HESIOD.
CHAPTER I.
THE LIFE OF HESIOD.
Of materials for a biography of the father of didactic poetry there is, as might be expected, far less scarcity than is felt in the case of the founder of epic. Classed as contemporaries by Herodotus, Homer and Hesiod represent two schools of authorship—the former the objective and impersonal, wherein the mover of the puppets that fill his stage is himself invisible; the latter the subjective and personal, which communicates to reader and listener, through the medium of its verse, the private thoughts and circumstances of the 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 naïveté of reality, sets himself in the foreground, and lets us into confidences about his family matters his hopes and fears, his aims and discouragements, the earnests of his success and the obstacles to it. But notwithstanding the explicitness natural to his school of composition, he has failed to leave any record of the date of his life and poems. For an approximation to this the chief authority is Herodotus, who, in discussing the Hellenic theogonies, gives it as his opinion that "Hesiod and Homer lived not more than four hundred years before" his era, and places, it will be observed, the didactic poet first in order of the two. This would correspond with the testimony of the Parian marble which makes Hesiod Homer's senior by about thirty years; and Ephorus, the historian of the poet's fatherland, maintained, 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 of the poems themselves, as to "the state of manners, customs, arts, and political government familiar to the respective authors." Tradition certainly conspires to affix a common date to these pre-eminent stars of Hellenic poetry, by clinging to a fabled contest for the prize of their mutual art; and, so far as it is of any worth, corroborates the consistent belief of the ancients, that Hesiod nourished at least nine centuries before Christ. As to his parentage, although the names of his father and mother have not been preserved, there is internal evidence of the most trustworthy kind. In his 'Works and Days' the poet tells us that his father migrated across the Ægean from Cyme in Æolia, urged by narrowness of means and a desire to better his fortunes by a recurrence to the source and fountain-head of his race; for he sailed to Bœotia, the mother-country of the Æolian colonies. There he probably gave up his seafaring life, taking to agriculture instead; and there—unless, as some have surmised without much warranty, his elder son, Hesiod, was born before his migration—he begat two sons, Hesiod, and a younger brother, Perses, whose personality is too abundantly avouched by Hesiod to be any subject of question. Though not himself a bard, the father must have carried to Bœotia lively and personal reminiscences and souvenirs of the heroic poetry for which the Æolic 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 muse in Hesiod, which developed itself in a distinct and independent vein, and was neither an offset of the Homeric stock, nor indebted to the Homeric poems for aught beyond the countenance afforded by parity of pursuits. The account given by Hesiod of his father's migration deserves citation, and may be conveniently given in the words of Elton's translation of the 'Works and Days:'—
Thus did our mutual father plough the main.
Erst from Æolian 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.
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.
To lead the mazy measure, breathing grace
Enkindling love, and glance their quivering feet,"—
they accosted the favoured rustic with their heavenly speech, gave him commission to be the bard of didactic, as Homer was of epic, poetry, and in token of such a function invested him with a staff of bay, symbolic of poetry and song. Hesiod's own account of this vision in the opening of his 'Theogony' is as follows:—
Have taught their stately song, the whilst his flocks
He fed beneath all-sacred Helicon.
Thus first those goddesses their heavenly speech
Addressed, the Olympian Muses born from Jove:
'Night-watching shepherds! beings of reproach!
Ye grosser natures, hear! We know to speak
Full many a fiction false, yet seeming true,
Or utter at our will the things of truth.'
So said they, daughters of the mighty Jove,
All eloquent, and gave into mine hand,
Wondrous! a verdant rod, a laurel branch,
Of bloom unwithering, and a voice imbreathed
Divine, that I might utter forth in song
The future and the past, and bade me sing
The blessèd race existing evermore,
And first and last resound the Muses' praise."
—E. 33-48.
The details of this interview, as above recorded, are replete with interest—centred, indeed, in the poet himself, but in some degree also attaching to his reputed works. If the verses are genuine—and that the ancients so accounted them is plain from two allusions of Ovid[2]—they show that with a faith quite in keeping with his simple, serious, superstitious character, he took this night-vision for no idle dream-fabric, but a definite call to devote himself to the poetry of truth, and the errand of making song subserve the propagation of religion and moral instruction. The "fictions seeming true"—in other words, the heroic poetry so popular in the land of his father's birth—Hesiod considers himself enjoined to forsake for a graver strain—"the things of truth"—which the Muses declare have been hitherto regarded by mortals as not included in their gift of inspiration. He takes their commission to be prophet and poet of this phase of minstrelsy, embracing, it appears, the past and future, and including his theogonic and ethical poetry. And while the language of the Muses thus defines the poet's aim, when awakened from a rude shepherd-life to the devout service of inspired song, it implies, rather than asserts, a censure of the kinds of poetry which admit of an easier and freer range of fancy. For himself, this supernatural interview formed the starting-point of a path clear to be tracked; and that he accepted his commission as Heaven-appointed is seen in the gratitude which, as we learn from his 'Works and Days,' he evinced by dedicating to the maids of Helicon,
"Where first their tuneful inspiration flowed,"
an eared tripod, won in a contest of song at funeral games in Eubœa. In the same passage (E. 915-922) Hesiod testifies to the gravity of his poetic trust by averring that he speaks "the mind of ægis-bearing Jove, whose daughters, the Muses, have taught him the divine song." Pausanias (IX. xxxi. 3) records the existence of this tripod at Helicon in his own day.
