Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/79

 LEGEND OF HESIOD'S LIFE 55 of the old ^olian lays of the Achaioi, from which ' Homer ' was developed ; and that this was at some time enriched and invigorated by the reaction upon it of the full-flown Ionian epic. That is, Ionian poets must have settled in Boeotia and taken up the local poetry. Whether one of those poets was called ' Hesiodos ' is a question of little importance. It does not look like an invented name. At any rate, the Boeotian poetry flourished, and developed a special epic form, based on the Ionian ' Homer,' but with strong local traits. What of Hesiod's death ? We know that the Hesiodic poetry covered Locris as well as Boeotia ; the catalogues of women are especially Locrian. The Clymene story is suggested, doubtless, by a wish to provide a romantic and glorious ancestry for Stesichorus. Does the rest of the story mean that Locris counted Hesiod as her own, and showed his grave ; while Boeotia said he was a Boeotian, and explained the grave by saying that the Locrians had murdered him ? As for the victory at the funeral games of Amphidamas, it is a late insertion, and the unnamed rivals must be meant to include Homer. The story of a contest between Homer and Hesiod, in which the latter won, can be traced back, as we saw (p. 6), to the fifth century at least. Of Hesiod's poems we have nominally three preserved, but they might as well be called a dozen, so little unity has any one of them — the Theogony, the Works and Days {Erga)y and the Shield of Heracles. The Works and Days is a poem on ' Erga,' or Works of agriculture, with an appendix on the lucky and unlucky Days of the month, and an intertexture of moral sen- tences addressed to Perses. It is a slow, lowly, simple poem ; a little rough and hard, the utterance of those