The Remains of Hesiod

Dissertation on the Life and Æra of Hesiod, His Poems, and Mythology

Section I — On the Life of Hesiod

It is remarked by Velleius Paterculus (Hist. lib. i.) that “Hesiod had avoided the negligence into which Homer fell, by attesting both his country and his parents: but that of his country he had made most reproachful mention; on account of the fine which she had imposed on him.” There are sufficient coincidences in the poems of Hesiod, now extant, to explain the grounds of this assertion of Paterculus; but the statement is loose and incorrect.

As to the mention of his country, if by country we are to suppose the place of his birth, it can only be understood by implication, and that not with certainty. Hesiod indeed relates that his father migrated from Cuma in Æolia, to Ascra, a Bœotian village at the foot of mount Helicon; but we are left to conjecture whether he himself was born at Cuma or at Ascra. His affirmation that he had never embarked in a ship but once, when he sailed across the Euripus to the Isle of Eubœa on occasion of a poetical contest, has been thought decisive of his having been born at Ascra; but the poet is speaking of his nautical experience: and even if he had originally come from Cuma, he would scarcely mention a voyage made in infancy. The observation respecting his parents tends to countenance the reading of Διου γενος; race of Dius; instead of διον γενος, race divine; but the name of one parent only is found. The reproachful mention of his country plainly alludes to his charge of corruption against the petty kings or nobles, who exercised the magistracy of Bœotia: and by the fine is meant the judicial award of the larger share of the patrimony to his brother.

There seems a great probability that Virgil, in his fourth eclogue, had Hesiod’s golden and heroic ages in view; and that he alludes to the passage of Justice leaving the earth, where he says

The virgin now returns: Saturnian times
Roll round again:

and to Hesiod himself in the verse,

The last age dawns, in verse Cumæan sung:4

and not, as is commonly thought, to the Sibyl of Campanian Cuma. Professor Heyne objects, that Hesiod makes no mention of the revolution of a better age: yet such an allusion is significantly conveyed in the following passage:

  Oh would that Nature had denied me birth
Midst this fifth race, this iron age of earth;
That long before within the grave I lay,
Or long hereafter could behold the day!

That Virgil elsewhere calls Hesiod’s verse Ascræan is no argument against his supposing him of Cuma: there seems no reason why either epithet should not be used: for the poet was at least of Cumæan extraction. That Ascræus was Hesiod’s received surname among the ancients proves nothing as to his birth-place, nor is any thing proved as to Virgil’s opinion by his adoption of the title in compliance with common usage. Apollonius was surnamed Rhodius from his residence at Rhodes, yet his birth-place was Ægypt. After all, nothing is established, even if it could be certified that Virgil thought him of Cuma, beyond the single weight of Virgil’s individual opinion. Plutarch relates, from a more ancient and therefore a more competent authority, that of Ephorus, the Cumæan historian, that Dius was the youngest of three brothers, and emigrated through distress of debt to Ascra; where he married Pycimede, the mother of Hesiod.

If we allow the authenticity of the proem to the Theogony, Hesiod tended sheep in the vallies of Helicon; for it is not in the spirit of ancient poetry to feign this sort of circumstance; and no education could be conceived more natural for a bard who sang of husbandry. From the fiction of the Muses presenting him with a laurel-bough, we may infer also that he was not a minstrel or harper, but a rhapsodist; and sang or recited to the branch instead of the lyre. La Harpe, in his Lycée, ou Cours de Littérature, asserts that Hesiod was a priest of the temple of the Muses. I find the same account in Gale’s Court of the Gentiles; book iii. p. 7. vol. i. who quotes Carion’s Chronicle of Memorable Events. For this, however, I can find no ancient authority. On referring to Pausanias, he mentions, indeed, that the statue of Hesiod was placed in the temple of the Muses on Mount Helicon: and in the Works and Days Hesiod mentions having dedicated to the Muses of Helicon the tripod which he won in the Eubœan contest; and observes

Th’ inspiring Muses to my lips have giv’n
The love of song, and strains that breathe of heaven.

From the conjunction of this passage with the account of Pausanias, has probably arisen a confused supposition that Hesiod was actually a priest of the Heliconian temple. The circumstance, although destitute of express evidence, is however probable, from his acquaintance with theogonical traditions and his tone of religious instruction.

Guietus rejects the whole passage as supposititious, which respects the voyage to Eubœa, and the contest in poetry at the funeral games of Amphidamas. Proclus supposes Plutarch to have also rejected it: because he speaks of the contest as τα εωλα πραγματα: which some interpret trite or threadbare tales: others old wives’ stories. But if the latter sense be the correct one, Plutarch may have meant to intimate his disbelief only of Hesiod and Homer having contended; not altogether of a contest in which Hesiod took part. In fact it seems reasonable to infer the authenticity of the passage from this very tradition of Homer and Hesiod having disputed a prize in poetry.

In the pseudo-history entitled “The Contest of Homer and Hesiod,” is an inscription purporting to be that on the tripod which Hesiod won from Homer in Eubœa:

This Hesiod vow’d to Helicon’s blest nine,
Victor in Chalcis crown’d o’er Homer, bard divine.

Now that the passage in “The Works” was extant long before this piece was in existence, is susceptible of easy proof: but if we conceive with the credulity of Barnes, that the piece is a collection of scattered traditionary matter of genuine antiquity, that the passage was not constructed on the narration may be inferred from the former wanting the name of Homer. The nullity of purpose in such a forgery seems to have struck those, who in the indulgence of the same fanciful whim have substituted, as Proclus states, for the usual reading in the text of Hesiod,

Υμνω νικησαντα φερειν τριποδ’ ωτωεντα,

I bore a tripod ear’d, my prize, away:

Υμνω νικησαντ’ εν χαλκιδι θειον Ομηρον,

Victor in Chalcis crown’d o’er Homer, bard divine:

the identical verse in the pretended inscription. It is incredible that any person should take the trouble of foisting lines into Hesiod’s poem, for the barren object of inducing a belief that he had won a poetical prize from some unknown and nameless bard: unless we were to presume that the forger omitted the name through a refinement of artifice, that no suspicion may be excited by its too minute coincidence with the traditionary story: but it is a perfectly natural circumstance that the passage in Hesiod, describing a contest with some unknown bard, should have furnished the basis of a meeting between Hesiod and Homer: and the tradition is at once explained by the coincidence of this passage in “The Works,” and an invocation in the “Hymn to Venus;” where Homer exclaims on the eve of one of these bardic festivals,

Oh in this contest let me bear away
The palm of song: do thou prepare my lay!

The piece entitled “The Contest of Homer and Hesiod,” is entitled to no authority. It is not credible that a composition of this nature, consisting of enigmas with their solutions, and of lines of imperfect sense which are completed by the alternate verses of the answerer, should have been preserved by the oral tradition of ages like complete poems: and the foolish genealogies, whereby Homer and Hesiod are traced to Gods, Muses, and Rivers, and are made cousins, according to the favourite zeal of the Greeks for finding out a consanguinity in poets, diminish all the credit of the writer as a sober historian.

It appears probable that the whole piece was suggested by the hint of the contest in Plutarch: who quotes it in his “Banquet of Sages,” as an example of the ancient contests in poetry. He says Homer proposed this enigma:

Rehearse, O Muse! the things that ne’er have been,
Nor e’er shall in the future time be seen:

which Hesiod answered in a manner no less enigmatical:

When round Jove’s tomb the clashing cars shall roll
The trampling coursers straining for the goal

The same verses, with a few changes, are given in “The Contest;” only the question is assigned to Hesiod, and the answer to Homer; as Robinson conjectures, with perhaps too much refinement, for the secret purpose of depressing Hesiod under the mask of exalting him, by appointing Homer to the more arduous task of solving the questions proposed. With respect also to the award of Panœdes, the judge, which is thought to betray the same design by an imbecile or partial preference of the verses of Hesiod to those of Homer, the reason stated by Panœdes, that “it was just to bestow the prize on him who exhorted men to agriculture and peace, in preference to him who described only war and carnage” is equally noble and philosophical; and by no means merits to have given rise to the proverbial parody quoted by Barnes: Πανιδος ψηφος “the judgment of Pan:” instead of Πανοιδου ψηφος, “the judgment of Panœdes.”

The piece seems to be a mere exercise of ingenuity, without any particular design of raising one poet at the expence of the other: and as it contains internal evidence of having been composed after the time of Adrian, who is mentioned by name as “that most divine Emperor,” and Plutarch flourished under Trajan, there is reason to suppose that the narrative of Periander in the “Banquet of Wise Men,” afforded the first hint of the whole contest.

To the same zeal for making Hesiod and Homer competitors we owe another inscription, quoted by Eustathius, ad Il. A. p. 5.

In Delos first did I with Homer raise
The rhapsody of bards; and new the lays:
Phœbus Apollo did our numbers sing;
Latona’s son, the golden-sworded king.

But if the passage in “The Works” be authentic, the spuriousness of this inscriptive record detects itself; as Hesiod there confines his voyages to the crossing the Euripus.

