Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/44

30 moving over the earth—a race of which Homer, indeed, says nought, but whose functions, shadowed forth in Hesiod, accord pretty much with the account Diotima gives of them in the 'Banquet of Plato.' Here is Hesiod's account:—

With this dim forecasting by a heathen of the "ministry of angels" may be compared the poet's reference further on in the poem to the same invisible agency, where he uses the argument of the continual oversight of these thrice ten thousand genii as a dissuasive to corrupt judgments, such as those which the Bœotian judges had given in favour of his brother:—