Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/78

 54 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE be an idle dog, ignorant of the world and fond of law. Hesiod wants to praise righteousness : the figure must show a certain light-handedness in its dealings with money. We have then no information of what Hesiod ^vas — only a tradition of what Hesiod was supposed to be. He was born at Kyme, in ^olis ; his father migrated to Boeotia, and settled in Ascra, a charming and fertile village on the slopes of Mount Helicon, which the poet describes as " bad in winter^ insufferable in summer!' Here he herded flocks on Helicon, till one day the Muses greeted him with the words : " Boors of the wild fields, by-words of shame, nothing but belly ! We know how to tell many false things true-seeming, but we know how to speak the real truth when we will'.' This made Hesiod a poet. We hear nothing more of him till his death, except that he once went across the channel from Aulis to Chalkis to take part in a competition at the funeral games of Amphidamas, king of Euboea, and, al- though much of his advice is about nautical matters, that he ciid not enjoy the sea. He avoided Southern Greece because of an oracle which foretold that he should die at Nemea ; and so he did, at a little sanctuary near Oineon in Locris, which happened to bear that name. He was murdered and thrown into the sea by the brothers of one Clymene or Ctimene, who was supposed to have borne a son to the octogenarian poet ; but the dolphins brought the body to land, and a stately tomb was built for it at Oineon. The son was the great lyrist Stesichorus ! Certainly the faith of these legend-makers can move mountains. Yet we can perhaps get some historical meaning out of their figments. The whole evidence of the poems goes to suggest that there was a very old peasant- poetry in Boeotia, the direct descendant in all likelihood