Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/815

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1em  HERZOGENBUSCH, or. See.  HESEKIEL, (1818–1874), German author and journalist, was born August 12, 1818, in Halle, where his father, a man of considerable distinction, was a preacher and inspector of schools, Hesekiel studied history and philosophy in Halle, Jena, and Berlin, and devoted himself in early life to journalism and litera- ture. In 1848 he settled in Berlin, where he lived till his death, February 26, 1874, achieving a considerable reputation both as a writer of books and as editor of the Neue Preussische Zeitung. He attempted many dif- ferent kinds of literary work, the most ambitious being perhaps his patriotic songs, of which he published a volume during the revolutionary excitement of 1848-49. Another collection—-Veue Preussenlieder—appeared in 1864 after the Danish war, and there was a third in 1870—Gegen die Franzosen, Preussische Kriegs- und RKonigslieder. Among his novels may be mentioned Vier Junker (1864) and Der Schultheiss vom Zeyst (1875). By far the best known of his works is his life of Prince Bismarck—Das Buch vom Firsten Bismarck (3d edition, enlarged, 1873). This biography, which has been translated into English by R. R. H. Mackenzie, is written from the point of view of an ardent admirer of the great chancellor. It is of no value as an estimate of his political importance, but it has acquired a certain popularity because of the mass of more or less interesting anecdotes which the author has brought together respecting both the public and the private life of his hero. It has lately, however, been rather thrust into the shade by tke more piquant revelations of Herr Busch.  HESIOD, the father of didactic poetry in Greece, is placed by Herodotus after Homer, but not more than before ; and, though the settlement of the question must depend on the internal evidence of the Hesiodic poems, this testimony is corroborated by the Parian marble and the historian Ephorus. He probably flourished about. His father had migrated from Cyme in Zolia to Beeotia, exchanging there a seafaring life fur agriculture; and Hesiod and his brother, a scapegrace named Perses, were born at Ascra, near the base of Helicon and under the mountains which encircle Beotia. Of this locality—whose claim to be his birth- place was disputel by the city Orchomenus on the score of possession of his relics——Hesiod’s description differs from that of modern topographers in pronouncing the climate un- genial, with alternations of excessive heat and cold; but the poet’s prejudice may have been influenced by the injustice of Beeotian law-courts, and it was at any rate here, as he fed his father’s flocks beside Helicon, that he received his com- mission from the Muses to be their prophet and poet—a commission which he recognized by dedicating to them an eared tripod won by him in a contest of song at funeral games in Eubcea, and extant at Helicon in tue age of Pausanias (Z’heog., 20-34 ; Pausan., ix. 31, § 3). But to this call were linked, no doubt, literary antecedents in /Evlia, as well as local associations of music and poetry in Hellas. His earliest poem, the famous Works and Days, embodies the experiences of his life afield, and, interwoven with episodes of fable, allegory, and personal history, forms a sort of Bceotian sheplerd’s calendar. The first portion is an ethical enforcement of honest labour and dissuasive of strife and idleness (1-383); the second consists of hints and rules as to husbandry (384-764); and the third is a religious calendar of the months, with remarks on the days most lucky or the contrary for rural or nautical employ- ments. The connecting link of the whole poem is the author’s advice to his brother, who appears to have bribed the corrupt judges to deprive Hesiod of his already scantier inheritance, and to whom, as he wasted his substance lounging in the agora, the poet more than once returned good for evil, though he tells him there will be a limit to this unmerited kindness. In the Works and Days thie episodes which rise above an even didactic level are the “Creation and Equipment of Pandora,” the “ Five Ages of the World,” and the much-admired ‘Description of Winter” (by some critics judged post-Hesiodic). It is in the Works and Days especially that we glean indications of Hesiod’s rank and condition in life, that of a stay-at- home farmer of the lower class, whose sole experience of the sea was a single voyage of 40 yards across the Euripus, and an old-fashioned bachelor whose misogynic views and prejudice against matrimony have been conjecturally traced to his brother Perses having a wife as extravagant as himself. The other poem attributed to Hesiod or his school which has come down in great part to modern times is he Theo- gony, a work of grander scope, inspired alike by older traditions and abundant local associations. It seems tliat no more congenial task could have suggested itself to the Ascrxcan shepherd than to work into system, as none had essayed to do before, the floating legends of the gods and goddesses and their offspring. This task Herodotus attributes to him, and he is quoted by Plato in his Sympostum (p. 178 B) as the author of the Zheogony. The first to question his claim to this distinction was Pausanias, the geographer. The Alexandrian grammarians had no doubt on the subject ; and indications of the hand that wrote the Works and Days may be found in the severe strictures on women, in the high esteem for the wealth-giver Plutus, and in coincidences of verbal expression. If, too, as commentators assert, the proper beginning of the Works and Days is at verse 11—

Ob Epa podvoy éjy 'Epliwy yévos, BAA’ em) yatay Eiss due,

it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the poet there corrects a statement made in his Z’heogony (225), where he had described Eris, the daughter of Night, as one and indivisible. One thing is clear, that, as Mr Grote puts it, it was the aim of Hesiod, or the member of his school who composed the Zheoyony, ‘to cast the divine functions into a systematic sequence,”—so welding into intelligible co- herence the generations and genealogies of the deities of Hellas, whom Homer had dealt with in passing and scattered notices only. The Zhcogony consists of three divisions—(1) a cosmogony, or creation ; (2) a theogony proper, recounting the history of the dynasties of Zeus and Cronus; and (3) a brief and abruptly terminated heroogony, or generaticn of heroes by immortal sires from mort:l mothers; the starting-point not improbably of the Hesiodic poem, the Zoiaz, or “ Catalogues of Women,” of which all but a few fragments are lost. Prefaced by an account of the Muses’ visit to their bard, the Theogony 