Читать книгу Studies of the Greek Poets - John Addington Symonds - Страница 9

Table of Contents

The Difference between the Homeric and the Hesiodic Spirit.—The Personality of Hesiod more Distinct than that of Homer.—What we Know about his Life.—Perses.—The Hesiodic Rhapsodes.—Theogony and Works and Days.—Didactic Poetry.—The Story of Prometheus.—Greek and Hebrew Myths of the Fall.—The Allegorical Element in the Promethean Legend.—The Titans.—The Canto of the Four Ages.—Hesiodic Ethics.—The Golden Age.—Flaxman's Illustrations.—Justice and Virtue.—Labor.—Bourgeois Tone of Hesiod.—Marriage and Women.—The Gnomic Importance of Hesiod for the Early Greeks.

Hesiod, though he belongs to the first age of Greek literature, and ranks among the earliest of Hellenic poets, marks the transition from the heroic period to that of the despots, when ethical inquiry began in Greece. Like Homer, Hesiod is inspired by the Muses: alone, upon Mount Helicon, he received from them the gift of inspiration. But the message which he communicates to men does not concern the deeds of demigods and warriors. It offers no material for tragedies upon the theme of

Thebes or Pelops' line,

Or the tale of Troy divine.

On the contrary, Hesiod introduces us to the domestic life of shepherds, husbandmen, and merchants. Homely precepts for the conduct of affairs and proverbs on the utility of virtue replace the glittering pictures of human passions and heroic strife which the Homeric poems present. A new element is introduced into literature, the element of man reflecting on himself, questioning the divine laws under which he is obliged to live, and determining the balance of good and evil which the days of youth and age bring with them in his earthly course. The individual is now occupied with his own cares and sorrows and brief joys. Living in the present, and perforce accommodating his imagination to the prose of human existence, he has forgotten to dream any longer of the past, or to reconstruct in fancy the poetic charm of visionary heroism. It was just this difference between Homer and Hesiod which led the aristocratic Greeks of a later age to despise the poet of Ascra. Cleomenes, the king of Sparta, chief of that proud military oligarchy which had controlled the destinies of decaying Hellas, is reported by Plutarch to have said that, while Homer was the bard of warriors and noble men, Hesiod was the singer of the Helots. In this saying the contempt of the martial class for the peaceable workers of the world is forcibly expressed. It is an epigram which endears Hesiod to democratic critics of the modern age. They can trace in its brief utterance the contempt which has been felt in all periods—especially among the historic Greeks, who regarded labor as ignoble, and among the feudal races, with whom martial prowess was the main-stay of society—for the unrecorded and unhonored earners of the bread whereby the brilliant and the well-born live.

Hesiod, therefore, may be taken as the type and first expression of a spirit in Greek literature alien from that which Homer represents. The wrath and love of Achilles, the charm of Helen and the constancy of Penelope, the councils of the gods, the pathos of the death of Hector, the sorrows of King Priam and the labors of Odysseus, are exchanged for dim and doleful ponderings upon the destiny of man, for the shadowy mythus of Prometheus and the vision of the ages ever growing worse as they advance in time. All the rich and manifold arras-work of suffering and action which the Odyssey and the Iliad display yields to such sombre meditation as a sad soul in the childhood of the world may pour forth, brooding on its own wrongs and on the woes of men around. The climax of the whole, after the justice of God has been querulously arraigned, and the violence of princes has been appealed against with pitiful vain iteration, is a series of practical rules for daily conduct, and a calendar of simple ethics.

Very little is known about Hesiod himself; nor can the date at which the poems ascribed to him were composed be fixed with any certainty. Something of the same semi-mythical obscurity which surrounds Homer envelops Hesiod. Just as Homer was the eponymous hero of the school of epic poets in Asia Minor and the islands, so Hesiod may be regarded as the titular president of a rival school of poets localized near Mount Helicon in Bœotia. That is to say, it is probable that the Hesiodic, like the Homeric, poems did not emanate from their supposed author as we read them now; but we may assume that they underwent changes and received additions from followers who imbibed his spirit and attempted to preserve his style. And, further, the poems ascribed to Hesiod became, as years went by, a receptacle for gnomic verses dear to the Greeks. Like the elegies of Theognis, the ethical hexameters of Hesiod were, practically, an anthology of anonymous compositions. Still Hesiod has a more distinct historic personality than Homer. In the first place, the majority of ancient critics regarded him as later in date and more removed from the heroic age. Then again, he speaks in his own person, recording many details of his life, and mentioning his father and his brother. Homer remains forever lost, like Shakespeare, in the creatures of his own imagination. Instead of the man Homer, we have the Achilles and Odysseus whom he made immortal. Hesiod tells us much about himself. A vein of personal reflection, a certain tone of peevish melancholy, peculiar to the individual, runs through his poems. He is far less the mouthpiece of the heavenly Muse than a man like ourselves, touching his lyre at times with a divine grace, and then again sweeping the chords with a fretfulness that draws some jarring notes.