Pausanias mentions the institution of a contest at the temple in Delphos, where a hymn was to be sung in honour of Apollo: and says that Hesiod was excluded from the number of the candidates because he had not learnt to sing to the harp. He adds, that Homer came thither also; and was incapacitated from trying his skill by the same deficiency: and, what is very strange, he gives as a reason why he could not have taken a part in the contest, even were he a harper, that he was blind.

From Plutarch, Pausanias, and the author of “The Contest,” we are enabled to cull some gossiping traditions of the latter life of Hesiod, which are scarcely worth the gleaning, except that, like the romancing Lives of Homer, they are proofs of the poet’s celebrity.

Hesiod, we are told, set out on a pilgrimage to the Delphic Oracle, for the purpose of hearing his fortune: and the old bard could scarcely get in at the gates of the temple, when the prophetess could refrain no longer: “afflata est numine quando jam propriore Dei:”

  Blest is the man who treads this hallow’d ground,
With honours by th’ immortal Muses crown’d:
The bard whose glory beams divinely bright
Far as the morning sheds her ambient light:
But shun the shades of fam’d Nemean Jove;
Thy mortal end awaits thee in the grove.

But after all her sweet words, the priestess was but a jilting gypsey; and meant only to shuffle with the ambiguity of her trade. The old gentleman carefully turning aside from the Peloponnesian Nemea, fell into the trap of a temple of the Nemean Jupiter at Ænoe, a town of Locris. He was here entertained by one Ganyctor; together with a Milesian, his fellow-traveller, and a youth called Troilus. During the night this Milesian violated the daughter of their host, by name Ctemene: and the grey hairs of Hesiod, who we are told was an old man twice over,5 and whose name grew into a proverb for longevity, could not save him from being suspected of the deed by the young lady’s brothers, Ctemenus and Antiphus: they without much ceremony murdered him in the fields, and “to leave no botches in the work,” killed the poor boy into the bargain. The Milesian, we are to suppose, escaped under the cloud of his miraculous security, free from gashes and from question. The body of Hesiod was thrown into the sea; and a dolphin,6 or a whole shoal of them, according to another account, conveyed it to a part of the coast, where the festival of Neptune was celebrating: and the murderers, having confessed, were drowned in the waves. Plutarch (de solertiâ animalium) states that the corpse of Hesiod was discovered through the sagacity of his dog.

The body of a murdered poet, however, was not to rest quiet without effecting some further extraordinary prodigies. The inhabitants of Orchomenos, in Bœotia, having consulted the oracle on occasion of a pestilence, were answered that, as their only remedy, they must seek the bones of Hesiod; and that a crow would direct them. The messengers accordingly found a crow sitting on a rock; in the cavity of which they discovered the poet’s remains; transported them to their own country, and erected a tomb with this epitaph:

The fallow vales of Ascra gave him birth:
His bones are cover’d by the Mingan earth:
Supreme in Hellas Hesiod’s glories rise,
Whom men discern by wisdom’s touchstone wise.

Among the Greek Inscriptions is an epitaph on Hesiod with the name of Alcæus, which has the air of being a genuine ancient production, from its breathing the beautiful classic simplicity of the old Grecian school:

  Nymphs in their founts midst Locris’ woodland gloom
Laved Hesiod’s corse and piled his grassy tomb:
The shepherds there the yellow honey shed,
And milk of goats was sprinkled o’er his head:
With voice so sweetly breathed that sage would sing,
Who sip’d pure drops from every Muse’s spring.

Some mention Ctemene, or Clymene, on whose account Hesiod is said to have been murdered, as the name of his wife: others call her Archiepe; and he is supposed to have had by her a son named Stesichorus. In “The Works” is this passage:

Then may not I, nor yet my son remain
In this our generation just in vain:

which, unless it be only a figure of speech, confirms the fact of his having a son.

Pausanias describes a brazen statue of Hesiod in the forum of the city Thespia, in Bœotia; another in the temple of Jupiter Olympicus, at Olympia in Elis; and a third in the temple of the Muses, on Mount Helicon, in a sitting posture, with a harp resting on his knees; a circumstance which he rather formally criticises, on the ground that Hesiod recited with the laurel-branch.

A brazen statue of Hesiod stood also in the baths of Zeuxippus, which formed a part of old Byzantium, and retained the same title, an epithet of Jupiter, under the Christian Emperors of Constantinople. (See Gibbon’s Roman Empire, ii. 17; Dallaway’s Constantinople, p. 110.) Constantine adorned the baths with statues, and for these Christodorus wrote inscriptions. That on the statue of Hesiod is quoted by Fulvius Ursinus, from the Greek Epigrams:

Midst mountain nymphs in brass th’ Ascræan stood,
Uttering the heaven-breathed song in his infuriate mood.

The collections of antiquities by Fulvius Ursinus, Gronovius, and Bellorius exhibit a gem, a busto and a basso-relievo, together with a truncated herma; which the ingenious artist who designed the frontispiece to this edition has united with one of the heads. The bust in the Pembroke collection differs from all these. In fact the sculptures, whether of Hesiod or Homer, are only interesting as antiquities of art; for the likenesses assigned to eminent poets by the Grecian artists were mostly imaginary:7 and must evidently have been so in such ancient instances as these.

Greece, at an early period, seems to have possessed a spirit of just legislation, which formed in the very bosom of polytheism a certain code of practical religion: and from the semi-barbarous age of Orpheus, down to the times of a Solon, a Plato, and a Pindar, Providence continued to raise up moral instructors of mankind, in the persons of bards, or legislators, or philosophers, who by their conceptions of a righteous governor of the universe, and their maxims of social duty and natural piety, counteracted the degrading influence of superstition on the manners of the people: and sowed the germs of that domestic and public virtue which so long upheld in power and prosperity the sister communities of Greece. The same spirit pervades the writings of Hesiod.

It is evident even in the times that have passed since the gospel light was shed abroad among the nations, that a perverted system of theology may perfectly consist with a pure practical religion: that scholastic subtleties, unscriptural traditions, and uncharitable dogmas, may constitute the creed, while the religion of primitive Christianity influences the heart. So, in estimating the character of Hesiod, we must separate those superstitions which belong to a traditionary mythology, from that system of opinions which respected the guidance of human life; the accountableness of nations and individuals to a heavenly judge; and the principles of public equity and popular justice which he derived from the national institutions. If we examine his poems in this view of their tendency and spirit, we shall find abundant cause for admiration and respect of a man, who, born and nurtured upon the lap of heathen superstition, could shadow out the maxims of truth in such beautiful allegories, and recommend the practice of virtue in such powerful and affecting appeals to the conscience and the reason.

They, however, who can feel the infinite superiority of Christianity over every system of philosophic morals, will naturally expect that the morality of Hesiod should come short of that point of purity, which he, who reads our nature, proposed through the revealer of his will as a standard for the emulation of his creatures. But in the zeal of commenting upon an adopted author, we find that every thing equivocal has been strained to some unobjectionable sense; we are presented with Christian graces for heathen virtues; and Hesiod is not permitted to be absurd even in his superstitions; which are thought to involve some refined emblematical meaning; some lesson of ethical wisdom or of economical prudence.

The similitude of patriarch and prophet, with whom he is compared by Robinson, is not a very exaggerated comparison, in so far as respects the simplicity of an ancient husbandman, laying down rules for the general œconomy of life; or the graver functions of a philosopher, denouncing the visitations of divine justice on nations and their legislators, greedy of the gains of corruption. But the learned editor is unfortunate in selecting for his praise the meek and placable disposition of Hesiod as completing the patriarchal character. The indignation which Hesiod felt at the injuries done him by a brother, and the venality of his judges, might reasonably excuse the bitterness of rebuke: but he should not be held up as a model of equanimity and forbearance. To this graceless brother he seldom ever addresses himself in any gentler terms than μεγα νηπιε, greatly foolish: and I question whether Perses, if he could rise from the dead, would confess himself very grateful for the tenderness of this reprehension.

The adverse decision in the law-suit with his brother must be confessed to be the hinge on which the alleged corruptness of his times perpetually turns: yet as he does not conceal the personal interest which he has in the question, his frankness wins our confidence; and simplicity and candour are so plainly marked in his grave and artless style, that we are insensibly led to form an exception in his favour as to the judgment of the character from the writer; to believe his praises of frugality and temperance sincere; and to coincide with Paterculus, in the opinion that he was a man of a contented and philosophical mind, “fond of the leisure and tranquillity” of rustic life.

His countrymen, as Addison expresses it, must have regarded him “as the oracle of the neighbourhood.” Plutarch adverts to his medical knowledge, in the person of Cleodemus the physician; and when we consider that he possessed sufficient astronomy for the purposes of agriculture, and that he carried his zeal for science even into nautical details, of which, notwithstanding, he confesses his inexperience, we shall acknowledge him to have been a man of extraordinary attainments for the times in which he lived.

Section II — On the Æra of Hesiod

The question of the æra when Hesiod flourished, and whether he were the elder or the junior of Homer, or his contemporary, has given rise to such endless disputes, that Pausanias declines giving any opinion on the subject. Some of the moderns have attempted to ascertain the point from internal evidence: 1st, by the character of style: 2dly, by philological criticism: 3dly, by astronomical calculation.

