Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/70



token of the antiquity of Hesiod's 'Works and Days' is his use of familiar proverbs to illustrate his vein of thought, and to attract a primitive audience. The scope and structure of his other extant poems are not such as to admit this mode of illustration; but the fact, that amidst the fragments which remain of his lost poems are preserved several maxims and saws of practical and homely wisdom, shows that this use of proverbs was characteristic of his poetry, or that his imitators—if we suppose these lost poems not to have been really his—at all events held it to be so. It is, perhaps, needless to remark that the poems of Homer are full of like adagial sentences—so much so, indeed, that James Duport, the Greek professor at Cambridge, published in 1680 an elaborate parallelism of the proverbial philosophy of the Iliad and Odyssey, with the adages as well of sacred as of profane writers. Other scholars have since followed his lead, and elucidated the same common point in the father of Greek poetry, and those who have opened a like vein in