We learn from the hexameters of Hesiod that he was born at Ascra in Bœotia (Works and Days, line 640). His father was an emigrant from Æolian Kumé, whence he came to Ascra in search of better fortune, "forsaking not plenty nor yet wealth and happiness, but evil poverty which Zeus gives to men: near Helicon he dwelt in a sorry village, Ascra, bad in winter, rigorous in summer heat, at no time genial." From the exordium of the Theogony (line 23) it appears that Hesiod kept sheep upon the slopes of Helicon; for it was there that the Muse descended to visit him, and, after rebuking the shepherds for their idleness and grossness, gave him her sacred laurel-branch and taught him song. On this spot, as he tells us in the Works and Days (line 656), he offered the first prize of victory which he obtained at Chalkis. It would seem clear from these passages that poetry had been recognized as an inspiration, cultivated as an art, and encouraged by public contests long before the date of Hesiod.

Husbandry was despised in Bœotia, and the pastoral poet led a monotonous and depressing life. The great event which changed its even tenor was a lawsuit between himself and his brother Perses concerning the division of their inheritance.³⁶ Perses, who was an idle fellow, after spending his own patrimony, tried to get that of Hesiod into his hands, and took his cause before judges whom he bribed. Hesiod was forced to relinquish his property, whereupon he retired from Ascra to Orchomenos. At Orchomenos he probably passed the remainder of his days. This incident explains why Hesiod dwelt so much upon the subject of justice in his poem of the Works and Days, addressed to Perses. Μέγα νήπιε Πέρση he always calls this brother, as though, while heaping the coals of good counsel upon his head, he wished to humble his oppressor by the parade of moral and intellectual superiority. Some of Hesiod's finest passages, his most intense and passionate utterances, are wrung from him by the injustice he had suffered; so true is the famous saying that poets

Learn in suffering what they teach in song.

One parable will for the moment serve as a specimen of the poetry which the wrong-dealing of Perses drew from him. "Thus spake the hawk to the nightingale of changeful throat, as he bore her far aloft among the clouds, the prey of his talons: she, poor wretch, wailed piteously in the grip of his crooked claws; but he insultingly addressed her: 'Wretch, why criest thou? Thou art now the prey of one that is the stronger; and thou shalt go whither I choose to take thee, song-bird as thou art. Yea, if I see fit, I will make my supper of thee, or else let thee go. A fool is he who kicks against his betters: of victory is he robbed, and suffers injury as well as insult.'" Hesiod himself is, of course, meant by the nightingale, and the hawk stands for violence triumphing over justice.

In verse and dialect the Hesiodic poems are not dissimilar from the Homeric, which, supposing their date to have been later, proves that the Iliad had determined the style and standard of epic composition, or, supposing a contemporary origin, would show that the Greeks of the so-called heroic age had agreed upon a common literary language. We may refer the Theogony and the Works and Days, after the deduction of numerous interpolations, to Hesiod, but only in the same sense and with the same reservation as we assign the Iliad and the Odyssey to Homer.³⁷ Unlike the heroic epos, they were recited, not to the accompaniment of the cithara, but by the poet standing with a laurel staff, called ῥάβδος or σκῆπτρον, in his hand. Hesiod, at the opening of the Theogony, tells us how he had received a staff of this kind from the Muse upon Mount Helicon. Either, then, the laurel ῥαβδος had already been recognized in that part of Greece as the symbol of the poet's office, or else, from the respect which the followers of Hesiod paid to the details of his poem, they adopted it as their badge.

Of the two poems ascribed to Hesiod, the Theogony and the Works and Days, the former—though its genuineness as a Hesiodic production seems to have been disputed from a very early period—was, perhaps, on the whole, of greater value than the latter to the Greeks. It contained an authorized version of the genealogy of their gods and heroes, an inspired dictionary of mythology, from which to deviate was hazardous. Just as families in England try to prove their Norman descent by an appeal to the Roll of Battle Abbey, so the canon of the Theogony decided the claims of god or demi-god to rank among celestials. In this sense Herodotus should be interpreted when he says that Hesiod joined with Homer in making their Theogonia for the Greeks. But though this poem had thus a unique value for the ancients, it is hardly so interesting in the light of modern criticism as the Works and Days. The Works and Days, while for all practical purposes we may regard it as contemporaneous with the Iliad, marks the transition from the heroic epic to the moral poetry of the succeeding age, and forms the basis of direct ethical philosophy in Hellas. Hesiod is thus not only the mouthpiece of obscure hand-workers in the earliest centuries of Greek history, the poet of their daily labors, sufferings, and wrongs, the singer of their doubts and infantine reflections on the world in which they had to toil; he is also the immediate parent of gnomic verse, and the ancestor of those deep thinkers who speculated in the Attic age upon the mysteries of human life.

