Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/109



was remarked at the outset that one class of Hesiodic poems consisted of epics in petto on some subject of heroic mythology. The 'Shield of Hercules' survives as a sample, if indeed it is to be received as Hesiod's work. Its theme is a single adventure of Hercules, his combat with Cycnus and his father, the war-god, near Apollo's Temple at Pagasæ. Shorn of a preface of fifty-six verses borrowed from the 'Catalogue of Women,' and having for their burden the artifice of Zeus with Alcmena, which resulted in the birth of Hercules, a preface manifestly in the wrong place, the 'Shield' is a fairly compact poem, constructed as a frame for the description of the hero's buckler, to which the rest of the poem is ancillary. Among the ancients the balance of opinion leaned to the belief that it was written by the author of the 'Theogony;' but though there is insufficient ground for the wholesale depreciation cast upon it by Mure, in his 'History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece,' it can hardly be maintained that the 'Shield of Hercules' is a poem