CHAP. II. Hesiod. THERE has been much difference of opinion as to the to the comparative antiquity of Hesiod and Homer; each has alternately been thrown back into remoter periods by different writers, and sometimes they have been represented as contemporary, and competitors *. Adopting, in this instance, the chronology of the learned Dr. Hales, who has minutely investigated the subject, we shall consider Hesiod as the most ancient writer, and as having lived about 27 years before Homer. His works, indeed, bear the character of earlier production, and of a ruder age than the Iliad and the Odyssey. We may suppose him therefore to have lived about 911 years before the time of + * Hesiod Vit. ex Girald. de Poetar. Hist. + Hales's New Analysis of Chronology, vol. i. P. 241. Christ, and about 272 years after the siege of Troy, (fixing, with Hales, that event at B. C. 1183,) a calculation supported by the authority of the Parian marbles, though it ascribes a higher antiquity to the poet than is assigned to him by Sir Isaac Newton, who states him to have flourished 884 years before the Christian era, and within 110 or 120 years of Solomon, and one generation from the siege of Troy, which he places at a later period, than that which is usually assigned to it. Hesiod, indeed, has been understood to speak of himself, as having lived in the generation or age which succeeded the Trojan war; but Hales gives a different construction of the passage, and represents him to speak of a race of men distinguished by peculiar qualities, and not merely of a generation, and therefore not to affirm any thing inconsistent with the period, which he assigns to the siege of Troy †. The poet was an inhabitant of Ascra, in Boeotia, to which place his father had retired from Cumæ, one of the Æolian islands, now called Foia Nuova, in consequence of Γένος not γένη. t Hales, vol. i. p. 33. some distress. In early life he followed the humble occupation of a shepherd; he speaks with affecting complaint of the wintry cli mate and miserable city in which his fortune had placed him; and he appears afterwards to have moved to Locris, near Mount Parnassus, consecrating, by his abode there, a spot ever after sacred in fiction to the daughters of Memory and Jove, where future poets might drink the streams of inspiration. He seems to have been a man of great moderation and liberality of mind, much alive to the sensibilities of filial and fraternal tender ness, and entertaining a high respect for religious and moral principles. There are two chief poems of this author still extant, the "Generation of the Gods," and the "Works and Days," besides a smaller poem, entitled "Days," not to mention a piece suspected to be spurious, entitled the "Shield of Achilles," and some fragments of disputed character. Pausanias also speaks of a poem of Hesiod called "the Catalogue "of Women*. The two principal poems are valuable monuments of antiquity, and exhibit pleasing Lib. i. c. 49. p. 103. marks of a venerable simplicity of manners. The poet seems to have been desirous of exciting a religious spirit and a love of agriculture, adopting moral views of softening the disposition by leading men to cultivate the peaceful arts of life. The works are interspersed with just and pleasing reflections, and animated by a spirit of piety honourable to his character. One design in his Works and Days, is said to have been to wean his brother from idle pleasures, and to excite in him a love of industry and virtue *. It is related of Seleucus Nicator, that he so much delighted in it, that the book was found placed beneath his head after his death. Hesiod seems to have had some general notions of the creation of the world, but the theogony which he furnished, exhibits something of the outline of that wild and fanciful theory, which appears in the Indian mythologies, and under many representations of oriental nations, with respect to the birth of Erebus and Night, or the generating principles from which the universe was produced. The system of things which he attempts to develope, is as confused as the chaos from Fabricius in Hesiod. Fragment. which it is raised, and it is not easy to under stand his description. He states that Chaos first existed; and next in order, Earth, Tartarus, and Love; that Erebus and Night arose likewise from Chaos, and by their conjunction produced ther and Day. After which the heaven and celestial bodies were generated by the earth, as were the mountains and the barren sea, and afterwards the ocean by union of the earth and the heavens *. Some have thought that the system of Hesiod had a reference to the primeval state of the world in its moral history; but others discover nothing in this strange and fanciful cosmogony, but the broken fragments of tradition, and the illusions of a vain philosophy, "The discordant seeds of things not well joined." Hesiod furnishes us with an account of the birth of man, and of those fictitious personages of poetry, who float in the airy visions of Grecian mythology; and by representing, not only Thea, and Rhea, and Themis, and Mnemosyne, and the race of Onyoría, v. 116, &c. |