Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/23

 brook an individual Hesiod than an individual Homer. But be this as it may, the glimpses which the poet gives of himself, in the more autobiographical of his reputed works, present the picture of a not very locomotive sage, shrewd, practical, and observant within his range of observation, apt to learn, and apt also to teach, storing up life's everyday lessons as they strike him, and drawing for his poetry upon a well-filled bank of homely truth and experience. He gives the distinct idea of one who, having a gift and believing in a commission, sets himself to illustrate his own sentiment, that "in front of excellence the gods have placed exertion;" and whilst in the 'Works and Days' it is obvious that his aim and drift are the improvement of his fellow-men by a true detail of his experiences in practical agriculture, in the 'Theogony' he commands our respect and reverence for the pains and research by which he has worked into a system, and this too for the benefit and instruction of his fellows, the floating legends of the gods and goddesses and their offspring, which till his day must have been a chaotic congeries. On works akin to these two main and extant poems we may conceive him to have spent that part of his mature life which was not given up to husbandry. Travelling he must have disliked—at any rate, if it involved sea-voyages. His lists of rivers in the 'Theogony' are curiously defective where it might have been supposed they would be fullest—as regards Hellas generally; whereas he gives many names