Quintillian’s 1111 judgment on Hesiod that ‘he rarely rises to great
heights... and to him is given the palm in the middle-class of speech’
is just, but is liable to give a wrong impression. Hesiod has nothing
that remotely approaches such scenes as that between Priam and
Achilles, or the pathos of Andromache’s preparations for Hector’s
return, even as he was falling before the walls of Troy; but in matters
that come within the range of ordinary experience, he rarely fails to
rise to the appropriate level. Take, for instance, the description of
the Iron Age (_Works and Days_, 182 ff.) with its catalogue of
wrongdoings and violence ever increasing until Aidos and Nemesis are
forced to leave mankind who thenceforward shall have ‘no remedy against
evil’. Such occasions, however, rarely occur and are perhaps not
characteristic of Hesiod’s genius: if we would see Hesiod at his best,
in his most natural vein, we must turn to such a passage as that which
he himself—according to the compiler of the _Contest of Hesiod and
Homer_—selected as best in all his work, ‘When the Pleiades, Atlas’
daughters, begin to rise...’ (_Works and Days_, 383 ff.). The value of
such a passage cannot be analysed: it can only be said that given such
a subject, this alone is the right method of treatment.
Hesiod’s diction is in the main Homeric, but one of his charms is the
use of quaint allusive phrases derived, perhaps, from a pre-Hesiodic
peasant poetry: thus the season when Boreas blows is the time when ‘the
Boneless One gnaws his foot by his fireless hearth in his cheerless
house’; to cut one’s nails is ‘to sever the withered from the quick
upon that which has five branches’; similarly the burglar is the
‘day-sleeper’, and the serpent is the ‘hairless one’. Very similar is
his reference to seasons through what happens or is done in that
season: ‘when the House-carrier, fleeing the Pleiades, climbs up the
plants from the earth’, is the season for harvesting; or ‘when the
artichoke flowers and the clicking grass-hopper, seated in a tree,
pours down his shrill song’, is the time for rest.
Hesiod’s charm lies in his child-like and sincere naivete, in his
unaffected interest in and picturesque view of nature and all that
happens in nature. These qualities, it is true, are those pre-eminently
of the _Works and Days_: the literary values of the _Theogony_ are of a
more technical character, skill in ordering and disposing long lists of
names, sure judgment in seasoning a monotonous subject with marvellous
incidents or episodes, and no mean imagination in depicting the awful,
as is shown in the description of Tartarus (ll. 736-745). Yet it
remains true that Hesiod’s distinctive title to a high place in Greek
literature lies in the very fact of his freedom from classic form, and
his grave, and yet child-like, outlook upon his world.