Page:Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica.djvu/25

 , old chronicles, and old plays; but close inspection will show that the Works and Days has a real unity and that the picturesque title is somewhat misleading. The poem has properly no technical object at all, but is moral: its real aim is to show men how best to live in a difficult world. So viewed the four seemingly independent sections will be found to be linked together in a real bond of unity. Such a connection between the first and second sections is easily seen, but the links between these and the third and fourth are no less real: to make life go tolerably smoothly it is most important to be just and to know how to win a livelihood; but happiness also largely depends on prudence and care both in social and home life as well, and not least on avoidance of actions which offend supernatural powers and bring ill-luck. And finally, if your industry is to be fruitful, you must know what days are suitable for various kinds of work. This moral aim — as opposed to the currently accepted technical aim of the poem — explains the otherwise puzzling incompleteness of the instructions on farming and seafaring.

Of the Hesiodic poems similar in character to the Works and Days, only the scantiest fragments survive. One at least of these, the Divination of Birds, was, as we know from Proclus, attached to the end of the Works until it was rejected by Apollonius Rhodius: doubtless it continued the same theme of how to live, showing how man can avoid disasters by attending to the omens to be drawn from birds. It is possible that the Astronomy or Astrology (as Plutarch calls it) was in turn appended to the Divination. It certainly gave some account of the principal constellations, their xix b 2