Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/110

96 of the same age and authorship as the 'Works' or the 'Theogony.' The sounder criticism of Müller deems it worthy to be set side by side with Homer's account of the Shield of Achilles in the 13th book of the Iliad, and characterises it as executed in the genuine spirit of the Hesiodian school. Were it desirable, it might be shown from the writings of the same critic that the objects represented on Hesiod's shield were in fact the first subjects of the Greek artificers in bronze, and that there are proofs in the accoutrement of Hercules, not with club and lion's skin, but like other heroes, of a date for this poem not posterior to the 40th Olympiad.

It has, no doubt, been the ill-fortune of this poem to have attracted more than its fair share of botchers and interpolators, and the discrimination of the true gold from the counterfeit and base metal belongs rather to a critical edition of the Hesiodic remains; but in the glance which we propose to bestow upon the work as it has come down to us, it will be shown that, after considerable allowance for interpolated passages, a residuum of fine heroic poetry will survive the process.

The poem proper, it has been said, begins at v. 57. Hercules, on reaching manhood, had undertaken an expedition against a noted robber, Cycnus, the son of Ares and Pelopia. This Cycnus used to infest the mountain-passes between Thessaly and Bœotia, and sacrilegiously waylay the processions to Delphi. It seems he would have been willing to buy off Apollo's