The first ten verses of the Works and Days are spurious—borrowed, probably, from some Orphic hymn to Zeus, and recognized as not the work of Hesiod by critics as ancient as Pausanias. The poem begins with these words: "Not, as I thought, is there only one kind of strife; but on the earth there are two, the one praiseworthy, the other to be blamed." It has been conjectured that Hesiod is referring to that passage of the Theogony³⁸ in which Eris, daughter of Night, is said to have had no sister. We are, therefore, justified in assuming that much of his mythology is consciously etymological; and this should be borne in mind while dealing with the legend of Prometheus. The strife whereof he speaks in his exordium is what we should now call competition. It rouses the idle man to labor; it stirs up envy in the heart of the poor man, making him eager to possess the advantages of wealth; it sets neighbor against neighbor, craftsman against craftsman, in commendable emulation. Very different, says the poet, is this sort of strife from that which sways the law-courts; and at this point he begins to address his brother Perses, who had litigiously deprived him of his heritage. The form of didactic poetry, as it has since been practised by the followers of Hesiod, was fixed by the appeal to Perses. Empedocles, it will be remembered, addressed his poem on Nature to the physician Pausanias; Lucretius invoked the attention of Memmius, and Virgil that of Mæcenas; the gnomes of Theognis were uttered to the Megarian Cyrnus; Poliziano dedicated his Silva to Lorenzo de' Medici, Vida his Poetics to the Dauphin, Fracastorio his medical poem to Bembo, and Pope the Essay on Man to Bolingbroke. After this preface on competition as the inducement to labor, and on strife as the basis of injustice, the poet proceeds to the mythus of Prometheus, which is so artificially introduced as to justify the opinion that it may be an interpolation by some later craftsman of the Hesiodic school. Work, he says, is necessary for men, because Zeus has concealed and hidden far away our means of livelihood; so that we are forced to toil and suffer in the search for sustenance. This grudge Zeus owed mankind because of the sin of Prometheus. In the Works and Days the account given of the trick played upon Zeus is brief; Hesiod only says, "seeing that Prometheus of crooked counsel deceived him." We may, however, supplement the story from the Theogony.³⁹ In old days the human race had fire, and offered burnt sacrifice to heaven; but Prometheus by his craft deceived the gods of their just portion of the victims, making Zeus take the bones and fat for his share. Whereupon Zeus deprived men of the use of fire. Prometheus then stole fire from heaven and gave it back to men. "Then," says Hesiod, "was cloud-gathering Zeus full wroth of heart, and he devised a great woe for all mankind." He determined to punish the whole race by giving them Pandora. He bade Hephæstus mix earth and water, and infuse into the plastic form a human voice and human powers, and liken it in all points to a heavenly goddess. Athene was told to teach the woman, thus made, household work and skill in weaving. Aphrodite poured upon her head the charm of beauty, with terrible desire, and flesh-consuming thoughts of love. But Zeus commanded Hermes to give to her the mind of a dog and wily temper. After this fashion was the making of Pandora. And when she had been shaped, Athene girded and adorned her; the Graces and divine Persuasion hung golden chains about her flesh, and the Hours crowned her with spring blossoms. Zeus called her Pandora, because each dweller on Olympus had bestowed on her a gift. Then Pandora was sent under the charge of Hermes to Epimetheus, who remembered not his brother's words, how he had said: "Receive no gift from Zeus, but send it back again, lest evil should befall the race of men." But as soon as Epimetheus had housed her he recognized his error. Before this time men had lived upon the earth apart from evils, apart from painful toil, and weariful diseases which bring death on mortals. The woman with her hands lifted the lid of the great jar where all these bad things were shut up, and let them loose into the air. Hope alone remained behind—for the lot of humanity is hopeless; but a hundred thousand woes abode at large to plague the race of men. Earth is full of them; the sea is full; and sickness roams abroad by night and day, where it listeth, bearing ills to mortals in silence, for Zeus in his deep craft took away its voice that men might have no warning. Thus not in any way is it possible to avoid the will of God.

