouded except by the worthlessness
of others, and owing no drawbacks to faults or failings
of its own. Musing much on the deities whose his-
tories he systematised as best he might, and at whose
fanes, notwithstanding all his research and inquiry,
he still ignorantly worshipped ; regulating his life on
plain and homely moral principles, and ever awake to
the voice of mythology, which spoke so stirringly to
dwellers in his home of Bceotia, Hesiod lived and died
in that mountain-girded region, answerably to the testi-
mony of the epitaph by his countryman Chersias,
which Pausanias read on the poet's sepulchre at
Orchomenus :
" Though fertile Ascra gave sweet Hesiod birth,
Yet rest his bones beneath the Minyan earth,
a. c. vol. xv. . B
18 HES10D.
Equestrian land. There, Hellas, sleeps thy pride,
The wisest bard of bards in wisdom tried."
Pausan., ix. 38, 4.
The question of Hesiod's literary offspring has
been much debated, the ' Works and Days ' alone en-
joying an undisputed genuineness. But it does not
seem that the 'Theogony' was impugned before the
time of Pausanias,* who records that Hesiod's Heli-
conian fellow - citizens recognised only the ' Works
and Days.' On the other hand to say nothing of
internal evidence in the * Theogony ' we have the
testimony of Herodotus to Hesiod's, authorship ; whilst
the ancient popular opinion on this subject finds cor-
roboration in Plato's direct allusion to a certain passage
of the ' Theogony' as Hesiod's recognised work. Allud-
ing to vv. 116-118 of the 'Theogony,' the philosopher
writes in the 'Symposium' (178), "As Hesiod
says,
' First Chaos came, and then broad-bosomed Earth,
The everlasting seat of all that is,
And Love/
In other words, after Chaos, the Earth and Love,
these two came into being." Aristophanes, also, in
more than one drama, must be considered to refer to
the 'Theogony' and the "Works." Furthermore,
it is certain that the Alexandrian critics, to whom
scepticism in the matter would have opened a con-
genial field, never so much as hinted a question con-
cerning the age and authorship of the 'Theogony.'
Besides these two works, but one other poem has
ix. 31, 3.
UNIVERSITY
THE LIFE OF HES10D. ^^Ca 19
descended to our day under the name of Hesiod,
unless, indeed, we take as a sample of Lis 'Eoiae, or
Catalogue of Heroines/ the fifty-six verses which,
having slipped their cable, have got attached to the
opening of ' The Shield of Hercules.' The ' Shield '
is certainly of questionable merit, date, and authorship,
though a little hesitation would have been wise in
Colonel Mure, before expressing such wholesale con-
demnation and contempt as he heaps upon it* These
three poems, at all events, are what have come down
under the name and style of Hesiod, and are our
specimens of the three classes of poetical composition
which tradition imputes to him: (1) didactic; (2)
historical and genealogical ; (3) short mythical poems.
Under one or other of these heads it is easy to group
the Hesiodic poems, no longer extant, of which notices
are found in ancient authors. Thus the ' Astronomy '
and the ' Maxims of Chiron,' with the ' Ornithoman-
teia, or Book of Augury,' belong to the first class ; the
'Eoiae, or Catalogue of Women,' which is probably
the same poem as the ' Genealogy of Heroes ; ' the
* Melampodia,' which treated of the renowned pro-
phet, prince, and priest of the Argives, Melampus, and
of his descendants in genealogical sequence ; and the
'iEgimius,' which gathered round the so-named my-
thical prince of the Dorians, and friend and ally of
Hercules, many genealogical traditions of the Heraclid
and Dorian races, will, with the extant 'Theogony,'
represent the second ; while the smaller epics of * The
Marriage of Ceyx,' * The Descent to Hades of Theseus/
* History of Greek Lit., ii. 424.
20 HESIOD.
and the ( Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis/ "will
keep in countenance the sole extant representative of
the third class, and enhance the possibility that ' The
Shield of Hercules ' is at least Hesiodic, though it is
safer to put it thus vaguely than to affirm it Hesiod's.
