Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/84

 6o LITERATURE OE ANCIENT GREECE valley ; but when they came out into the world, they found there families descended from Poseidon, the god of the great sea, perhaps of all waters, and they could not remain content with a mere local river. In Odyssey we have the second stage of the story : the real ancestor was Poseidon, only he visited Tyro disguised as the river ! The comparatively stable human ancestresses form the safest basis for cataloguing the shifting divine ancestors. There were five books in the Alexandrian edition of the Catalogues of lVo;nen* the last two being what is called Eoiai.* This quaint title is a half -humorous plural of the expression ^ o'it], ' Or like,. . . which was the form of transition to a new heroine, " Or like her who dwelt in Phthia^ with the CJiarites^ own loveliness, by the waters of Peneus, Cyrene the fair!' There are one hundred and twenty - four fragments of the Catalogue * and twenty -six of the ^ Or likes!* If they sometimes contradict each other, that is natural enough, and it cannot be held that the Alexandrian five books had all the women there ever were in the Hesiodic lists. When once the formula ' Or like' was started, it was as easy to put a new ancestress into the list as it is, say, to invent a new quatrain on the model of Edward Lear's. P'urther more, it was easy to expand a given Eoic * into a story, and this is actually the genesis of our third Hesiodic poem, the Shield of Heracles, the ancestress being, of course, the hero's mother, Alcmene. The Shield begins : " Or like Alcmene, when she fled her home and fatherland, and came to Thebes ; " it goes on to the birth of Heracles, who, it proceeds to say, slew Kyknos, and then it tells how he slew Kyknos. In the arming of Heracles before the battle comes a long description of the shield.