Such is the mythus of the Fall, as imagined by the early Greeks. Man in rebellion against heaven, pitted in his weakness at a game of mutual deception against almighty force, is beaten and is punished. Woman, the instrument of his chastisement, is thrust upon him by offended and malignant deity; the folly of man receives her, and repents too late. Both his wisdom and his foolishness conspire to man's undoing—wisdom which he cannot use aright, and foolishness which makes him fall into the trap prepared for him. We are irresistibly led to compare this legend with the Hebrew tradition of the Fall. In both there is an act of transgression on the part of man. Woman in both brings woe into the world. That is to say, the conscience of the Greeks and Jews, intent on solving the mystery of pain and death, convicted them alike of sin; while the social prejudices of both races made them throw the blame upon the weaker but more fascinating sex, by whom they felt their sterner nature softened and their passions quickened to work foolishness. So far the two myths have strong points of agreement. But in that of the Greeks there is no Manichæism. The sin of Prometheus is not, like the sin of Adam, the error of weak human beings tempted by the power of evil to transgress the law of good. It is rather a knavish trick played off upon the sire of gods and men by a wily gamester; and herein it seems to symbolize that tendency to overreach which formed a marked characteristic of the Hellenes in all ages. The Greek of Hesiod's time conceived of the relations between man and god as involving mutual mistrust and guile; his ideal of intellectual superiority, both in Prometheus and in Zeus, implied capacity for getting the upper hand by craft. Again, the Greek god takes a diabolical revenge, punishing the whole human race, with laughter on his lips and self-congratulation for superior cunning in his heart. We lack the solemn moment when God calls Adam at the close of day, and tells him of the curse, but also promises a Saviour. The legend of Prometheus has, for its part also, the prophecy of a redeemer; but the redeemer of men from the anger of God does not proceed from the mercy of the deity himself, who has been wronged, but from the iron will of Fate, who stands above both god and man, and from the invincible fortitude of the soul which first had sinned, now stiffening itself against the might of Zeus, refusing his promises, rejecting his offers of reconciliation, biding in pain and patience till Herakles appears and cuts the Gordian knot. This is the spectacle presented by Æschylus in his Prometheus Bound. To deny its grandeur would be ridiculous; to contend that it offers some features of sublimity superior to anything contained in the Hebrew legend would be no difficult task. In the person of Prometheus, chained on Caucasus, pierced by fiery arrows in the noonday and by frosty arrows in the night, humanity wavers not, but endures with scorn and patience and stoical acceptance. Unfortunately the outlines of this great tragic allegory have been blurred by time and travestied by feeble copyists. What we know about the tale of Prometheus is but a faint echo of the mythus apprehended by the Greeks anterior to Hesiod, and handled afterwards by Æschylus. Enough, however, remains to make it certain that it was the creation of a race profoundly convinced of present injustice in the divine government of the world. If the soul of man is raised by the attribution of stern heroism, God is lowered to the infamy of a tyrant. But neither is the Hebrew legend on its side theologically flawless. Greek and Jew fail alike to offer a satisfactory solution of the origin of evil. While in the Greek mythus Zeus plays with mankind like a cat with a mouse, the Hebrew story does not explain the justice of that omnipotent Being who created man with capacity for error, and exposed him to temptation. The true critique of the second and third chapters of Genesis has been admirably expressed by Omar Khayyam in the following stanzas:

O Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin

Beset the road I was to wander in,

Thou wilt not with predestination round

Enmesh me, and impute my fall to sin?

O Thou, who man of baser earth didst make,

And who with Eden didst devise the snake,

For all the sin wherewith the face of man

Is blackened, man's forgiveness give—and take!

Both tales are but crude and early attempts to set forth the primitive mystery of conscience, and to account for the prevalence of pain and death. The æsthetic superiority of the Hebrew conception lies in its idealization of the deity at all costs. God is at least grand and consistent, justified by his own august counsels; and at the very moment of punishing his creatures, he promises deliverance through their own seed. Moreover, a vast antagonistic agency of evil is brought into the field to account for the fall of man; and we are not precluded from even extending our compassion to the deity, who has been thwarted in his schemes for good.

Before quitting the discussion of this ancient tale of human suffering and sin, it would be well to notice that Hesiod identifies Prometheus with the human race. His hero is the son of the Titan Iapetus by Clymene, daughter of the Titan Oceanus; and his brethren are Atlas, Menoitios, and Epimetheus. These names are significant. Just as Prometheus signifies the forecasting reason of humanity,⁴⁰ so Epimetheus indicates the overhasty judgment foredoomed to be wise too late. These are intellectual qualities. Atlas, in like manner, typifies the endurance of man, who bears all to the very end, and holds upon his back the bulk of heaven. In Menoitios is shadowed forth the insolence and rebellious spirit for which a penalty of pain and death is meted. These, then, are moral qualities. In the children of Iapetus and Clymene we consequently trace the first rude attempt at psychological analysis. The scientific import of the mythus was never wholly forgotten by the Greeks. Pindar calls Prophasis, or excuse, the daughter of Epimetheus, or back-thought as opposed to fore-thought. Plato makes the folly of Epimetheus to have consisted in his giving away the natural powers of self-preservation to the beasts; whereupon Prometheus was driven to supplement with fire the unprotected impotence of man. Lucian, again, says of Epimetheus that repentance is his business; while Synesius adds that he provides not for the future, but deplores the past. The Titans, it should further be remarked, are demiurgic powers—elemental forces of air, fire, earth, water—conditions of existence implied by space and time—distributors of darkness and of light—parents, lastly, of the human race. Though some later Greek authors identified Prometheus with the Titans, and made him the benefactor of humanity, this was not the conception of Hesiod. Prometheus is stated, both in the Theogony and the Works and Days, to have been the son of Titans, the protagonist of men, who strove in vain to cope with Zeus. Zeus himself belongs in like manner to a secondary order of existences. Begotten by the Titan Kronos, he seems to typify the reason as distinguished from the brute powers of the universe, mind emergent from matter, and overcoming it by contest. Prometheus is connected, by his parentage, with the old material order of the world; but he represents that portion of it which is human, and which, qua human, has affinity to Zeus. Herein we trace the mystery of the divine in man, though man has been placed in antagonism to the deity. The same notion is further symbolized by the theft of fire, and by the fiction of Prometheus breathing a particle of the divine spirit into the clay figures whereof he made men. In the decaying age of Greek mythology this aspect of the legend absorbed attention to the exclusion of the elder Hesiodic romance, as students of Horace will remember, and as appears abundantly from Græco-Roman bass-reliefs. To reconcile man and Zeus, cognate in their origin, yet hostile owing to their ancient feud, it was needful that a deliverer, Herakles, should be born of god and woman, of Zeus and Alcmene, who sets free the elementary principle of humanity typified in Prometheus, and for the first time establishes a harmony between the children of earth and the dwellers on Olympus. So far I have remained within the limits of the Hesiodic legend, only hinting at such divergences as were adopted by the later handlers of the tale. The new aspect given to the whole myth by Æschylus deserves separate consideration in connection with the tragedy of Prometheus. It is to be regretted that we only possess so important a relique of Greek religious speculation in fragments; and these fragments are so tantalizingly incomplete that it is impossible to say exactly how much may be the débris of original tradition, or where the free fancy of later poets has been remoulding and recasting the material of the antique myth to suit more modern allegory.

