Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/82

 58 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE are tJiick with fur, but the cold blows through them, and through the builds hide and the goat's thick hair ; but it cannot blow through to the gentle little girl who sits m the cottage with her mother" and so on. And how good the summer is, in which foolish people have made it a reproach against Hesiod's poetic sensitiveness that he liked to sit in the shadow of a rock and have a picnic with milk and wine and plenty of food. The Theogony is an attempt, of course hopelessly in- adequate, to give a connected account of the gods, their origins and relationships. Some of it is more than old ; it is primeval. Several folk-gods occur whose names are found in Sanskrit, and who therefore may be imagined to date from Indo-European times, though they are too undignified for Homer to mention : Hestia, Rhea, Orthros, Kerberos. We are dealing with most ancient material in the Theogony ; but the language, the present form of the poem, and perhaps the very idea of syste- matising the gods, are comparatively late. The Erga 702 is quoted by Semonides (about 650 B.C.). But it is im- possible to date the poems. We have seen (p. 37) that the Theogony is quoted by the //zW— whereas the Theo- gony often quotes the Jliad and Odyssey, and at the end refers to the matter of several of the rejected epics. The text is in a bad condition ; it is often hard to see the connection or the sense. It almost looks as if there were traces of a rhapsode's notes, which could be ex- panded in recitation. There are remains of real, not merely literary, religion. Eros (120), Love, is prominent, because he was specially worshipped in Thespiae, Ascra's nearest big town. Hecate has a hymn (411-452) so earnest that it can only come from a local cult. A great part of the poem, the mutilation of Ouranos, the