In the first instance they are unfortunately by no means agreed. Justus Lipsius asserts that a greater simplicity and more of the rudeness of antiquity are apparent in Hesiod: Salmasius insists that Hesiod is more smooth and finished, and less imbued with antiquity than Homer.

As to the argument of Heinsius respecting τεκμαιρομαι being used by Homer in the sense of to effect or bring to pass, and by Hesiod in that of to appoint, contrive, or will; and as to the former being the more ancient acceptation; the proof totally fails: inasmuch as Homer has repeatedly used the word in the latter sense: and with regard to the use of θεμιστας by Homer for law, when Hesiod uses νομους, which is asserted not to have been known in Homer’s age, the objection is vague; unless we suppose that Homer’s poems8 contained every word in the language. The argument of the celebrated Dr. Samuel Clarke, in favour of their being of a different age, and of Hesiod being the junior, turns on the word καλος; which in Homer is invariably made long in the first syllable; whereas Hesiod makes it either long or short at pleasure: and on the word οπωρινος; of which the penult is long in Homer, and short in Hesiod. But should the argument affect their being coeval, it does not appear why Hesiod might not be the elder: for who will be bold enough to decide as to the most ancient quantity? nor could we possibly determine the question, unless we were in possession of other poets, contemporary with Homer, who should be found to conform exactly with the Homeric prosody: in which case the disagreement of Hesiod might favour a presumption of his belonging, at least, to a different age. The criticism seems, however, in all respects unworthy of so acute a reasoner as Dr. Clarke: for surely the difference of country alone might induce a difference of prosodial usage, no less than a dissimilarity of dialect. But the most decisive answer to all such minute criticisms appears to be, that all the evidence afforded us on historical authority respecting the discovery, collection, and arrangement of the poems ascribed to Homer, justifies the presumption that their dialect, diction, and prosody have undergone9 such modifications and changes, as to baffle all chronological reasoning drawn from the present state of the poems.

Scaliger and Vossius have thought that the æra of Hesiod could be ascertained within seventy years, more or less, by astronomical calculation, from the following passage of The Works and Days.

When sixty days have circled, since the sun
Turn’d from his wintry tropic, then the star
Arcturus, leaving ocean’s sacred flood,
First whole-apparent makes his evening rise.

It is singular that so great a philosopher as Dr. Priestley should also have argued for the certainty of the same method of chronology in this instance of Hesiod. (Lectures on History, Lect. xii. p. 99.) But neither the accuracy nor the precise nature of the astronomical observation here commemorated can possibly be ascertained. It is uncertain whether the single star Arcturus may not be placed for the whole constellation of Boötes; of which there are examples in Columella, and other writers. It is wholly uncertain whether this rising was observed in Hesiod’s own country, or even in Hesiod’s own time; a knowledge of both which particulars is essential to our making a just calculation. We shall scarcely ascribe to Hesiod a more scientific accuracy than to subsequent astronomers; yet we find that even their observations of the solstices and of the risings and settings of the stars, are ambiguous, and most probably fallacious. Hesiod makes the achronycal rising of Arcturus sixty days after the winter solstice: many other writers, and particularly Pliny, say the same. Now setting the difference between Hesiod and Pliny at 800 years, this will make a difference of eleven days in the time of the phænomenon. Both therefore cannot have written from actual observation, and probably neither did. The ancients copied from each other without scruple; because they knew not till the time of Hipparchus, that the times of rising &c. varied by the course of ages. They seem besides to have copied from writers of various latitudes: unconscious that this also made a difference. We shall not then be disposed to rely on this, or similar passages of Hesiod, for any secure data of chronology.

In the absence of internal evidence we are therefore referred to the opinions of antiquity. There is a remark of Gibbon in that part of his Posthumous Writings entitled “Extraits raisonnés de mes Lectures,” which lays down an excellent rule of judgment in matters of chronology. He very justly observes, that the differences of chronologers may be reconciled by the consideration that they reckoned from different æras of the person’s life. The fixing the date from different periods, as from the birth or death, the production of a work,10 or any other remarkable event of a person’s life, might easily make the difference of a century. “So that we may establish it as a rule of criticism, that where these diversities do not exceed the natural term of human life we ought to think of reconciling, and not of opposing them. There are, indeed, many writers, with respect to Homer, whom it is impossible to conciliate; since they take in so enormous a period as 416 years, from the return of the Heraclidæ A. C. 1104 to the twenty-third Olympiad A. C. 688. But besides that they are of inferior note, the great difference among them leaves the authority of each to stand singly by itself.”

This reasoning very much diminishes whatever force might be derived from the authority of names, to the computations of those writers who contend that Hesiod is a century younger than Homer. These are the Latin writers; whose concurrence is however so exact as to induce a belief of their having merely copied from each other. Thus Velleius Paterculus, who wrote his history 30 years after Christ, says that Homer flourished 950 years before his time; that is, before Christ 920; and Pliny about the year 78 computed that Homer lived 1000 years before him; before Christ 920. Paterculus follows Cicero in placing Hesiod 120 years after Homer: Pliny, Porphyry, and Solinus, concur in the order of their ages, and in the interval between them: varying only from ten to twenty or thirty years. But on the plan laid down by Gibbon, this chronology might be reconciled with that of Ephorus, and Varro: who, according to Aulus Gellius, made Hesiod and Homer contemporaries: as did Plutarch and Philostratus.

This opinion is supported by the ancient authority of Herodotus; and by that of the Chronicler of the Parian Marbles. The authenticity of these marbles has, indeed, been impugned by a learned dissertation of Mr. Robertson, printed in 1788. To this an answer was published in 1789, by Mr. Hewlett: and Mr. Gough has defended the genuineness of the Chronicle in a Memoir of the Archæologia, vol. ix. Gibbon observes, “I respect that monument as a useful, as an uncorrupt monument of antiquity: but why should I prefer its authority to that of Herodotus? it is more modern: (B. C. 264:) its author is uncertain: we know not from what source he drew his chronology.”11 The Parian Marble, however, if not a modern forgery, may be allowed to stand on the same footing with other Greek tablets of chronology.

Herodotus was born B. C. 484. He affirms Hesiod and Homer to have preceded his own time by four hundred years: thus making them contemporaries; and fixing their æra at B. C. 884.

The Chronicler of the Marbles fixes the æra of Hesiod at 944 years B. C.: and that of Homer at 907; by which Hesiod is placed 37 years before Homer; a difference, however, too trifling to affect the chronological evidence in favour of their contemporary existence.

Section III — On the Poems of Hesiod12

Pausanias informs us that “the Bœotians, who dwell round Helicon, have a tradition among them that Hesiod wrote nothing besides the poem of ‘Works:’ and from this they take away the introduction, and say that the poem properly begins with The Strifes. They showed me a leaden tablet near the fountain, which was almost entirely eaten away with age, and on which were engraven the Works and Days of Hesiod.”

It is difficult to account for the manifest mutilation and corruption of this venerable poet’s compositions, since it appears that they were extant in a complete, or at least, a more perfect form, so late as the age of Vespasian. Pliny, book xiv. complaining of the agricultural ignorance of his age, observes that even the names of several trees enumerated by Hesiod had grown out of knowledge: and in book xv. he adverts to Hesiod’s opinion of the unprofitableness of the olive. From some verses in the Astronomicon of Manilius, an Augustan writer, it would seem that he had treated of ingrafting, and of the soils adapted to corn and vines.

He sings how corn in plains, how vines in hills
Delight, how both with vast increase the olive fills:
How foreign grafts th’ adulterous stock receives,
Bears stranger fruit and wonders at her leaves.

Creech.

and it is remarkable that the line in Virgil translated by Dryden,

And old Ascrean verse through Roman cities sing, occurs in that book of the Georgics which is dedicated to planting, ingrafting, and the dressing of vines. In the “Works,” as they now appear, we find no mention of any trees but such as are fit for the fabrication of the plough: and it is plain that the countrymen of Pliny could be in no danger of forgetting the names of the oak, the elm, or the bay-tree. Of the olive, and of ingrafting, there is no mention whatever, and but a cursory notice on the vine: nor is there any comparison of the soils respectively adapted to the growth of vines and of corn.

The poem in some editions has been divided into two books; under the general title of “Works and Days,” but with a subdivision entitled Days only: by which arrangement it is made virtually to consist of three books. In Loesner’s edition the distinction of the second book is done away: but the subdivision of Days is retained. From either mode of disposition this incoherency results: that Works and Days no longer appear to be the general title, but applicable only to the former part of the poem, in which there is no mention of Days at all. The ancient copies, as Heinsius has shown, had no division into parts. If any minor distinction be deemed admissible for the more convenient arrangement of the subject, the disposition of Henry Stephens is obviously the most rational: whereby the poem is divided into two parts: the first entitled “Works” only, and the second “Days.”