The tale of Prometheus may be called the first canto of the Works and Days. The second consists of the vision of the four ages of man. Hesiod, in common with all early poets, imagined a state of primeval bliss, which he called the Age of Gold. Then Kronos reigned upon the earth, and men lived without care or pain or old age. Their death was like the coming on of sleep, and the soil bore them fruits untilled. When this race came to an end, Zeus made them genii of good-will, haunting the world and protecting mortals. Theirs it is to watch the decrees of justice, and to mark wrong-doing, wrapped around with mist, going up and down upon the earth, the givers of wealth; such is the royal honor which is theirs. The next age he calls the Silver, for it was inferior to the first; and Zeus speedily swept it away, seeing that the men of this generation waxed insolent, and paid no honor to the gods. The third age is the Brazen. A terrible and mighty brood of men possessed the land, who delighted in naught but violence and warfare. They first ate flesh. Their houses and their armor and their mattocks were of brass. In strife they slew themselves, and perished without a name. After them came the heroes of romance, whom Zeus made most just and worthy. They fell fighting before seven-gated Thebes and Troy; but after death Father Zeus transferred them to the utmost limits of the world, where they live without care in islands of the blest, by ocean waves, blest heroes, for whom thrice yearly the soil bears blooming fruitage honey-sweet. Then cries Hesiod, and the cry is wrenched from him with agony, Would that I had never been born in the fifth generation of men, but rather that I had died before or had lived afterwards; for now the age is of iron! On the face of the world there is naught but violence and wrong; division is set between father and son, brother and brother, friend and friend; there is no fear of God, no sense of justice, no fidelity, no truth; the better man is subject to the worse, and jealousy corrupts the world. Soon, very soon, will wing their way to heaven again—leaving the earth with her broad ways, robed in white raiment, joining the immortal choir, deserting men—both modest shame and righteous indignation. But dismal woes will stay and harbor here, and against evil there shall be no aid. This ends the second canto of the Works and Days, and brings us down to the two hundredth line of the poem. The remainder consists for the most part of precepts adapted to the doleful state in which mortals of the present have to suffer.

What may be called the third canto is occupied with justice, the advantages of which, from a purely utilitarian point of view, as well as æsthetically conceived, are urged in verse. It begins with the apologue of the hawk and nightingale already quoted. Then the condition of a city where justice is honored, where the people multiply in peace, and there is fulness and prosperity, where pestilence and calamity keep far away, is contrasted with the plagues, wars, famines, wasting away of population, and perpetual discomforts that beset the unjust nation. For the innocent and righteous folk, says the poet, the earth bears plenty, and in the mountains the oak-tree at the top yields acorns, and in the middle bees, and the woolly sheep are weighed down with their fleeces. The women give birth to children like their fathers. With blessings do men always flourish, nor need they tempt the sea in ships, but earth abundantly supplies their wants.

