Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/80

66 And in his treatment of these neighbours there was, to judge by his teaching, a very fair amount of liberality, though scarcely that high principle of benevolence which is content "to give, hoping nothing again." Self-interest, indeed, as might be expected, leavens the mass of his precepts of conduct, which may be characterised as a good workaday code for the citizen of a little narrow world, shut up within Bœotian mountains. We laugh at the suspicion that animates some, and the homeliness of others, but cannot fail withal to be captivated perforce by the ingenuousness with which the poet speaks his inner mind, and pretends to no higher philosophy than one of self-defence. In the line which follows the couplet last quoted, and which says that "where neighbours are what they should be, not an ox would be lost," for the whole village would turn out to catch the thief,—it has been surmised that there is allusion to an early "association for the prosecution of felons" in the Æolian colony from which Hesiod's father had come; but these glosses of commentators and scholiasts only spoil the simplicity of the poet's matter-of-fact philosophy, which in the instance referred to did but record what Themistocles afterwards seems to have seen, when, as a recommendation to a field for sale, he advertised that it had "a good neighbour."

Though the 'Theogony' is, from its nature and scope, by no means a storehouse of proverbs like the 'Works and Days,' it here and there has allusions and references to an already existing stock of such maxims. Where, in pointing a moral à propos of Pandora, he