Cooke explains the “Works” of Hesiod to mean the labours of agriculture, and the “Days” the proper seasons for the Works; but erroneously. The term Works is to be taken with greater latitude, as including not only labours, but actions; and as referring equally to the moral, as to the industrious œconomy of human life. It is evident also that the term “Days” does not respect the seasons of labour specified in the course of the poem, but the days of superstitious observance at the end of it: and of these many have no reference whatever to the works of husbandry.

The Theogony has all the appearance of being a patchwork of fragments; consisting of some genuine Hesiodéan passages;13 pieced together with verses of other poets, and probably of a different age. The mythology is occasionally inconsistent with itself: thus the god Chrysaor is re-introduced among the demi-gods; and the Fates are born over again from different parents: an incongruity which Robinson attempts to obviate by an ingenious, but over-refined construction.

The proem bears the internal marks of comparatively modern refinement. It has not the simple outline of Hesiod. The whole passage has the air of one of those introductions which the rhapsodists were accustomed to prefix to their recitations: it is conceived in a more florid taste than the usual composition of Hesiod, but expressed with considerable elegance of fancy.

These arguments are not affected by the individual opinions of Romans and Greeks, themselves modern with respect to Hesiod. Ovid in his “Art of Love” alludes to this proem:

The sister Muses did I ne’er behold,
While, Ascra! midst thy vales, I fed my fold.

Plutarch in the ninth book of his Symposiacs, quotes two of the verses in illustration of the propriety of epithets: Pausanias appeals to the presentation of the branch as evidence that Hesiod did not sing to the lyre; and Lucian in his dialogue “on the illiterate book-collector” observes, “how can you have known these things without having learnt them? how or whence? unless at any time you have received a branch from the Muses like that shepherd. They, indeed, did not disdain to appear to the shepherd, though a rough hairy man, with a sun-burnt complexion; but they would never have deigned to come near you:” and in the “Dialogue with Hesiod” he banters him as promising to sing of futurity; and affecting the Chalcas or Phineas, when there is nothing of prophecy in his whole poem. An indirect argument for the spuriousness of the verses.

It must have been an impression of this proem which led Gibbon in his “Notes on the editions of the Classics” (Miscellaneous Works, vol. v.) to observe, “in the Theogony I can discern a more recent hand:” for many details in the poem have all the internal evidence of antiquity. Perhaps the catalogue of names, which Robinson superfluously defends on the score of their metrical harmony, and compares with Homer’s catalogue of ships, of which the merit is geographical and historical, may furnish a strong presumptive argument of antiquity. They would appear to have been composed at a period when alphabetic writing was unknown, and the memory of names and things depended on the technical help of oral tradition.

Pausanias says, speaking of the Theogony, “There are some who consider Hesiod as the author of this poem.” That some theogony was composed by Hesiod is evidenced by the passage in Herodotus; who, speaking of Hesiod and Homer, affirms, “these are they who framed a Theogony for the Greeks:” and the fable of Pandora in the Theogony, that we now possess, bears characteristical marks of having come from the same hand as that in the Works and Days.

Of the Shield of Hercules it is asserted by Cooke, that “there is great reason to believe this poem was not in existence in the time of Augustus:” but he merely advances, in proof of this assertion, that “Manilius, who was an author of the Augustan age, takes notice of no other than the Theogony, and the Works and Days:” yet this, if indeed anything decisive could be concluded from the omission, would only prove that he did not believe the piece authentic. He further remarks that critics should not suppose it to have formed a part of another poem, unless they could show when, where, or by whom the title had been changed. This is surely to demand a very unreasonable as well as unnecessary kind of proof. The distinct title affords, in fact, no evidence for the completeness of the poem; as we learn from Ælian, that portions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were known by such separate titles as, “the Funeral Games of Patroclus,” the “Grot of Calypso;” and sung as detached pieces. The argument of Cooke that it cannot be an imitation of the Shield of Achilles, because the description of the mere Shield occupies but a small part of the piece, is equivalent to contending that Virgil could not have imitated the simile of Diana in the first book of the Æneid from the Odyssey, because the rest of the book bears no resemblance to any thing in Homer. A slight presumption of the Shield being from the hand of Hesiod may be founded on a quotation of Polybius, from one of Hesiod’s lost works: the historian speaks of the Macedonians as being “such as Hesiod describes the Æacidæ; rejoicing in war rather than in the banquet:” book v. ch. i. In the Shield, Iölaus says of himself and Hercules, that battles “are better to them than a feast.” The expression, however, may have been proverbial, and used by more poets than one.

The poem is ascribed to Hesiod by Athenæus: but Aristophanes the grammarian rejected it as spurious, and Longinus speaks doubtingly of Hesiod being the author. Tanaquil Faber confidently asserts “that they who think the Shield not of Hesiod, have but a very superficial acquaintance with Grecian poetry:” and on the other side Joseph Scaliger speaks of the author, whoever he may be, of the Shield; which the critical world by a preposterous judgment have attributed to the poet of Ascra. It is not by a reference to authorities that the question must be decided, but by an examination of the interior structure of the poem, and the evidence of style.

The objections to a great part of the poem consist in its unlikeness to the style of Hesiod, and its resemblance to that of Homer.

Robinson insists in reply that it is very usual for the same author to show a diversity of style; which is at least an admission that Hesiod is here different from himself. But to his question “whether we demand the same fervour and force in the Georgics of Virgil as in the Æneid?” it may be asked in return whether a certain similarity of style be not clearly distinguishable in these poems, however distinct their nature? there is, indeed, a difference, but not absolutely a discordance.

The whole laboured argument which he has bestowed on the necessary dissimilarity of didactic and heroical composition is plainly foreign to the question. Who would dream of urging as an objection to its authenticity, that the style of “The Shield” is unlike the georgical style of Hesiod? the objection is, that it is unlike his epic style: and Robinson has brought the question to a fair issue by his remark that the Battle of the Gods abounds no less than the Shield with the ornaments of poetry.

It is not sufficient that these passages respectively display ornament; we must examine whether they display a similar style of ornament. Now the descriptive part of the Shield is in a gorgeous taste; unlike the bold and simple majesty of the Theogony. There is a visible effort to surprise by something marvellous and uncommon; which often verges on conceit and extravagance. For sublime images we are presented with gigantic and distorted figures, and with hideous conceptions of disgusting horror. There is indeed a considerable degree of genius even in these faulty passages: but whoever perceives a resemblance in the imagery of the Shield to that of the Titanic War, may equally trace an affinity between Virgil and Ariosto.

These reasonings affect that part of the poem chiefly, which is occupied with the mere description of the Shield; but a single circumstance will show that the passages which represent the action of the poem are both foreign to Hesiod’s manner, and are in the manner of Homer. I allude to the employment of similes and to the character of those similes.

Homer is fond of comparisons; and of such, particularly, as are drawn from animated nature. The Shield of Hercules also abounds with similes, and they are precisely of this sort. But the frequent use of similitudes is so far from being characteristic of Hesiod, that in the whole Battle of the Giants but one occurs; and only one in the Combat of Jupiter and Typhæus; and in both we look in vain for any comparison drawn from lions, or boars, or vultures.

Robinson appears, indeed, conscious of a more crowded and diversified imagery in the Shield than we usually meet with in Hesiod’s poetry; for he is driven to the miserable alternative of supposing that Hesiod may have produced the Shield in his youth, and his other works in his old age. Longinus in the same manner accounts for the comparative quiet simplicity of the Odyssey. The supposition in either case is founded on the erroneous principle, that a poem is beautiful in proportion to the noise and fury of its action, or the accumulation of its ornament. The notion of the genius necessarily declining with the decline of youthful vigour is completely unphilosophical; and is contradicted by repeated experience of the human faculties. It was in his old age that Dryden wrote his “Fables.”

As to that portion of the poem which is properly the Shield, and from which the whole piece takes its title, it is self-evident that this must have been borrowed from the description in the Iliad, or the description in the Iliad from this. I do not allude merely to a whole series of verses being literally the same in each; but to long passages of description, bearing so close a resemblance as to preclude the idea of accidental coincidence; such as the bridal procession, the siege, the harvest, and the vintage.

Robinson admits the imitation; but thinks the partisans of Homer cannot easily show that Homer was not the copyist. It were, however, easy to decide from internal evidence which is the copy.

Where two poems are found so nearly resembling each other as to convey at once the impression of plagiarism, the scale of originality must doubtless preponderate in favour of that which is the more simple in style and invention. Where a poem abounds with florid figures and irregular flights of imagination, it is inconceivable that a copy of that poem should exhibit a chaste simplicity of fancy: but it is highly natural that an imitator should think to transcend his original by the aid of meretricious ornament; that he should mistake bombast for sublimity, and attempt to dazzle and astonish. Of this sort of elaborate refinement a single instance will serve in illustration.

Both poets encircle their bucklers with the ocean. Robinson gives the preference to the author of The Shield of Hercules; alleging that his description is decorated with the utmost beauty of imagery; while that of The Shield of Achilles is naked of embellishment. To the unornamented style of the passage in Homer I appeal, as demonstrating the superiority of his judgment, and as thereby establishing beyond dispute the fact of his originality.

