Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/125

 Revieivs. 105

Hesiod. The Poems and Fragments done into English prose, with Introduction and Appendices, by A. W. Mair. Frowde, 1908. i2mo, pp. 224.

As embodying the oldest formal record alike of mythologic speculation and agricultural practice among the Greeks, Hesiod must always be of the highest interest to folklorists. To those whose Greek has become too rusty to allow them to read the original text with ease, this excellent version will be most welcome, and will recall much which, though it should be present to the memory of all engaged in our studies, has a way of becoming dim and faint. Professor Mair prints versions of the three considerable works as well as of the majority of the fragments attributed to Hesiod. His commentary is chiefly devoted to illustrating the agricultural import of his author, and the parallel matter which he adduces, ranging from the ist to the 17th century a.d., affords a most instructive instance of the persistence of ' craft ' formulas and conceptions, and corroborates strongly that cardinal dogma of the folklorist's creed — the toughness of tradition. Hesiod himself in the gnomic wisdom which he deals out to his fellow-farmers presents an example of peasant psychology, almost every trait of which is still exhibited by the peasant proprietors of any genuinely agricultural country, say France. In particular it should be noted that practices, fondly deemed to be the product of modern degeneracy, are of im- memorial antiquity ; for Hesiod, as for the contemporary French peasant, the small family is the ideal. "May there be an only-born son to feed * his father's house : for so is wealth increased in the halls r

Professor Mair hints at a larger work in which all the multifarious and complex questions raised by Hesiod will be discussed. It will be welcome. To the present reviewer at least the way in which recent writers, for instance Miss Harrison and Professor Gilbert Murray, handle Hesiodic problems is by no means satisfying. Unless this larger work is to appear shortly, a second edition of the Translation under review may

like myself to make better sense.
 * Diibner (Didot Hesiod) translates 'qui servet,' which seems to a layman