It is worth while to pause for a moment and contemplate the pastoral ideal of perfect happiness and pure simplicity which, first set forth by Hesiod in these passages, found afterwards an echo in Plato, in Empedocles, in Lucretius, in Virgil, in Poliziano, and in Tasso; all of whom have lingered lovingly upon the bell' età dell' oro. The Hesiodic conception of felicity is neither stirring nor heroic. Like the early Christian notion of heaven, expressed by the pathetic iteration of in pace on the sepulchral tablets of the catacombs, it owes its beauty to a sense of contrast between tranquillity imagined and woe and warfare actually experienced. We comprehend why the Spartan king called Hesiod the poet of the Helots, when, in the age that idealized Achilles and Odysseus, the all-daring, all-affronting heroes of a radiant romance, we find that his sole aspiration was to live in peace, decorously fulfilling social duties, and growing old in the routine of moderate labor. It is a commonplace, and what the French would call a bourgeois, aspiration. Just this lot in life Achilles rejected with disdain, in exchange for the dazzling prospect of victory and death, that fascinated the noblest of the Greeks, and produced their Alexander. Still we must remember that Hesiod was not, like Homer, singing in the halls of fiery and high-fed chieftains, who stood above the laws. His plaintive note was uttered to the watchers of the seasons and the tillers of the soil, whose very livelihood depended on the will and pleasure of δωροφάγοι βασιλεῖς. In the semi-barbarous state of society which Homer and Hesiod represent from different points of view, when violence prevails, and when life and property alike are insecure, justice may well be selected as the prime of virtues, and peace be idealized as heaven on earth. In one sense, as the Greek philosophers argued, justice does include all the excellences of a social being. The man who is perfectly just will be unimpeachable in all his conduct; and the simpler the state of society, the more outrageous the wrongs inflicted by one man on another, the more apparent will this be.

Putting aside, however, for further consideration, the ethical aspect of Hesiod's ideal, we find in it an exquisite and permanently attractive æsthetic beauty. Compared with the fierce heroism of Achilles, the calm happiness of Hesiod's pastoral folk soothes our fancy, like the rising of the moon in twilight above harvest sheaves at the end of a long intolerable day. Therefore great poets and artists, through all the resonant and gorgeous ages of the world, have turned their eyes with sympathy and yearning to these lines; and the best that either Virgil or Poliziano could achieve was to catch an echo of Hesiod's melody, to reproduce a portion of his charm. Perhaps the most complete homage to the poetry of Hesiod on this point has been rendered by Flaxman. Nature, so prodigal to the English race in men of genius untutored, singular, and solitary, has given us but few seers who, in the quality of prolific invention, can be compared with Flaxman. For pure conceptive faculty, controlled by unerring sense of beauty, we have to think of Pheidias or Raphael before we find his equal. His powers were often employed on uncongenial subjects; nor had he, perhaps, a true notion of the limitations of his art, else he would not have attempted to give sculpturesque form, even in outline, to many scenes from the Divine Comedy. The conditions, again, of modern life were adverse to his working out his thought in marble, and precluded him from gaining a complete mastery over the material of sculpture. It may also be conceded that, to a large extent, his imagination, like a parasite flower, was obliged to bloom upon the branches of Greek art. What Flaxman would have been without the bass-reliefs, the vases, and the hand-mirrors of the ancients, it is difficult to conceive. Herein, however, he did no more than obey the law which has constrained the greatest modern minds by indissoluble bondage to the service of the Greek spirit. Allowing for all this, the fact remains that within a certain circle, the radius of which exceeds the farthest reach of many far more frequently be-lauded artists, Flaxman was supreme. Whatever could be expressed according to the laws of bass-relief, embossed in metal, or hewn out of stone, or indicated in pure outline, he conveyed with a truth to nature, a grace of feeling, and an originality of conception absolutely incomparable. Moreover, in this kind his genius was inexhaustible. Nowhere are the fruits of his creative skill so charming as in the illustrations of the Works and Days. The ninth plate, in which the Age of Gold is symbolized by a mother stretching out her infant to receive his father's kiss, might be selected as a perfect idyl, conveyed within the strictest and severest bounds of sculptural relief. The man and his girl-wife are beautiful and young. Age, we feel, will never touch them, by whitening her forehead or spoiling his smooth chin with hair. Both are naked, seated on the ground; their outstretched arms enfold, as in a living cradle, the robust and laughing boy. On one side shoots a heavy sheaf of barley; on the other stands an altar, smoking with bloodless offerings to heaven; above, the strong vine hangs its clusters and its wealth of lusty leaves. More elaborate, but scarcely more beautiful—like a double rose beside a wilding blossom from the hedge of June—is the seventeenth plate, which sets forth the felicity of god-fearing folk who honor justice. These, too, are seated on the ground, young men and girls, with comely children, pledges of their joy. One child is suckled at her mother's breast; another lies folded in his father's arms; a girl and boy are kissing on their parents' knees; while a beardless youth pipes ditties on the double reed. Above the group vine-branches flourish, and the veiled Hours, givers of all goodly things, weave choric dance with song, scattering from their immortal fingers flowers upon the men beneath. In order to comprehend the purity of Flaxman's inspiration, the deep and inborn sympathy that made him in this nineteenth century a Greek, we ought to compare these illustrations with the picture of the Golden Age by Ingres. For perfection of scientific drawing from the nude, this masterpiece of the great French painter has never been excelled. It is a treasure-house of varied attitude and rhythmically studied line. Yet the whole resembles a theatrical tableau vivant, which an enlightened choreograph, in combination with an enterprising manager, might design to represent the Garden of Eden on a grand scale. The power displayed by Flaxman is of a very different order. There is no effort, no mise en scène, no parade of science, no suggestion of voluptuousness. His outlines are as simple and as pure as Hesiod's verse. We feel that, whereas Ingres is using the old vision as a schema for the exhibition of his skill, Flaxman has felt its poetry and given form to its imagination. This is not the occasion to linger over these illustrations; yet, before closing the volume that contains them, I cannot forbear from turning a page, and pointing to the pictures of the Pleiads. Seven beautiful interwoven female shapes are rising, in the one plate, like a wreath of light or vapor moulded into human form, above the reapers; in the other are descending, with equal grace of now inverted movement, over the ploughman at his toil. By no other artist's hand have the constellations elsewhere been converted, with so much feeling for their form, into the melodies of rhythmically moving human shapes. Flaxman's outlines of the Pleiads might be described as a new celestial imagery, a hitherto unapprehended astronomical mythology.