In one condensed verse he pours around the verge of the buckler “the great strength of the ocean stream.” An image of roundness and completeness is here at once presented to the eye, and fills the mind. But the author of the Shield of Hercules, evidently striving to excel Homer, says that “high-soaring swans there clamoured aloud, and many floated on the surface of the billows, and near them fishes were leaping tumultuously.” Who does not perceive that the full image of the rounding ocean is broken and rendered indistinct by this multiplicity of images? The description is, indeed, picturesque; at nunc non erat his locus.

Yet that Hesiod was the plagiarist will scarcely be contended, until the assertion already advanced respecting the epic simplicity of his style shall have been set aside.

But the former part of the piece has all the internal marks of having been composed by an author of totally dissimilar genius. It has the stamp of the ancient simplicity upon it. A few passages are magnificent; but still in a noble and pure taste. Here then I discern the hand of Hesiod. But the presumption rests on surer grounds than characteristics of style.

In the concluding verses of the Theogony, the poet invokes the Muses to sing the praises of women; and among the lost works of Hesiod, whose titles are dispersed in ancient authors, are enumerated the four Catalogues of Women or Heroines; and the Herogony, or Generation of Heroes descended from them; which are thought to have been five connected parts of the same poem. That this was the work of Hesiod we have the testimony of Pausanias; who alludes to the tale of Aurora and Cephalus, and that of Iphigenia, as treated by Hesiod in his Catalogue of Women. The fourth Catalogue had acquired a secondary title of Ηοιαι μεγαλαι; the great Eoiæ: fantastically framed out of the words η οιη, or such as, which introduced the stories of the successive heroines. From the use of this title a strange idea got abroad that Eoa was the name of a young woman of Ascra, the mistress of Hesiod.

  Bœotian Hesiod, vers’d in various lore,
Forsook the mansion where he dwelt before:
The Heliconian village sought, and woo’d
The maid of Ascra in her scornful mood:
There did the suffering bard his lays proclaim,
The strain beginning with Eoa’s name.

Hermisianax of Colophon, in Athenæus, book xiii.14

Among the minor fragments of Hesiod are preserved three passages, each beginning with the words η οιη, introductory of a female description. They are naturally considered as remnants of the Fourth Catalogue. Now the piece entitled “The Shield of Hercules” also opens with these identical words, introductory of the story of Alcmena.

Fabricius decides that these introductory words will not permit us to doubt that “The Shield of Hercules” formed part of the Fourth Catalogue; but the inference does not necessarily extend beyond the first portion of the piece. Robinson justly argues on the incongruity of the poet’s digressing from the tale of Alcmena, to tell a story of Hercules; and he therefore conjectures that this piece is a fragment of the Heroical Genealogies; but aware that the concurrence of the exordium with the above-mentioned fragments, points the attention to the Fourth Catalogue, he cuts the Gordian knot by changing η οιη, or such as, into η οιη, she alone.

Guietus suggests the reading of ηοιη, rising with the dawn; for the purpose of rendering the piece complete in itself: but the very basis of the argument in favour of the authenticity of the poem as a work of Hesiod, is the striking coincidence of the introductory lines with the fragments of the Fourth Catalogue. This may be set aside by the ingenious expedient of altering the text; but if the text be suffered to remain, the presumption, so far as it extends, is irresistible. I do conceive that Robinson, when his judgment consented to this alteration of the reading, yielded a very important advantage to those who dispute the genuineness of the poem, as the production of Hesiod; that by the abandonment of these remarkably coincident words the difficulty of proving the poem to be a fragment is increased two-fold; and that with the fact of its being a fragment is closely linked the fact of its authenticity.

From what has been said, it will perhaps be thought extraordinary that the idea of a cento of dispersed fragments, pieced together and interpolated with Homeric imitations, never suggested itself to those critics who have bestowed such elaborate scrutiny on the composition of the poem.

In the scholium of the Aldine edition of Hesiod, it is stated, “The beginning of the Shield as far as the 250th verse is said to form a part of the Fourth Catalogue.” Here is at once an admission of the patchwork texture of the piece; and we may be allowed to conjecture that the scholiast may possibly be mistaken as to the exact number of lines. This portion, in fact, comprehends the meeting of Hercules with Cygnus, and his arming for battle; which follows, with a strange and startling abruptness, immediately on his birth; and seems to have little connexion with the praises of a heroine, in a poem devoted exclusively to celebrated women.

I should, therefore, be inclined to consider the first fifty-six lines only as belonging to the Fourth Catalogue. This introductory part, ending with the birth of Hercules, is awkwardly coupled with his warlike adventure in the grove of Apollo by the line

Who also slew Cygnus, the magnanimous son of Mars.

This line is perceptibly the link of connexion between the two fragments, and betrays the hand of the interpolator. The succeeding passage, as far as verse 153, I conjecture to have formed a part of the Herogony. It seems probable that Hesiod’s description of the sculpture on the Shield of Hercules was limited to the dragon in the centre, and the figure of Discord hovering above it; and was meant to end with the effects produced by the sight of this shield on the hero’s enemies. This short description appears to have suggested the experiment of ingrafting upon it a florid parody of the Shield of Achilles; and that here precisely we may fix the commencement of the spurious additions is probable from the verses

Οστεα δε σφι, περι ρινοῖο σαπεισης,
Σειριου αζαλεοιο, κελαινῇ πυθεται αιῃ.

          Through the flesh that wastes away
Beneath the parching sun, their whitening bones
Start forth, and moulder in the sable dust:

being instantly followed by a passage from the Achillean Shield: Εν δε προιωξις, &c.

Pursuit was there, and fiercely rallying Flight.

I suppose, therefore, the description of the putrefying corses of the foes of Hercules to have joined the 320th verse; where he is made to grasp the shield and ascend the chariot. Several of the subsequent passages, as, in particular, the description of the Cicada, appear to me genuine; but they are visibly patched with Homeric similes, which are in general mere plagiarisms; and are not at all in unison with the style of the rest of the poem; nor with the characteristic manner of Hesiod. This mixture of authenticity and imposture will explain the contradictory decisions of learned men; who, in examining this curious question, have looked only at one side.

It does not appear that Hesiod was the most ancient author either of a theogony or a rural poem; although Herodotus speaks of him as the first who framed a theogonic system for the Greeks, and Pliny cites him as the earliest didactic poet on agriculture. But tradition has preserved the fame of theogonies by Orpheus and Musæus: and Tzetzes mentions two poems of Orpheus, the one entitled Works, the other Diaries; the archetypes, probably, of The Works and Days.

Quintilian observes that “Hesiod rarely rises, and a great part of him is occupied in names; yet he is distinguished by useful sentences conveying precepts, and a commendable sweetness of words and construction; and the palm is given him in that middle kind of writing.”

This is niggardly praise; and is somewhat similar to that which the same critic awards to Apollonius Rhodius;15 whose picturesque style and impassioned sentiment are honoured with the diluted commendation of “an equable mediocrity.” Who that read the above character would suppose that Hesiod was at all superior to the gnomic or sententious poets; such as Theognis or Phocylides? that he had ever composed his Combat of Giants, or his Ages of Gold and of Iron?

If the battle of the Titans be Hesiod’s genuine composition, and if the Shield, as there is reason to believe, contain authentic extracts from his Heroical Genealogies, we shall decide that Hesiod, as compared with Homer, is less rapid; less fervent in action; less teeming with allusions and comparisons; but grand, energetic, occasionally vehement and daring; but more commonly proceeding with a slow and stately march. In the mental or moral sublime I consider Hesiod as superior to Homer. The personification of Prayers in the latter is almost the only allegory that can be compared with the awful prosopopeia of Justice, weeping her wrongs at the feet of the Eternal: while Justice and Modesty, described as virgins in white raiment, ascending out of the sight of men into heaven, and the Holy Dæmons, after having animated the bodies of just men, hovering round the earth, and keeping watch over human actions, are equalled by no conceptions in the Iliad or Odyssey.

Addison, with that squeamish artificial taste which distinguishes the age of Anne, as compared with that of Elizabeth, underrates, as might have been expected, the vigorous simplicity of Hesiod. But the strong though simple sketches of the old Ascræan bard are often more striking than the finished paintings of the Mantuan. Critics admire the pastoral board of Virgil’s Corycian husbandman; but there is a far greater charm in the summer-repast of Hesiod: so picturesque in its scenery; so patriarchal in its manners. The winter tempest is a bolder copy of nature than any thing in the Latin Georgics; more fresh in colouring; more circumstantiated in detail. The rising of the north-wind, moving the ocean, rooting the pines and oaks from the tops of the mountains, and strewing them along the valleys, and after a pause, suddenly roaring in its strength through the depths of the forests; the exquisite circumstances of life intermingled with the effects of the storm on inanimate nature; the beasts quaking and grinding their teeth with cold and famine; shuddering at the snowflakes, and shrinking into dens and thickets; the old man bent double with the blast;16 the delicate contrast of the young virgin, sheltered in a soft chamber under her mother’s roof, and bathing previously to her nightly rest, compose a picture wild, romantic, and interesting in an uncommon degree.

