HESIOD—the poet par excellence of peace and of agriculture, as Homer is of war and of the “heroic” virtues—was born at Ascra, a village in Boeotia, a part of Hellas, which, in spite of its proverbial fame for beef-eating and stupidity, gave birth to three other eminent persons—Pindar, the lyric poet, Epameinondas, the great military genius and statesman, and Plutarch, the most amiable moralist of antiquity.

The little that is known of the life of Hesiod is derived from his Works and Days. From this celebrated poem we learn that his father was an emigrant from Æolia, the Greek portion of the north-west corner of the Lesser Asia; that his elder brother, Perses, had, by collusion with the judges, deprived him of his just inheritance; that after this he settled at Orchomenos, a neighbouring town—in the pre-historical ages a powerful and renowned city. This is all that is certainly known of the author of the Works and Days, and The Theogony. Of the genuineness of the former there has been little or no doubt; that of the latter—at least in part—has been called in question. Besides these two chief works, there is extant a piece entitled The Shield of Herakles, in imitation of the Homeric Shield (Iliad xviii.) The Catalogues of Women—a poem commemorating the heroines beloved by the gods, and who were thus the ancestresses of the long line of heroes, the reputed founders of the ruling families in Hellas—is lost.

The charm of the Works and Days—the first didactic poem extant—is its apparent earnestness of purpose and simplicity of style. The author’s frequent references to, and rebuke of, legal injustices—his sense of which had been quickened by the iniquitous decisions of the judges already referred to—are as naÏve as they are pathetic.

Of the Theogony, the subject, as the title implies, is the history of the generation and successive dynasties of the Olympian divinities—the objects of Greek worship. It may, indeed, be styled the Hellenic Bible, and, with the Homeric Epics, it formed the principal theology of the old Greeks, and of the later Romans or Latins. The “Prooemium,” or introductory verses—in which the Muses are represented as appearing to their votary at the foot of the sacred Helicon, and consecrating him to the work of revealing the divine mysteries by the gift of a laurel-branch—and the following verses, describing their return to the celestial mansions, where they hymn the omnipotent Father, are very charming. To the long description of the tremendous struggle of the warring gods and Titans, fighting for the possession of heaven, Milton was indebted for his famous delineation of a similar conflict.

The Works and Days, in striking contrast with the military spirit of the Homeric epic, deals in plain and simple verse with questions ethical, political, and economic. The ethical portion exhibits much true feeling, and a conviction of the evils brought upon the earth by the triumph of injustice and of violence. The well-known passages in which the poet figures the gradual declension and degeneracy of men from the golden to the present iron race, are the remote original of all the later pleasing poetic fictions of golden ages and times of innocence.

According to Hesiod, there are two everlastingly antagonistic agents at work on the Earth; the spirit of war and fighting, and the peaceful spirit of agriculture and mechanical industry. And in the apostrophe in which he bitterly reproaches his unrighteous judges—

he seems to have a profound conviction of the truth taught by Vegetarianism—that luxurious living is the fruitful parent of selfishness in its manifold forms.[3]

That Hesiod regarded that diet which depends mainly or entirely upon agriculture and upon fruits as the highest and best mode of life is sufficiently evident in the following verses descriptive of the “Golden Age” life:—

The second race—the “Silver Age”—inferior to the first and wholly innocent people, were, nevertheless, guiltless of bloodshed in the preparation of their food; nor did they offer sacrifices—in the poet’s judgment, it appears, a damnable error. For the third—the “Brazen Age”—it was reserved to inaugurate the feast of blood:—

According to Hesiod, who is followed by the later poets, the “immortals inhabiting the Olympian mansions” feast ever on the pure and bloodless food of Ambrosia, and their drink is Nectar, which may be taken to be a sort of refined dew. He represents the divine Muses of Helicon, who inspire his song, as reproaching the shepherds, his neighbours, “that tend the flocks,” with the possession of “mere fleshly appetites.”

Ovid, amongst the Latins, is the most charming painter of the innocence of the “Golden Age.” Amongst our own poets, Pope, Thomson, and Shelley—the last as a prophet of the future and actual rather than the poet of a past and fictitious age of innocence—have contributed to embellish the fable of the Past and the hope of the Future.