A conveniently wide berth is afforded by the modern
solution, that several imputed works of Hesiod are the
works of a school of authors of which Hesiod was the
name-giving patriarch. The truth in this matter can
only be approximated. Enough, perhaps, is affirmed
when we say that in style, dialect, and flavour of anti-
quity, the ' Theogony ' and the ' Works ' are more akin
to each other than to the ' Shield ; ' while, at the
same time, the last-named poem is of very respectable
age. The two former poems are of the iEolo-Boeotic
type of the ancient epic dialect, while the l Shield ' is
nearer to the .^Eolo- Asia, tic branch of it, used by
Homer. Discrepancies, where they occur, may be set
down to the interpolations of rhapsodists, and to the
accretions incident to passage through the hands of
many different workmen, after the original master.
The style and merits of each work will best be dis-
cussed separately ; and we shall give precedence to
Hesiod's most undoubted poem, the ' Works and
Days.'
CHAPTER TL
THE WORKS AND DAYS.
The meaning of the title prefixed to Hesiod's great
didactic poem appears to be properly " Farming Opera-
tions," "Lucky and Unlucky Days," or, in short,
"The Husbandman's Calendar;" but if the ethical
scope of it be taken into account, it might, as Colonel
Mure has remarked, be not inaptly described as "A
Letter of Kemonstrance and Advice to a Brother."
And inasmuch as its object is to exhort that brother to
amend his ways, and take to increasing his substance
by agriculture, rather than dreaming of schemes to
enhance it by frequenting and corrupting the law r -
courts, the two descriptions are not inconsistent with
each other. It has been imputed as blame to the
poem that it hangs loosely together, that its connec-
tion is obscure and vague, in short, that its constitu-
ent parts, larger and smaller, are seldom fitly jointed
and compacted. But some allowance is surely to be
made for occasional tokens of inartistic workmanship
in so early a poet, engaged upon a task wdiere he had
neither pattern nor master to refer to; and besides
22 IIES10D.
tills, a closer study of the whole will prove that the
want of connectedness in the work is more seeming
than real. Didactic poetry, from Hesiod's day until
the present, has ever claimed the privilege of arrang-
ing its hortatory topics pretty much as is most con-
venient, and of enforcing its chief idea, be that what
it may, by arguments and illustrations rather congru-
ous in the main than marshalled in the best order of
their going. But the ' Works and Days' is capable
of tolerably neat division and subdivision. The first
part (vv. 1-383) is ethical rather than didactic, a set-
ting-forth by contrast, and by t}ie accessory aid of
myth, fable, allegory, and proverb-lore, of the superi-
ority of honest labour to unthrift and idleness, and of
worthy emulation to unworthy strife and envying.
The second part (vv. 384-764) consists of practical
hints and rules as to husbandry, and, in a true didactic
strain, furnishes advice how best to go about that
which was the industrious Boeotian's proper and chief
means of subsistence. It thus follows naturally on
the general exhortation to honest labour which formed
the first part of the poem. The third and last part
is a religious calendar of the months, with remarks
upon the days most lucky or unpropitious for this or
that duty or occupation of rural and nautical life. All
three, however, more or less address Perses as " a sort
of ideal reader," and thus hang together quite suffi-
ciently for didactic coherence ; whilst in each of the
two first parts episodic matter helps to relieve the dry
routine of exhortation or precept, and is introduced, as
we shall endeavour to show, with more skill and sys-
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 23
tern than would appear to a perfunctory reader. The
first part, as is almost universally agreed by editors
and commentators, begins properly at v. 11, which
in the Greek reads as if it were a correction of the
view held by the author in his 'Theogony/ that
there was but one "Eris," or "Contention," and which is
therefore of some slight weight in the question of unity
of authorship for the two poems. The introductory
ten verses are in all probability nothing more than
a shifting proem, in the shape of an address to Jove
and the Muses, available for the use of the Hesiodian
rhapsodists, in common with divers other like intro-
ductions. According to Pausanias, the Heliconians,
who kept their countryman's great work engraved on
a leaden tablet, knew nothing of these ten verses.