As a legendary mythologist the elegant tale of Pandora, and the Island of the Blessed Spirits, are far beyond any thing of Ovid, and can only be compared with Homer: and as a poetical moralist, the strongest proof of his merit is, that innumerable sentences of Hesiod, as is well remarked by Voltaire in his “Dictionnaire Philosophique” have grown into proverbial axioms. Cicero observes in one of his Epistles; “Let our dear Lepta learn Hesiod, and have by heart ‘the gods have placed before virtue the sweat of the brow.’” His plain and downright rules of decency,17 his superstitious saws, and his lumber of names, belong to the manners of a semi-barbarous village and the learning of a dark age: his genius and his wisdom are his own. From that which remains, mutilated as it obviously is, we may form a judgment of what he would appear to us, if the whole of his numerous works, complete and unadulterated by foreign mixture, were submitted to our observation. Ex pede Herculem.

Footnotes

Atque iterum patrio nascentem corpore Bacchum, excellently rendered by Creech, a translator now too fastidiously undervalued,

And twice-born Bacchus burst the Thunderer’s thigh:

but this tale, which Ovid and Nonnus have related, is not found in the present theogony.

Section IV — On the Mythology of Hesiod

Diogenes Laertius mentions that Pythagoras feigned to have seen the soul of Hesiod in the infernal regions, bound to a brazen pillar, and howling in torture for his false representations of the Deities: and that of Homer environed with serpents for the same reason. Plato, in a similar feeling, excluded both these poets from his ideal republic. It seems strange that the philosophers should have failed to perceive that Hesiod and Homer repeated merely the popular legends of their age; as is abundantly evident from the style and manner of narration and allusion throughout their poems.

The following passage of Herodotus has been construed to mean that they were the absolute inventors of the Grecian theology; “Whence each of the Gods came; whether all have continually existed, or what figures they severally had, was known but lately; or, if I may so speak, only yesterday; for I am of opinion that Hesiod and Homer were older than myself by four hundred years, and not more; these are they who framed a theogony for the Greeks, and gave titles to the gods; distinguishing their honours and functions, and describing their forms.”

Against such an hypothesis several reasons obviously present themselves: 1st, A plurality of gods could scarcely be the production of a single age, much less of one or two individuals: 2dly, It is not likely that Greece, which was visited by Ægyptian and Phœnician colonists at an æra long antecedent to the age of Homer, should have been destitute of a religious system: 3dly, It is not credible that a whole nation, at the suggestion of one or two bards, should have abandoned this received system in order to adopt a whole hierarchy of divinities, of whom they had never before heard.

But the doubt of Herodotus, “whether they have continually existed,” shows that he merely considered Hesiod and Homer in the light of collectors and illustrators of the ancient religion of their country; and Wesseling accordingly interprets ποιησαντες as referring to arrangement and description, not invention. This stupid inference could in fact never have been drawn, had Herodotus been compared with himself: as in a preceding passage he says, “Nearly all the names of the gods have come into Greece from Ægypt; for I have ascertained it to be a fact that they are of barbaric extraction.”

Herodotus, however, seems to have been in error, even as to this position of Hesiod and Homer having first digested the mythology of Greece into a system: and as he could not be ignorant that theogonies were ascribed to poets reputed their elders, such as Musæus and Orpheus, he was reduced to the alternative of making these poets their juniors. “Those poets,” he observes, “who were said to be before them, were in my opinion after them.”

But Cicero (in Bruto, cap. xviii.) sensibly argues, “nor can it be doubted that there were poets before Homer; which may be inferred from the songs described by him as sung in the banquets of the Phæacians and the suitors.” Fabricius makes a comment, that “it cannot be proved from this, that Greek poems, before Homer, were committed to writing, and so handed down to posterity.” As if the poems of Homer himself had been transmitted in any other manner than by oral tradition!18

The pre-existence of religious rites seems, indeed, to involve that of poetical cosmogonies and mythological hymns. Before the invention of letters there was no other traditionary record, or vehicle of popular instruction, or organ of religious homage and supplication, than verse: the conclusion follows that there were both poets anterior to the age of Homer,19 and that these poets were also mythologists.

Pausanias mentions Olen of Lycia; who, he says, composed very ancient hymns; and who in his hymn to Lucina, makes her the mother of Love: and he names Pamphus and Orpheus, as succeeding Olen, and as also composing hymns to the mythological Love.

The doubt entertained by Aristotle and Cicero of the personal existence of Orpheus, neither affects the antiquity of the name, nor of that system of theology which bears the title of Orphic. The relics now extant under that name have, indeed, been suspected as the forgeries of Onomacritus, the sooth-sayer, who produced the hymns to the people of Athens: but Gesner is of opinion that he only altered the dialect of genuine Orphic remains, on which he ingrafted his own additions. The fragments which have come down to us appear certainly from internal evidence to contain a theology more ancient than that of Hesiod and Homer; for the nearer it approaches in any of its parts to the religious system of the Ægyptians, the stronger is the presumptive testimony of its antiquity.

Jablonski, in his Pantheon Ægyptiorum, considers this stellar theology as resolvable into an astronomical and Niliacal idolatry. The terrestrial Osiris is the Nile: the celestial Osiris the Sun, in his zodiacal progress through the signs that preside over the seasons. Amon, Jupiter, designates the Sun in the constellation of Aries. In the vernal equinox he is Hercules, in the summer solstice Horus or Apollo, in the winter solstice Harpocrates. Serapis was the Nile in its period of fertilization, or the autumnal Sun of the lower hemisphere. Isis was the moon, the mother of multiform nature; the same also as Neitha or Minerva, and the causer of the Nile’s inundations. Tithrambo, Brimo, or Hecate, was Isis incensed, or the maleficent moon. Bubastis, Diana, or Latona, was the titular symbol of the New Moon, and Buto or Latona of the full. The Cabiri, or Seven Planets, were worshipped as appendants of the greater gods; thus the planet Venus was the star of Isis, and the planet Jupiter the star of Osiris. The dog-headed Anubis, or Mercury, was the celestial horizon, the guard of the Sun’s gate, and the follower of Isis or the Moon. The bull Apis was a living symbol of the Nile; but was supposed to have been generated in a heifer by the transmission of celestial fire from the Moon; and was sacred both to that planet and to the Sun. A living goat was the symbol of Mendes or Pan; the generative principle of all nature. These animal types were multiplied; thus a lion figured the Sun; a cow, Isis and Venus; and a hawk, Osiris. Stones were also made typical. An obelisk represented the Sun; and seven columns, such as Pausanias saw in Laconia, the Planets. They worshipped also Night, the supposed creative principle of all things, as Athor, Venus,21 or Juno; and Pthas, the Vulcan as well as Minerva of the Grecians; the masculo-feminine cause and soul of the world; a pervading infinite spirit, or subtile ethereal fire, superior to the solar and planetary orbs; from which emanated terrestrial souls, and to which they returned. This system may very well be reconciled with the received theology; as it is not at all improbable that the subtile and scientific Ægyptians should have refined upon their original emblems, by connecting with them a secondary astronomical signification. In the explication of certain terms, and the identity and nature of many of the deities, the “Ægyptian Pantheon” agrees with the “New Analysis.”

Proclus (in Timæum, book i.) mentions a statue of Neitha or Minerva in a temple at Sais, in Ægypt, inscribed on the base with hieroglyphical characters to this effect: “I am whatever things are, whatever shall be, and whatever have been. None have lifted up my veil. The fruit which I have brought forth is the Sun.” Notwithstanding the mixed planetary worship, the Sun was considered by the Ægyptians as the king and architect of the universe: who under the name of Osiris comprehended in himself the power and efficacy of all the other material gods. Consistent with this is the Orphic fragment:

  Hear me thou! for ever whirling round the rolling heavens on high
Thy far-travelling orb of splendour midst the whirlpools of the sky:
Hear, effulgent Jove and Bacchus! father both of earth and sea!
Sun all-various! golden-beaming! all things teeming out of thee!

In another passage Orpheus identifies with the sun the different deities.

One Jove and Pluto; Bacchus, and the Sun;
One God alike in all, and all are one.

The cosmogonists of Ægypt represented the Demiurgus or Universal Maker, in a human form, sending forth from his mouth an egg; which egg was the world. They called him Kneph; who was the same as Pthas, the essential pervading energy. Chaos is described by Orpheus, in the manner of Ovid, as an immense, self-existent, heterogeneous mass; neither luminous nor tenebrous; which in the lapse of ages generated an egg; and from this egg was produced a masculo-feminine principle, which disposed the elements, and created the forms of nature. A primæval water or Chaos, and a mundane egg, are found also in the mythology of India.

In the cosmogonic system of Ægypt the world was Deity, and its parts other gods; a doctrine equivalent to the το πᾶν of the Stoics; the inherent divinity of the universe; which Lucan seems to intend in the sentiment of Cato:

Deus est quodcunque vides: quòcunque moveris.

Whate’er we see, where’er we move, is God.

