Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/37

 tem than would appear to a perfunctory reader. The first part, as is almost universally agreed by editors and commentators, begins properly at v. 11, which in the Greek reads as if it were a correction of the view held by the author in his 'Theogony,' that there was but one "Eris," or "Contention," and which is therefore of some slight weight in the question of unity of authorship for the two poems. The introductory ten verses are in all probability nothing more than a shifting proem, in the shape of an address to Jove and the Muses, available for the use of the Hesiodian rhapsodists, in common with divers other like introductions. According to Pausanias, the Heliconians, who kept their countryman's great work engraved on a leaden tablet, knew nothing of these ten verses. Starting, then, at this point, the poet distinguishes between two goddesses of strife, the one pernicious and discord-sowing, the other provocative of honest enterprise. The elder and nobler of the twain is the parent of healthy competition, and actuates mechanics and artists, as well as bards and beggars, between which last trades it is obvious that the poet traces a not fortuitous connection:—

The wandering minstrel and the professional beggar of the heroic age exercise equally legitimate callings in Hesiod's view, and the picture which he draws