But though he took his call as divine, there is no reason to think that Hesiod depended solely on this gift of inspiration for a name and place among poets. His father's antecedents suggest the literary culture which he may well have imbibed from his birthplace in Æolia. His own traditions and surroundings in the mother-country—so near the very Olympus which was the seat of the old Pierian minstrels, whatever it may have been of the fabled gods—so fed by local influences and local cultivation of music and poetry—may have predisposed him to the life and functions of a poet; but there is a distinctly practical tone about all his poetry, which shows that he was indebted to his own pains and thought, his own observation and retentiveness, for the gift which he brought, in his measure, to perfection. A life afield conduced to mould him into the poet of the 'Works and Days,'—a sort of Bœotian 'Shepherd's Calendar,' interwoven with episodes of fable, allegory, and personal history. The nearness of his native hills, as well as the traditions of elder bards, conspired to impel him to the task of shaping a theogony. And both aims are so congenial and compatible, that prima facie likelihood will always support the theory of one and the same authorship for both poems against the separatists,[3] who can no more brook an individual Hesiod than an individual Homer. But be this as it may, the glimpses which the poet gives of himself, in the more autobiographical of his reputed works, present the picture of a not very locomotive sage, shrewd, practical, and observant within his range of observation, apt to learn, and apt also to teach, storing up life's everyday lessons as they strike him, and drawing for his poetry upon a well-filled bank of homely truth and experience. He gives the distinct idea of one who, having a gift and believing in a commission, sets himself to illustrate his own sentiment, that "in front of excellence the gods have placed exertion;" 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 practical agriculture, in the 'Theogony' he commands our respect and reverence for the pains and research by which he has worked into a system, and this too for the benefit and instruction of his fellows, the floating legends of the gods and goddesses and their offspring, which till his day must have been a chaotic congeries. On works akin to these two main and extant poems we may conceive him to have spent that part of his mature life which was not given up to husbandry. Travelling he must have disliked—at any rate, if it involved sea-voyages. His lists of rivers in the 'Theogony' are curiously defective where it might have been supposed they would be fullest—as regards Hellas generally; whereas he gives many names of Asiatic rivers, and even mentions the Nile and the Phasis, neither of which occur in Homer. But this would seem to have been a hearsay knowledge of geography, for he distinctly declares his experience of his father's quondam calling to be limited to a single passage to Eubœa 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 communicative touching those streams of which he had heard most in childhood. The one voyage to which he owned was made with a view to the musical contest at Chalcis above alluded to; and it is surely not without 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:—
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 Eubœan shore;
From Aulis, where the mighty Argive host,
The winds awaiting, lingered on the coast,
From sacred Greece assembled to destroy
The guilty walls of beauty-blooming Troy."
—'Works and Days,' E. 901-910.
This, the poet goes on to say, is all he knows practically about navigation, and truly it is little enough; for it is no exaggeration, but a simple fact, that the strait which constituted Hesiod's sole experience of a 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 Eubéen." In the days of Thucydides a bridge had been thrown across it.
But experimental knowledge was reckoned superfluous by one who could rest in the knowledge he possessed of the mind of Jove, and in the commission he held from his daughters,—who, according to his belief, taught him navigation, astronomy, and the rest of the curriculum, when they made him an interpreter of the divine will, and a "vates" in a double sense,—to dictate a series of precepts concerning the time for voyaging and the time for staying ashore. Besides, in the poet's eye seafaring was a necessity of degenerate times. In the golden age none were merchants.—('Works and Days,' 236.)