This system is unfolded in the Orphic hymns:

Jove is the breath of all: the force of quenchless flame:
The root of ocean Jove: the sun and moon the same:
Jove is the king, the sire, whence generation sprang:
One strength, one Dæmon, great, on whom all beings hang:
His regal body grasps the vast material round:
There fire, earth, air, and wave, and day and night, are found.

The same physico-theology appears in the Orphean verses,

I swear by those, the generating powers,
Whence sprang the gods that have eternal being;
Fire, Water, Earth, and Heaven, the Moon and Sun,
Great Love effulgent, and the sable Night!

and in another fragment, preserved by Eusebius: (Præparat. Evang. iii. 9.)

Fire, water, earth, and ether, night and day,
Metis, first sire, and all-delighting Love.

Metis is Minerva or Vulcan, the mind of the universe already noticed.

From a general view of the Ægyptian and Orphic theogonies, they would appear to consist in an atheistic materialism; for although they acknowledge a certain divine, or active, principle pervading and animating passive matter, nothing can be inferred from this, superior to a physical operative energy. Jablonski indeed contends that, exclusive of the worship of the signs of the zodiac, and the solar and lunar phenomena, the more ancient Ægyptians recognized an intelligent power, or infinite Eternal Mind, on whose wisdom the operations of the sensible or visible divinities depended. But it may be doubted whether this controlling intelligence were any thing different from the before described emanation of the supposed ethereal spirit of holy dæmons, or deified men.

Hesiod begins his poem on the generation of the gods with certain cosmogonical principles. Chaos first exists; then Earth; and thirdly Love. Erebus and Night spring from Chaos, and generate Ether and Day; and Earth produces Heaven. But we search in vain through the rest of the work for the subtile intelligence of the Orphic philosophy. It has been attempted, indeed, to reduce the whole into a consistent scheme of theogonic physiology, by allegorizing the supernatural battles into volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and earthquakes; but much would still remain incapable of being wrested to a physical sense. On certain crude principles of cosmogonical tradition, and lineal generations of gods, intermingled with the generation of the world, the theogonist has ingrafted ancient legendary histories, and poetical and moral allegories. The historical mythology is alone significant; for every thing respecting the nature of the gods was in Hesiod’s time perverted and misunderstood. The bard was no longer clothed in the robe of the hierophant.

Very different hypotheses have been framed to explain the Greek polytheism. They have failed because they were hypotheses. When the Abbé Banier22 detects the real characters of profane history in the gods of the Pantheon; and when De Gebelin23 sees in them only emblematical shadows, personifying the successive inventions of the sciences and arts, we are reminded of the observation of Dr. Reid; (Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man:) “that there never was an hypothesis invented by an ingenious man, which although destitute of direct evidence, did not serve to account for a variety of phenomena, and had not therefore an indirect evidence in its favour.” Even the Alchemists have laid claim to the heathen mythology; the pagan stories have been analysed into chemical arcana: the golden fleece becomes a recipe for the discovery of the philosopher’s stone inscribed on a ram’s-skin, and Medea restores her father to life by means of the grand elixir.24

But it were an unreasonable scepticism to argue from these visionary theories, that the ancient fabulous philosophy is a mass of inscrutable and unmeaning superstition. The affinity between the different systems of paganism rests on irrefutable proof.25 This affinity points to a common origin. The light of history directs us to Ægypt. The astronomical genius of that nation led them to symbolize their idols by the celestial signs. These idols were the deified memories of men. As to their individuality, we are assisted by certain resemblances in heathen theology to Mosaic scripture. This parallel may have been urged too closely and too fancifully; as by Huet, in his “Demonstratio Evangelica:” who affirms that all the deities of the Ægyptians, Indians, Americans, Greeks, and Italians, are only Moses in disguise; and by Theophilus Gale, in his “Court of the Gentiles;” who draws a parallel between the god Pan, and the Messias, Abel, and Israel; and who derives not only both the mythic or fabulous, and the physical theology of the heathens, but all human letters and sciences from the Hebrew language and scriptures, and the philosophies of Joseph, Moses, and Solomon. Mistakes may have arisen from trusting too much to a specious analogy; as where Tubal-cain, the artificer of brass and iron, is identified with Vulcan.26 The conjectures of Hebraic etymologists, also, as of Bochart, in the Phaleg and Canaan of his Geographia sacra, must be acknowledged to be often vague and inconclusive. But so plain are the general traces of corrupted scripture-history, that Celsus, in his books against the Christians, attacks the biblical records as plagiarisms from the pagan mythology; and asserts that Paradise is borrowed from the gardens of Alcinous, and the flood of Noah from that of Deucalion; which Origen refutes by the greater antiquity of the Jewish traditions.

It is not to be supposed that they, who trace these parallels of mythology with scripture, mean that scripture was its immediate source: as the French Encyclopædists seem to think, when they ridicule the idea of the Grecian poets having deduced their fables from the Mosaic books, of which they knew nothing. The religious separation of the Jews renders it improbable, that even the intellectual philosophy of the Greek sages, as Thales and Pythagoras, should have been indebted for the idea of pure incorporeal deity to the sacred oracles: though Dr. Anderson conceives it probable that “the Mosaic scriptures, and other prophetical writings under the Jewish dispensation, could not be unknown to the priests of Ægypt, Chaldæa, and other adjacent countries.” History of Philosophy, p. 88.

But the improbability is greatly increased with respect to the mythological philosophy; nor is it credible that the circumstances of pagan story, on the supposition of their representing the same events as those recorded in the book of Genesis, should have been transferred immediately from the volume of Moses by poets or philosophers into the popular religion. Nations do not borrow vast systems of theology from poets or even from priests. Gale does not suppose that priests or bards imported the Hebrew accounts from the sacred writings; but that they were learnt, through international communication with the Jews, by the Phœnicians; who, in their various nautical enterprizes, carried them to distant countries.

But the temple of heathen mythology rests its pillars in the two hemispheres, and overshadows climes unvisited by the navigators of Phœnicia. Its basis must, apparently, be sought without the circle of Jewish report and scripture, in ancient gentile tradition. Stillingfleet convincingly argues, that, assuming the descent of mankind from the posterity of Noah, the obliteration and extinction of all remnants of oral history concerning the ancient world is utterly inconceivable. He proceeds to show that such fragments were, in fact, so preserved in many nations after the dispersion; that they were appropriated by the Phœnicians, Greeks, Italians, and others to their respective countries; and that portions of Noah’s memory, in particular, were retained in many fables under Saturn, Janus, Prometheus, and Bacchus.

Similar to this is the outline of the Analytic System; in which, however, the dæmon-worship of the patriarchs of mankind is connected with the arkite and ophite idolatry under the types of the sun and moon. The affinities in the pagan sister-mythologies are explained by the general dissemination of these idolatrous mysteries, and the traditions which they were designed to commemorate, through the dispersion of a peculiar people in the early ages; migrating from a central point, and spreading through the extremest regions of the east and west.

“This wonderful people were the descendants of Chus; and called Cuthites and Cuseans. They stood their ground at the general migration of families, but were at last scattered over the face of the earth. They were the first apostates from the truth, yet great in worldly wisdom. They introduced, wherever they came, many useful arts, and were looked up to as a superior order of beings. They were joined in their expeditions by other nations; especially by the collateral branches of their family; the Mizraim, Caphtorim, and the sons of Canaän. These were all of the line of Ham, who was held by his posterity in the highest veneration. They called him Amon; and having in process of time raised him to a divinity, they worshipped him as the Sun; and from this worship they were called Amonians. Under this denomination are included all of this family; whether they were Ægyptians or Syrians, of Phœnicia or of Canaän. They were a people who carefully preserved memorials of their ancestors, and of those great events which had preceded their dispersion. These were described in hieroglyphics on pillars and obelisks.

“The deity whom they originally worshipped was the Sun; but they soon conferred his titles upon some other of their ancestors; whence arose a mixed worship. Chus was one of these; and the idolatry began among his sons. The same was practised by the Ægyptians; but this nation made many subtile distinctions; and supposing that there were certain emanations of divinity, they affected to particularize each by some title, and to worship the deity by his attributes. This gave rise to a multiplicity of gods. The Grecians, who received their religion from Ægypt and the East, misapplied the terms which they had received, and made a god out of every title.” Preface to the Analysis of Ancient Mythology.

Footnotes

4 It has been a favourite theory of learned men, that Virgil had access to Sibylline prophecies, which foretold the birth of a Saviour. How came the Sibyls, any more than the Pythonesses of Delphos, to be ranked on a sudden with the really inspired prophets? or is it credible that they should have had either the curiosity, or the power, to inspect the Jewish Scriptures? The “Sibylline Verses” were confessedly interpolated, if not fabricated, by the pious fraud of Monks. The imitations from Isaiah seem no less chimerical. Every description of a golden age among the poets may be wrested into a similar parallel. Nor is it to be conceived that Virgil would have produced so dry a copy of so luxuriant an original. This argument does not affect the extraordinary coincidence of the time of the appearance of this eclogue, with the epoch of the Messiah’s birth; which is exceedingly curious.