Starting, then, at this point, the poet distinguishes
between two goddesses of strife, the one pernicious
and discord-sowing, the other provocative of honest
enterprise. The elder and nobler of the twain is the
parent of healthy competition, and actuates mechanics
and artists, as well as bards and beggars, between
which last trades it is obvious that the poet traces a
not fortuitous connection :
" Beneficent this better envy burns,
Thus emulous his wheel the potter turns,
The smith his anvil beats, the beggar throng
Industrious ply, the bards contend in song."
E. 33-36.
The wandering minstrel and the professional beggar
of the heroic age exercise equally legitimate callings
in Hesiod's view, and the picture which he draws
24 HESIOD.
' recalls to us those of the "banquet-hall in the Odyssey.
When Antinous rates the swine-herd Eumseus for
bringing Ulysses disguised as a beggar -man into the
hall of feasting, his grievance is that
" Of the tribes
Of vagrants and mean mendicants that prey,
As kill-joys, at our banquets, we have got
A concourse ample. Is it nought to thee
That such as these, here gathering, all the means
Of thy young master waste ? "
Odyssey, xvii. 624-628 (Musgrave).
It is probable that the beggar's place was nearer the
threshold than that of Phemius the bard, who had
just before been singing to his harp, or of other in-
spired minstrels, of whom it is said that
" These o'er all the world
At all feasts are made welcome."
Odyssey, xvii. 639-641 (Musgrave).
But that he had an assured footing and dole in such .
assemblies is plain from Irus's jealousy of a supposed
rival beggar, which results in the boxing-match with
Ulysses in the 18th Book.
To return to Hesiod. The bettermost kind of rivalry
is the goddess to whom he would have Perses give
heed, and not her wrangling sister, who inspires
wrongful dealing, chicanery, and roguish shifts, and
has no fancy for fair-play or healthy emulation. She,
says the poet, has had it too much her own way since
Prometheus stole the fire from heaven, because Zeus,
as a punishment, made labour toilsome, and the idle,
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 25
to shirk their inevitable lot, resort to injustice. " If
the gods had not ordained toil, men might stow away
their boat-paddles over the smoke, and there would be
an end to ploughing with mules and oxen : "
" But Zeus our food concealed : Prometheus' art
With fraud illusive had incensed his heart ;
Sore ills to man devised the heavenly sire,
And hid the shining element of fire.
Prometheus then, benevolent of soul,
In hollow reed the spark recovering stole,
And thus the god beguiled, whose awful gaze
Serene rejoices in the lightning blaze."
E. 67-74.
Till the Titan's offence, toil and sickness and human
ills had been unknown ; but after that transgression
they were introduced as sin into the world through
our mother Eve by Zeus's " beauteous evil," Pandora.
The Father creates her, and the immortals rival each
other in the gifts that shall make her best adapted for
her work of witchery, and presently send her as a gift
to Epimetheus, the personification of " Unreflection,"
who takes her in spite of the remonstrances of his
elder and more foresight ed brother, Prometheus. If,
as has been suggested, we may take the wise Prome-
theus to represent the poet, and Perses to be implied
in the weaker Epimetheus and if, too, in Pandora
there is a covert allusion to the foolish wife of Perses,
who encouraged his extravagance, and seems to have
inspired Hesiod with an aversion for her sex it will
bring home the more closely the pertinence of this
myth to the moral lesson which, in the first part of
26 HES10D.
the poem, the poet designed to teach. The creation
and equipment of Pandora is one of Hesiod's finest
nights above a commonly-even level :
" The Sire who rules the earth and sways the pole
Had said, and laughter filled his secret soul:
He hade the crippled god his hest obey,
And mould with tempering water plastic clay ;
With human nerve and human voice invest
The limbs elastic, and the breathing breast ;
Fair as the blooming goddesses above,
A virgin's likeness with the looks of love.
He bade Minerva teach the skill that sheds
A thousand colours in the gliding threads ;
He called the magic of love's golden queen
To breathe around a witchery of mien,
And eager passion's never-sated flame,
And cares of dress that prey upon the frame ;
Bade Hermes last endue with craft refined
Of treacherous manners, and a shameless mind."
