Page:Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica.djvu/30

 arisen in the following way : the Catalogues probably ended (cp. Theogony 963 ff.) with some such passage as this: "But now, ye Muses, sing of the tribes of women with whom the Sons of Heaven were joined in love, women pre-eminent above their fellows in beauty, such (οἵη) as was Niobe (?)." Each succeeding heroine was then introduced by the formula ἢ οἵη "Or such as was..." (cp. frags. 88, 92, etc.). A large fragment of the Eoiae is extant at the beginning of the Shield of Heracles, which may be mentioned here. The "supplement" (ll. 57-480) is nominally devoted to a description of the combat between Heracles and Cyenus, but the greater part is taken is taken up with an inferior description of the shield of Heracles, in imitation of the Homeric shield of Achilles (Iliad xviii. 478 ff.). Nothing shows more clearly the collapse of the principles of the Hesiodic school than this ultimate servile dependence upon Homeric models.

At the close of the Shield Heracles goes on to Trachis to the house of Ceyx, and this warning suggests that the Marriage of Ceyx may have come immediately after the ἢ οἵη of Alcmena in the Eoiae: possibly Halcyone, the wife of Ceyx, was one of the heroines sung in the poem, and the original section was "developed" into the Marriage, although what form the poem took is unknown.

Next to the Eoiae and the poems which seemed to have developed from it, it is natural to place the Great Eoiae. This, again, as we know from fragments, was a list of heroines who bare children to the gods: from the title we must suppose it to have been much longer than the simple Eoiae, but its

xxiv