_HESIOD._
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 Boeotia. 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
Boeotia (_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 Boeotia, 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. #Mega
nêpie Persê# 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 #rhabdos# or #skêptron#, 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
#rhabdos# 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 _Theogony_[38] 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 #dôrophagoi basileis#. 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--
#chrêmata gar psychê peletai deiloisi brotoisi.#
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[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.