Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/36

 this, a closer study of the whole will prove that the want of connectedness in the work is more seeming than real. Didactic poetry, from Hesiod's day until the present, has ever claimed the privilege of arranging its hortatory topics pretty much as is most convenient, and of enforcing its chief idea, be that what it may, by arguments and illustrations rather congruous in the main than marshalled in the best order of their going. But the 'Works and Days' is capable of tolerably neat division and subdivision. The first part (vv. 1-383) is ethical rather than didactic,—a setting-forth by contrast, and by the accessory aid of myth, fable, allegory, and proverb-lore, of the superiority of honest labour to unthrift and idleness, and of worthy emulation to unworthy strife and envying. The second part (vv. 384-764) consists of practical hints and rules as to husbandry, and, in a true didactic strain, furnishes advice how best to go about that which was the industrious Bœotian's proper and chief means of subsistence. It thus follows naturally on the general exhortation to honest labour which formed the first part of the poem. The third and last part is a religious calendar of the months, with remarks upon the days most lucky or unpropitious for this or that duty or occupation of rural and nautical life. All three, however, more or less address Perses as "a sort of ideal reader," and thus hang together quite sufficiently for didactic coherence; whilst in each of the two first parts episodic matter helps to relieve the dry routine of exhortation or precept, and is introduced, as we shall endeavour to show, with more skill and sys-