Continuing what I have called the third canto of the Works and Days, Hesiod addresses himself in the next place to the Basileis, or judges of the people: "Kings in judgment, do ye also ponder this divine justice; for the immortals, dwelling near and among men, behold who waste their fellows by wrong judgment, scorning the wrath of God. Verily, upon earth are thrice ten thousand immortals of the host of Zeus, guardians of mortal man. They watch both justice and injustice, robed in mist, roaming abroad upon the earth." Again he reminds them that Justice, virgin child of Zeus, is ever ready with ear open to observe the injury to right and fair dealing done against her honor. She complains of the wrongful judge; but it is the people who suffer for his sin. Therefore let the princes so greedy of bribes take heed, forego their crooked sentences, and bear in mind that the man who works evil for another, works it for himself, that bad intentions harm those who have conceived them, and that Zeus sees all and knows all. This period is concluded with a bitterly ironical repudiation of the poet's own precepts: May neither I nor my son be just; for now the wrongful man has by far the best of it upon the earth! It will be observed that Zeus throughout this tirade on justice is a different being from the Zeus in the mythus of Prometheus. The dramatic personage of the legend, whose guile inflicts so much misery on men, has been supplanted by a moral idea personified. It is not that a new mythology has been superinduced upon the old one, or that we are now in the track of esoteric religious teaching: the poet is only expressing his internal certainty that though fraud and violence prevail on earth, yet somewhere in the eternal and ideal world justice still abides. It is not a little singular, considering his querulous and hopeless tone in other passages, that Hesiod should here assert the cognizance which Zeus takes of unfair dealing, and the continued action of protective and retributive dæmons. We could scarcely find stronger faith in the superiority of justice among the moral writings of the Jews. Furthermore, Hesiod reminds Perses that justice is human, violence bestial, and that in the long run honesty will be found to be the best policy. Then follows the sublimest passage of the whole poem—one of great celebrity among the Greeks, who quoted it, and worked it up in poems, parables, and essays: "Behold, thou mayest choose badness easily, even in heaps; for the path is plain, and she dwells very near. But before excellence the immortal gods have placed toil and labor: afar and steep is the road that leads to her, and rough it is at first; but when you reach the height, then truly is it easy, though so hard before."⁴¹

The subject of Justice being now exhausted, Hesiod passes, in the fourth canto of the Works and Days, to the eulogy of labor, regarded as the source of all good. The unheroic nature of his life-philosophy is very apparent in this section. He thinks and speaks like a peasant, whose one idea it is to add pence to pence, and to cut a good figure in his parish. A man must work in order to avoid hunger and grow rich: gods and men hate the idle, who are like drones in the hive: if you work, you will get flocks and herds, and folk will envy you: to grow rich from dishonest gains brings no profit, for they are unlucky: the great aim for a good man is to live a respectable life, to work soberly, to fulfil righteousness, to be punctual in paying homage to the gods—to go to church, in fact—with this end in view, that he may buy the estates of his neighbor, instead of having to sell his own. Such is the bathos of Hesiod's ethical ideal: Do right and abstain from wrong, in order that you may be richer than the tenant of the adjacent farm. Many other precepts of like tenor might be quoted: Call your friend to your banquet, and leave your enemy alone: invite him most who lives nearest, for he will be most useful in time of need: love him who loves you, and cleave to him who cleaves to you: give to him who gives, and give not to him who gives not, for to a giver gifts are given, but to him who gives not no man hath given. Of such sort are the Hesiodic rules of conduct. They reveal the spirit of a prudent clown, the practical and calculating selfishness which the doleful conditions of the early age of Hellenic civilization intensified. The social life of great political centres and the patriotism of the Persian war helped at a later period to raise the Greeks above these low and sordid aims in life. It was only in a century when justice could be bought and penury meant starving, unheeded or derided, by the roadside, that a poet of Hesiod's temper could write,⁴² Money is a man's soul—

χρήματα γὰρ ψυχὴ πέλεται δείλοισι βρότοισι.