E. 83-99.
The Olympians almost overdo the bidding of their
chief, calling in other helpers besides those named in
the above extract :
" Adored Persuasion and the Graces young,
Her tapered limbs with golden jewels hung ;
Round her fair brow the lovely-tressed Hours
A golden garland twined of spring's purpureal flowers."
E. 103-106.
And when the conclave deemed that they had per-
fected an impersonation of mischief,
" The name Pandora to the maid was given,
For all the gods conferred a gifted grace
To crown this mischief of the mortal race.
THE WORKS AND DAYS. 27
The sire commands the winged herald bear
The finished nymph, the inextricable snare ;
To Epimetheus was the present brought,
Prometheus' warning vanished from his thought
That he disclaim each offering from the skies,
And straight restore, lest ill to man should rise.
But he received, and conscious knew too late
The invidious gift, and felt the curse of fate."
E. 114-124.
How this gift of " woman " was to be the source of pro-
lific evil and sorrow, the poet, it must be confessed, does
not very coherently explain. Nothing is said, in the
account of her equipment, of any chest or casket sent
with her by Zeus, or any other god, as an apparatus
for propagating ills. And when in v. 94 of the poem
we are brought face to face with the chest and the lid,
and Pandora's fatal curiosity, the puzzle is " how they
got there." Homer, indeed, glances at two chests,
one of good the other of evil gifts, in Jove's heavenly
mansion :
" Two casks there stand on Zeus' high palace-stair,
One laden with good gifts, and one with ill :
To whomso Zeus ordains a mingled share,
Now in due time with foul he meeteth, now with fair."
Conington, II. xxiv.
And those who hold Hesiod to have lived after Homer,
or to have availed himself here and there of the same
pre-existent legends, may infer that the poet leaves it
to be surmised that Pandora was furnished with the
less desirable casket for the express purpose of woe to
man. But it is a more likely solution that Prometheus,
the embodiment of mythic philanthropy, had im-
28 HESIOD.
prisoned " human ills " in a chest in the abode of Epi-
metheus, and this chest was tampered with through
the same craving for knowledge which actuated Mother
Eve. This account is supported by the authority of
Proclus. In Hesiod, the first mention of the chest is
simultaneous with the catastrophe
" The woman's hands an ample casket bear ;
She lifts the lid she scatters ills in air.
Hope sole remained within, nor took her flight,
Beneath the casket's verge concealed from sight.
The unbroken cell with closing lid the maid
Sealed, and the cloud-assembler's voice obeyed.
Issued the rest, in quick dispersion hurled,
And woes innumerous roamed the breathing world ;
With ills the land is rife, with ills the sea ;
Diseases haunt our frail humanity :
Self-wandering through the noon, the night, they glide
Voiceless a voice the Power all-wise denied. .
Know then this awful truth : it is not given
To elude the wisdom of omniscient Heaven."
E. 131-144.
It is a beautiful commentary on that part of the
legend which represents Hope as lying not at the
bottom of the casket, but just beneath the lid which
in closing shuts her in, that this did not happen
through inadvertence on Pandora's part, but with her
connivance, and that of her divine prompter, who,
though desirous to punish mankind, represents a par-
tial benefactor to the race. The concluding lines of
the last extract recall the reader to the drift of the
first part of the poem, by repeating that the moral
governance of the universe will not suffer wrong to
TEE WORKS AND DAYS. 29
go unpunished, or allow innocence to succumb to
fraud.
And yet, the poet goes on to argue, the times in
which he lives are out of joint. Such men as his
brother prosper in an age which in wickedness dis-
tances its precursors. His lot, he laments, is cast in
the fifth age of the world ; and here he takes occasion
to in troduce the epi sode of the five a ges of the world ,
and of the increaseof corruption as each suc ceeds the
other. In this episode, which Mr Puley considers to
bear a more than accidental resemblance to the Mosaic
writings, the gol den a ge comes first those happy
times und^exlkonoaj^rj^ when there was neither
care nor trouble nor labour, but life was a blameless
holiday spent in gathering self-sown fruits ; and death,
unheralded by decay or old age, coming to men even
as a sleep, was the very ideal of an Euthanasia :