A History of Ancient Greek Literature. Gilbert Murray

the great lyrist Stêsichorus!

      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 peasantpoetry in Bœotia, the direct descendant in all likelihood of the old Æolian 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 Bœotia and taken up the local poetry. Whether one of those poets was called 'Hêsiodos' is a question of little importance. It does not look like an invented name. At any rate, the Bœotian 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 Bœotia; the catalogues of women are especially Locrian. The Clymenê story is suggested, doubtless, by a wish to provide a romantic and glorious ancestry for Stêsichorus. Does the rest of the story mean that Locris counted Hesiod as her own, and showed his grave; while Bœotia said he was a Bœotian, 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), and the Shield of Heracles.

      The Works and Daysis a poem on 'Erga,' or Worksof agriculture, with an appendix on the lucky and unlucky Days of the month, and an intertexture of moral sentences addressed to Perses. It is a slow, lowly, simple poem; a little rough and hard, the utterance of those 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 toll. There is little sentiment. The outspoken bitterness of the first 'Gnômê' 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 know not how the half is more than the whole, nor the great joy there is in mallow and 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!" "It 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 mixingbowl 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 Ergaare genuine and country-like. They may be regarded as the gist of the poem, the rest being insertions and additions. There is the story how the gods had "hidden away his life from man," till good Promêtheus 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 Pandôra, and gave it to Epimêtheus, 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 Aidôs and Nemesis -- those two lovely ideas which the sophist Protagoras made the basis of social ethics, and which we miserably translate into Shameand 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 primitive kings with the bitter insurgency of the Bœotian peasant-song against its oligarchy of nobles.

      The Ergais 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 themselves 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 are thick with fur, but the cold blows through them, and through the bull's hide and the goat's thick hair; but it cannot blow through to the gentle little girl who sits in 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 inadequate, 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 systematising the gods, are comparatively late. The Erga702 is quoted by Semonides (about 650 B.C.). But it is impossible to date the poems. We have seen (p. 37 ) that the Theogony is quoted by the Iliad-- whereas the Theogonyoften quotes the Iliadand 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 expanded in recitation. There are remains of real, not merely literary, religion. Erôs (120), Love, is prominent, because he was specially worshipped in Thespæ, Ascra's nearest big town. Hecatê 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 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 -- 'The Catalogue of Women,' '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 Proitos,' 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 exaggeration, 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 quasimonotheistic 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 Enîpeus. This was well enough in their own 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,