5 See the epigram; which, for want of an owner, is ascribed by Tzetzes to Pindar:
Hail Hesiod! wisest man! who twice the bloom
Of youth hast prov’d, and twice approach’d the tomb.

6 The Greeks were extremely fanciful about dolphins. Several stories of persons preserved from drowning by dolphins, and romantic tales of their fondness for children, and their love of music, are related by Plutarch in his “Banquet of Diocles.”

7 See “Specimens of ancient Sculpture,” by the society of Dilettanti.

8 Robinson, Dissertatio de Hesiodo.

9 “If we consider the chronology of Homer’s life to be sufficiently established, one would be tempted to believe that his rhapsodies, as they were called, have not only been arranged and digested in a subsequent period, as has been asserted on good authority, but have even undergone something similar to the refaccimento by Berni of Boyardo’s Orlando.” Essays annexed to Professor Millar’s History of the English Government.

10 It is strange, however, that a critic like Gibbon should have allowed himself to talk of a definite time when “Homer wrote his Iliad;” in an age when alphabetic characters were not in use; when poets composed only rhapsodies, or such portions as could be recited at one time; which were preserved by oral tradition through the recitations of succeeding bards.

11 The first specimen of a regular tablet of chronology is said to have been given by Demetrius Phalereus in his Αρχοντων Αναγραφη, about the middle of the fourth century B. C. The historian Timæus, who flourished in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, first arranged his narrative in the order of Olympiads; which began B. C. 776. His contemporary Sosibius, gave a work entitled Χρονων Αναγραφη: Apollodorus wrote the Συνταξις Χρονικη: and on such chronologers rests the credit of all later compilers, as well as of the Arundelian Marbles. Dr. Gillies.
We are informed by Dr. Clarke, in his “Travels,” that these marbles were not found in Paros, but in the Isle of Zia.

12 The following are enumerated as the lost poems of Hesiod.
The Catalogue of Women or Heroines, in five parts, of which the fifth appears to have been entitled “The Herogony.” Suidas.
The Melampodia; from the sooth-sayer Melampus; a poem on divination. Pausanias, Athenæus.
The great Astronomy or Stellar Book. Pliny.
Descent of Theseus into Hades. Pausanias.
Admonitions of Chiron to Achilles. Pausanias, Aristophanes.
Soothsayings and Explications of Signs. Pausanias.
Divine Speeches. Maximus Tyrius.
Great Actions. Athenæus.
Of the Dactyli of Cretan Ida; discoverers of iron. Suidas, Pliny.
Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis. Tzetzes.
Ægimius. Athenæus. Apocryphal.
Elegy on Batrachus, a beloved youth. Suidas.
Circuit of the Earth. Strabo.
The Marriage of Ceyx. Athenæus, Plutarch.
On Herbs. Pliny.
On Medicine. Plutarch.
Fabricius (Bibliotheca Græca) supposes the two latter subjects to be alluded to as incidental topics in other works of Hesiod. But the passages quoted by him from Pliny and Plutarch seem to justify the opinion that they meant to advert to distinct poems. There is nothing in the works extant which favours the former idea. Mallows and asphodel are the only herbs mentioned: and that merely as synonymous with a frugal meal: like the cichorea levesque malvæ of Horace: nor is there anything medical; for the passages respecting bathing, children, &c. are mere superstitions, unconnected with health. Athenæus (book iii.) quotes some verses as ascribed to Hesiod respecting the fishes fit for salting; but says they seem to be rather the verses of a cook than of a poet; and adds that cities are mentioned in them which were posterior to Hesiod’s time. Lilius Gyraldus states that the fables of Æsop have been assigned to Hesiod. Plutarch, indeed, observes that Æsop might himself have profited by Hesiod’s apologue of the Hawk and the Nightingale; and Quintilian mentions Hesiod, and not Æsop, as the earliest fabulist; which passages may have been strained to bear the above meaning. As to the Greek fables, extant under the name of Æsop, they are proved to be spurious. See Bentley’s Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles, &c. and the fables of Æsop.

13 Manilius, describing the subjects of Hesiod, has a line

14 In the same poem, which is a love-elegy to his mistress Leontium on the sufferings of lovers, Homer is made to visit Ithaca, “sighing like furnace” for the chaste Penelope.

15 The Quarterly Reviewer, in his critique on my “Specimens of the Classic Poets,” conceives it strange that I should prefer the Medea of Apollonius to Virgil’s Dido; and talks of critical heresies. The deliberation of Medea on her purposed suicide, and her interview with Jason in the temple of Hecate, place the matter beyond all question; except with those who may be frightened by the word heresy into a surrender of their judgments to vulgar prejudice and traditional error.

16 This fine natural image is ridiculously parodied by Addison, “The old men, too, are bitterly pinched by the weather.” Essay on Virgil’s Georgics.

17 These were excluded from the first edition of my translation, but are now reinstated, as curiously illustrative of manners.

20The Ægyptians held that the world was produced from Chaos, or Water. They worshipped the Sun, as Osiris, Hammon, and Horus; the Moon, as Isis; the Cabiri or Planets, as symbols of invisible divinities. They had two systems of worship; the one exoteric or popular, the other esoteric or mystical. The adoration of the celestial bodies was literal with the people, and emblematical with the priesthood. They supposed emanations from divinity to be resident in the parts of nature; and thus that the sun, moon, and stars, and the other bodies of the universe, were animated with a divine spirit or virtue; or retained portions of a divine essence from good demons or genii, who dwelt in them: these dæmons had been inclosed in the bodies of virtuous men; and having left them, passed into the stars and planets, which were consequently worshipped as gods. Hence probably the legend of Hesiod, who supposes the spirits of men in the golden age to become holy dæmons; though these dæmons are not sent to the stars, but hover round the earth and keep watch over the actions of humankind.

18 We know from Homer (Il. vi.) that when Prætus sent Bellerophon to the king of Lycia he gave him, not a written letter, but σηματα λυγρα, mournful signs; (probably like the picture-writing of the Mexicans:) writing could not be common till many centuries afterwards, since the first written laws were given in Greece only six centuries B. C. (Herod. lib. ii. Strab. lib. vi.) Dr. Gillies.

19 “The Trœzenian histories,” observes Ælian, book xi. ch. 2, “relate that the poems of Oræbantius, a native of Trœzene, were in existence before Homer; and I know they affirm that Dares the Phrygian, whose Iliad is even now extant, lived before Homer’s time. Melisander, the Milesian, likewise, composed the battle of the Lapithæ and the Centaurs.”

20 Brucker, Historia Critica Philosophiæ, tom. i. Homer represents father Oceanus as the generator of all things: and the Chaos of Hesiod is merely the watery element.

21 So Orpheus:

Night, source of all things, whom we Venus name.

Night and Chaos, or the aqueous mass, seem reciprocally considered as the source of nature.

22 La Mythologie, ou la Fable expliquée par l’Histoire.

23 Monde Primitif.

24 Wotton’s Reflections on ancient and modern Learning.

25 See Sir William Jones’s Dissertation on the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India.

26 The working of metals was not among the ancient attributes of Vulcan: but a diversity of character or attributes is not always an objection. Each god had not only a twofold nature, celestial, and human or heroical, but his history and qualities changed with change of place. Thus Hercules was the Sun; he was also a vagabond hero; but he may have been one person in Greece, and another in Phœnicia. Gerard Vossius, in his treatise “de Origine et Progressu Idolatriæ,” may therefore be right in his conjecture, that among the Phœnicians both Joshua and Samson were commemorated in the Tyrian Hercules. Bacchus was the Sun, and an Indian conqueror. His history also assimilates with that of Noah. He was likewise in all probability Caphtor, the grandson of Ham; the great Ægyptian warrior who dispossessed the Avim of that part of the land of Canaan, afterwards called Philistia. (See Priestley’s Lectures on History, i. 5.) But it is natural that the Phœnicians, who visited Greece when the memory of Moses was still vivid among the Canaanites, should have brought with them miraculous reports of the Jewish lawgiver, which were added to the history of Bacchus. Bacchus is called by Orpheus, Μισης; and by Plutarch (de Iside et Osiride) Palæstinus. Bacchus was exposed in an ark upon a river: a double coincidence with Noah and Moses, which is exactly in the spirit of the old mythologists. Nonnus, in his Dionysiacs, mentions the flight of Bacchus to the red sea, and his battles with the Princes of Arabia; and relates that he touched the rivers Orontes and Hydaspes with his thyrsus, and that the rivers dried up, and he passed through dry-shod. The Indians are in darkness, while the Bacchic army are in light. The ivy-rod of Bacchus is thrown on the ground, and creeps to and fro like a live serpent. Snakes twist themselves about the hair and limbs of Bacchus; which may be a shadow of the fiery serpents in the wilderness. The host of Bacchus, like the multitude led by Moses, is accompanied by women. One of the Bacchæ touches a rock, and water gushes out; at another time wine and honey; and the rivers run with milk. These circumstances are very remarkable. See Stillingfleet, Origines Sacræ, ch. v. Nonnus, Dionysiacs.