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Hesiod

The Theogony is a poem containing thoughts and descriptions of a lofty and imposing character, and for the history of the religious faith of Greece, a production of the highest importance. Less monotonous than the Theogony, if somewhat more desultory, is the poem called the "Works and Days." Indeed, so curious a treatise on the life and farming operations of the primitive Hellenes is at least as well worth the perusal as the mythology of the Attic Tragedies. Though utterjy remote from anything like sentiment or pathos, it has a genuine earnestness about it; and it derives some interest too from being the model on which Virgil composed his "Georgics."

Attempts have been made to show, that Hesiod must have lived at least a century later than Homer, and a date has been assigned to him as low as BC 735. In the opinion of Herodotus, whose authority for the assertion we know not, and who perhaps merely repeated a popular notion, he flourished about BC 850. Modern scholars in general do not think the earlier date tenable; but no doubt seems ever to have been entertained by the ancients themselves. It has been observed, that Hesiod is even generally mentioned leforc Homer, as in the passage of Herodotus quoted above. The Parian Marble (though its authority in such matters is worth little) makes Hesiod older than Homer by about thirty years. Hesiod, though regarded by the ancients as the rival and contemporary of Homer, is eclipsed by him both in the choice of a subject and the treatment of it. The Theogony is a dull poem, for it contains little more than a formal catalogue of names and pedigrees, relieved only by a few brief descriptive episodes, — in a word, it is a compendium of dogmatic theology, according to the earliest Greek notions of it, done into verse.

While Homer represents the chivalrous buoyant susceptibility of the Ionic character, Hesiod takes the more gloomy view of life; of its toils and miseries, the frauds and faithlessness of his fellow-men, the corruption of judges, the selfish unfairness even of brother to brother. It is on this ground alone that we can consent to regard the singular episodes about Prometheus and Pandora, and of the golden and other deteriorated ages, as an integral part of the original poem. They both indirectly inculcate the same doctrine, that man is born to woe and disappointment; that he has lapsed from a higher and happier estate, and has now to earn a scanty livelihood by the sweat of his brow. The ethical precepts interspersed relate principally to economic, but partly to religious and ceremonial matters.

At a time when the ancient epic poems were handed down orally, as the most precious national properties, by professional reciters called rhapsodists, — men undoubtedly, in the earlier ages, often of ltigh genius, and quite capable of appreciating and (even when they added to it) of sustaining the unity of a great epic composition, though in Xenophon's time they had become a degenerate profession, — there were likely to exist several more or less local versions or recensions of Homer and Hesiod, the collation and adaptation of which occupied the critical skill of the compilers and collectors at a time when all Greek literature was regularly committed to writing. And it was perhaps hardly avoidable but that the earliest transcribers should have sometimes so combined these different recensions as to cause occasional repetition, abruptness, and tautology. Internal evidence strongly confirms a theory highly probable in itself, and one that satisfactorily accounts for many phenomena in the present text of Hesiod, which on any other supposition would be very difficult to explain.

From the storehouses of fable Hesiod drew the materials of his Theogony. Every legend which could not be brought into agreement with Hesiod's Theogony, sank into the obscurity of mere local tradition, and lived only in the limited sphere of the inhabitants of some Arcadian districts, or the ministers of some temple, under the form of a strange and marvellous tale, which was cherished with the greater fondness because its unconformity with the received theogony gave it the charm of mystery. But if Hesiod's system had been invented by himself, it would not have met with such ready acceptance from succeeding generations.

What Herodotus means by saying that both Hesiod and Homer made a theogony for the Greeks, was perhaps nothing more than this; that their poems gave a sanction, a popularity, and an universal acceptance under a definite form to the most authentic legends then current respecting the names, affinities, and attributes of the gods and demigods. In the Homeric texts the system of polytheism is completely established, and its existence assumed throughout.

Nothing is less likely, or less justified by internal evidence, than that Hesiod was in any way indebted to Homer. The style, the imagery, the subject of each, are as different as the countries where the authors respectively resided. A difficulty certainly presents itself in the many Homeric words and phrases and even passages (as the lists of Water Nymphs and Rivers) found in Hesiod. both poets separately and independently derived the phrases and expressions which they exhibit in common, from the common source of an earlier poetry. There must indeed have been a large mass of matter current among the rhapsodists, and partaking of the nature of epic common-places, before literature had become fixed by being written down, revised and edited by more or less competent judges of the spurious and the genuine. No valid argument can be drawn from certain differences, real or supposed, between the Homeric and Hesiodic mythology, as to the relative dates of the two poets. These differences do not amount to more than what might naturally be looked for in two contemporary poets treating of religious legends indefinitely older than themselves, and varying somewhat according to local developments.

Whatever opinions may be held as to the real dates of the Homeric and the Hesiodic poems, both in their original forms and in the perhaps much altered and interpolated recensions which have come down to the present, one fact remains indisputable; they are the only extant Greek writings which have any claim even to approximate to the Epic age, properly so called. While it is not possible to be sure that the present Theogony is the very one alluded to by Herodotus, or that it forms a complete poem, or is wholly genuine, and that nothing has been lost and nothing interpolated; still there is every reason to think that at least it contains a great deal that has descended from a remote antiquity.

The Theogony is possibly a patchwork of several scraps of antiquity, — a compilation rather than an entirely original production, — perhaps adapted by a poet or rhapsodist called Hesiod, perhaps conjecturally attributed to him in the absence of any certain authorship, perhaps put together, arranged, altered, interpolated by successive rhapsodists at a later period. The pure metal of the true epic age may still exist, though it has suffered alloy in passing through many crucibles in the hands of many different workmen.

There is remarkably uniform and very authentic testimony of great antiquity in favor of the genuineness of at least the two principal Hesiodic poems even as they now exist. Both poems agree in their piecemeal character, and seem to be the production of the same sort of poet, — a man of considerable taste for collecting what was old and picturesque, but without any genius for composing from his materials a largo and uniform plan. There appears to be no trace of scepticism as to the authorship of the Theogony either among the Alexandrian grammarians, or their predecessors of the early Attic school.

Nevertheless, it may perhaps be granted, and rather as a matter of regret than as materially invalidating the claim to great antiquity which in the main the Hesiodic poems clearly possess, that considerable alterations have been introduced into them in later times. Such are, in all probability, the prefixing of a short proeme or introduction to the " Works," and of a much longer one (or rather, a combination of several) to the Theogony, and possibly, the addition of a good many verses at the ends of both poems, not to mention the occasional introduction of Homeric verses. The expansion, so to say, or amplification of many passages by a somewhat tiresome repetition, or by the addition of feeble and merely supplementary lines, and lastly, the insertion of episodes more in the descriptive style than was congenial to the Muse of Hesiod, are indications that the original work has been tampered with by the inferior genius of rhapsodists, or by the hands of literary compilers and revisers.