Yet the even flow of the poet's rural life was not without its occasional and chronic disturbances and storms. The younger brother, to whom allusion has been made more than once, and whom he generally addresses as "simple, foolish, good-for-nought Perses," had, it seems, come in for a share of the considerable property which Hesiod's father had got together, after he exchanged navigation and merchandise for agricultural pursuits. The settlement of the shares in this inheritance lay with the kings, who in primitive ages exercised in Bœotia, as elsewhere, the function of judges, and, according to Hesiod's account, were not superior to bribery and corruption. Perses found means to purchase their award to him of the better half of the patrimony, and, after this fraud, dissipated his ill-gotten wealth in luxury and extravagance, a favourite mode of spending his time being that of frequenting the law-tribunals, as nowadays the idletons of a town or district may be known by their lounging about the petty sessional courts when open. Perhaps the taste for litigation thus fostered furnished him with the idea of repairing his diminished fortunes by again proceeding against his brother, and hence Hesiod's invectives against the unscrupulousness of the claimant, and of the judges, who were the instruments of his rapacity. It is not distinctly stated what was the issue of this second suit, which aimed at stripping Hesiod of that smaller portion which had already been assigned to him: perhaps it was an open sore, under the influence of which he wrote his 'Works and Days,'—a persuasive to honest labour as contrasted with the idleness which is fertile in expedients for living at the expense of others—a picture from life of the active farmer, and, as a foil to him, of the idle lounger. Here is a sample of it:—
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
For other's wealth go instigate the war:
But this thou may'st no more; let justice guide,
Best boon of heaven, and future strife decide.
Not so we shared the patrimonial land,
When greedy pillage filled thy grasping hand;
The bribe-devouring judges, smoothed by thee,
The sentence willed, and stamped the false decree:
O fools and blind! to whose misguided soul
Unknown how far the half exceeds the whole,
Unknown the good that healthful mallows yield,
And asphodel, the dainties of the field."
—E. 44-58.
The gnomic character of the last four lines must not blind the reader to the fact that they have a personal reference to the poet and his brother, and represent the anxiety of the former that the latter should adopt, though late, his own life-conviction, and act out the truth that a dinner of herbs with a clear conscience is preferable to the luxuries of plenty purchased by fraud. Consistent with this desire is the unselfish tone in which he constantly recurs to the subject throughout the 'Works and Days,' and that not so much as if he sought to work this change in his brother for peace and quietness to himself, as for a real interest in that brother's amendment—we do not learn with what success. Perhaps, as has been surmised, Perses had a wife who kept him up to his extravagant ways, and to the ready resource of recouping his failing treasure by endeavouring to levy a fresh tax upon Hesiod. Such a surmise might well account for the poet's curious misogynic crotchets. Low as is the value set upon a "help-meet" by Simonides, Archilochus, 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 which 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:—
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 experience. The bridegroom was to be not far short of thirty, the bride about nineteen. Possibly in the injunction 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 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:—
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 outsider might give it, to others. For himself, it is probable he reckoned that the establishment would suffice 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 remembrance. This was surely Plato's belief when he wrote the following beautiful sentences in his 'Symposium.' "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 everlasting glory?"[4]
So far as the poet's life and character can be approximately 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 Œnoe, in Ozolian Locris, with Clymene, the sister of his hosts, is doubtless 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 specimen 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 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 Perses, and beyond the atmosphere of unrighteous judges. Pausanias states that Hesiod, like Homer, whether from fortune's spite or natural distaste, enjoyed no intimacy with kings or great people; and this consists with Plutarch's story that the Spartan Cleomenes 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 and Days' that the poet and his father were only resident aliens in Bœotia. In Thespiæ, 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 tradition; 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 histories 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 Bœotia,—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:—
Yet rest his bones beneath the Minyan earth,
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 enjoying an undisputed genuineness. But it does not seem that the 'Theogony' was impugned before the time of Pausanias,[5] 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. Alluding to vv. 116-118 of the 'Theogony,' the philosopher writes in the 'Symposium' (178),—"As Hesiod says,—
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 congenial field, never so much as hinted a question concerning the age and authorship of the 'Theogony.' Besides these two works, but one other poem has descended to our day under the name of Hesiod, unless, indeed, we take as a sample of his 'Eoiæ, 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 condemnation and contempt as he heaps upon it.[6] 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 'Ornithomanteia, or Book of Augury,' belong to the first class; the 'Eoiæ, or Catalogue of Women,' which is probably the same poem as the 'Genealogy of Heroes;' the 'Melampodia,' which treated of the renowned prophet, prince, and priest of the Argives, Melampus, and of his descendants in genealogical sequence; and the 'Ægimius,' which gathered round the so-named mythical 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,' 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 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 age. The two former poems are of the Æolo-Bœotic type of the ancient epic dialect, while the 'Shield' is nearer to the Æolo-Asiatic 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 discussed separately; and we shall give precedence to Hesiod's most undoubted poem, the 'Works and Days.'
- ↑ P. 253, 254.
- ↑ Fasti, vi. 13; Art of Love, i. 27.
- ↑ The ancient critics who believed in the separate authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey were so called, as separating what by the voice of previous tradition had been made one.
- ↑ Jowett's transl., i. 525.
- ↑ ix. 31, § 3.
- ↑ History of Greek Lit., ii. 424.