C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Critical and Biographical Introduction
By Hesiod (fl. Eighth Century B.C.)
“F
Hesiod represents a back current of colonial Asiatic culture, returning to the yet rude undeveloped motherland. His father had emigrated from Kymè in Asia Minor, a chief center of Trojan myth and epic, back to—
The chief creation of Hesiod is called ‘Works and Days’; i.e., farmers’ tasks, and lucky or fit days on which to do them. It is nowise like an almanac in form, however. The poem of a thousand hexameter verses is dedicated, as it were, to his ungracious brother Perses. The latter, we hear, had bribed the judges and so secured the lion’s share of the family estate. Again reduced to poverty by sloth and waste, he has appealed to the poet, who has nothing for him but caustic advice. Moreover, Hesiod takes a pessimistic view of human life. His own iron age is the worst among five successive periods, and life is hardly endurable. The only break, indeed, in the gradual decay from the golden through the silvern and brazen ages, is the interposition—between the latter and the poet’s day of iron—of the nobler heroic age; and the sieges of Thebes and Troy are expressly mentioned, to point this reminiscence of Homeric song. Zeus has never forgiven men for Prometheus’s theft of fire, and has “hidden the means of subsistence”; i.e., has said to man, “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread.” The Pandora episode, also, is brought in to explain the manifold miseries that vex mortal life.
The transitions from one branch of this wide-ranging theme to another are rather stiff and awkward. Some parts of the poem are probably lost; and where it becomes, as often, a mere string of maxims, the temptation to interpolate similar apophthegms has haunted the copyists in every age. Altogether, the poem is more interesting piecemeal than as a whole. Still, in the main, it is a genuine production of a feebly inspired, rather prosy eighth-century rustic philosopher. In fact, it is our earliest didactic sermon in verse.
The other poem usually assigned to Hesiod—viz., the ‘Theogony’—is the first connected attempt at tracing the origin of the Greek gods. It is no description of creation, much less an attempt to solve the mystery of existence. In the main we have a mere genealogy of the family sprung from Uranus and Gê (Heaven and Earth), who in turn are supplied with a sort of ancestry. Herodotus must not mislead us into thinking these strange figures are the creation of Hesiod, or whoever of his school left us the ‘Theogony.’ The poet does probably little more than to record, and in some degree to harmonize, tales already more or less generally current. Many stories of cannibalism and outrageous immorality among the gods must have come down from utterly savage forefathers. These uncanny heirlooms were never definitely discarded in pagan Greece. Some of the worst accounts of Divine wickedness were so entangled with beautiful and well-loved myths that they have been immortalized in the drama, in lyric, in works of plastic art, and cannot be ignored in any view of Greek life and thought. Philosophers, and even poets, did indeed make fearless protest against the ascription of any grievous wickedness to Deity. Yet it must be confessed that from Homer’s song downward, the gods are altogether inferior in motive and action to the truly heroic men and women, either of myth and poetry or of historic record. And this crude and ignoble popular mythology was fixed and nationalized above all by the Hesiodic ‘Theogony.’ Even so pure, devout, and original a poet as Æschylus, in the ‘Prometheus’ copies Hesiod in many details, though he is probably combating directly the elder poet’s view of Zeus’s purpose and character.
It will be evident, then, that the works of Hesiod are of extreme interest and value, not chiefly as poetry, but as an early record of man’s gropings about the roots of mystery. The moral philosopher, the student of mythology, even the historian of agriculture, may find here more inspiration than the poet.
Every historian of Greek literature gives a careful chapter to Hesiod. The literal version in the Bohn Library, Elton’s metrical renderings reprinted in the same volume, even the complete prose translation of poems and fragments by Mair (Oxford, 1908) with its scholarly notes, and Professor Paley’s annotated Greek text, are now largely displaced by Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s ‘Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica.’ This well-planned and well-packed volume of the Loeb Classical Library contains the Greek text as well as a translation, and numerous tantalizing fragments from lost Hesiodic works, recovered in Egypt during recent years, and here first conveniently accessible.