In criticising the Solonian reforms at Athens, we should never forget the dismal picture of Hellenic misery revealed to us by Hesiod.

Thus ends the first part of the Works and Days. The second half of the poem consists of rules for husbandry. Hesiod goes through the seasons of the year, detailing the operations of the several months, and adorning his homely subject with sober but graceful poetry. It is an elegant farmer's calendar, upon which Virgil founded his Georgics, translating into Augustan Latin the rude phrases of the bard of Ascra, and turning all he touched to gold. Scattered among precepts relating to the proper seasons and successions of agricultural labor are descriptive passages and moral reflections. One picture of winter is so long and elaborate as to justify the notion that it is a separate interpolated poem. The episode upon procrastination (line 408) and the rules for the choice of a wife (line 693) might be selected as offering special topics for comment. The latter passage deserves particular attention; since, if the condition of the working-man was wretched in this early age of Greece, far more miserable, may we argue, was that of his helpmate. A man, according to Hesiod, ought to be about thirty when he marries, and his wife about nineteen. He should be very careful in choosing her, to insure that she will not bring him into contempt among his neighbors; and he must remember that if a good wife be a prize, it is not possible to get a worse plague than a bad one. What his general notion about women was, we gather from the long invective against the female sex in the Theogony.⁴³ Pandora was the greatest curse imaginable to the human race, for from her sprang women; and now, if a man refrains from marriage, he must endure a wretched old age, and leave his money to indifferent kindred; or if he marries and gets a good wife, curses and blessings are mingled in his lot; if his wife be of the bad sort, his whole life is ruined. So utterly impossible is it to avoid the misery devised for the human race by Zeus.

The whole argument of Hesiod in this passage, taken in connection with his few lines on the choice of a wife in the Works and Days, and with his grim silence upon the subject of women as the companions of men, proves that he regarded them as a necessary deduction from the happiness of life—the rift within the lute that spoils its music—the plague invented by the malice of an all-wise god in vengeance for a man's deceit. This appreciation of women is substantially consistent with the curious poem by Simonides of Amorgos; with the treatment of the female sex at Athens; with the opinion of Pindar and Plato that to be a woman-lover as compared with a boy-lover was sensual and vile; with the disdainful silence of Thucydides; with the caricatures of society presented by the comic poets; with the famous epigram of Pericles; with the portrait of Xanthippe; and with the remarkable description of female habits in Lucian's Amores. Thus, running through the whole literature of the Greeks, we can trace a vein of contempt for women, which may fairly be indicated as the greatest social blot upon their brilliant but imperfect civilization. Exceptions can, of course, be found. In the age of the despots women rose into far more importance than they afterwards enjoyed in democratic Athens. At Sparta their right to engross property (severely criticised by Aristotle) gave them a social status which they had in no other Greek state. At Lesbos, during the brief blooming period of Æolian culture, in freedom of action and in mental training they were at least the equals of the male sex. The fact, however, remains that in Athens, the real centre of Hellenic life, women occupied a distinctly inferior rank. It is significant that in the Lives of Plutarch, whereas we read of many noble Lacedæmonian ladies, comparatively little account is taken of the wives or mothers of Athenian worthies.

Some scattered proverbs about the conduct of the tongue and the choice of friends, followed by an enumeration of lucky and unlucky days, and by a list of truly rustic rules of personal behavior, conclude the poem of the Works and Days. How far these saws and maxims belong to the original work of Hesiod it is quite impossible to say. The book became popular in education, and consequently suffered, like the gnomes of Theognis and Phocylides, from frequent interpolations at a later period. As it stands, the whole is chiefly valuable for the concrete picture which it offers of early peasant life in Hellas. As the epics of Homer present us with the ideal towards which the princes and great nobles raised their souls amid the plenty and the splendor of their palaces, so in the lines of Hesiod we learn how the Thetes, whom Achilles envied in Elysium, toiled and suffered in their struggle for their only source of comfort, gold.

³⁶ Works and Days, 219, 261, 637.

³⁷ There are probably few scholars who would now venture to maintain confidently that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by one and the same poet. The name Homer must be used like the x of algebra for an unknown power.

³⁸ Line 225.

³⁹ Line 535.

⁴⁰ That Prometheus was Pramanthas, the fire-lighting stick, has been ascertained by modern philology, but was not known by Hesiod.

⁴¹ Works and Days, 286.

⁴² Works and Days, 686. It must here again be repeated that though it is convenient to talk of Hesiod as a poet and a person, the miscellaneous ethical precepts of the Works and Days are derived from a variety of sources.

⁴³ Lines 587-612.