Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/31

 Perses, and beyond the atmosphere of unrighteous judges. Pausanias states that Hesiod, like Homer, whether from fortune's spite or natural distaste, enjoyed no intimacy with kings or great people; and this consists with Plutarch's story that the Spartan Cleomenes used to call Hesiod "the poet of the Helots," in contrast with Homer, "the delight of warriors," and with the inference from an expression in the 'Works and Days' that the poet and his father were only resident aliens in Bœotia. In Thespiæ, to which realm he belonged, agriculture was held degrading to a freeman, which helps to account for his being, in his own day, a poet only of the peasantry and the lower classes. Pausanias and Paterculus do but retail tradition; but this suffices to corroborate the impression, derived from the poet's own works, of a calm and contemplative life, unclouded except by the worthlessness of others, and owing no drawbacks to faults or failings of its own. Musing much on the deities whose histories he systematised as best he might, and at whose fanes, notwithstanding all his research and inquiry, he still ignorantly worshipped; regulating his life on plain and homely moral principles, and ever awake to the voice of mythology, which spoke so stirringly to dwellers in his home of Bœotia,—Hesiod lived and died in that mountain-girded region, answerably to the testimony of the epitaph by his countryman Chersias, which Pausanias read on the poet's sepulchre at Orchomenus:—