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APPENDIX B. (1.)

Hesiodus, one of the earliest Greek poets, respecting whose personal history we possess little more authentic information than respecting that of Homer, together with whom he is frequently mentioned by the ancients. The names of these two poets, in fact, form as it were the two poles of the early epic poetry of the Greeks; and as Homer represents the poetry, or school of poetry, belonging chiefly to Ionia in Asia Minor, so Hesiod is the representative of a school of bards, which was developed somewhat later at the foot of Mount Helicon in Bœotia, and spread over Phocis and Eubœa. The only points of resemblance between the two poets, or their respective schools, consists in their forms of versification and their dialect, but in all other respects they move in totally distinct spheres: for the Homeric takes for its subjects the restless activity of the heroic age, while the Hesiodic turns its attention to the quiet pursuits of ordinary life, to the origin of the world, the gods and heroes. The latter thus gave to its productions an ethical and religious character; and this circumstance alone suggests an advance in the intellectual state of the ancient Greeks upon that which we have depicted in the Homeric poems; though we do not mean to assert that the elements of the Hesiodic poetry are of a later date than the age of Homer, for they may, on the contrary, be as ancient as the Greek nation itself. But we must, at any rate, infer that the Hesiodic poetry, such as it has come down to us, is of later growth than the Homeric; an opinion which is confirmed also by the language and expressions of the two schools, and by a variety of collateral circumstances, among which we may mention the range of knowledge being much more extensive in the poems which bear the name of Hesiod than in those attributed to Homer. Herodotus (II. 53) and others regarded Homer and Hesiod as contemporaries, and some even assigned to him an earlier date than Homer; but the general, opinion of the ancients was that Homer was the elder of the two, a belief which was entertained by Philochorus, Xenophanes, Eratosthenes, Apollodorus, and many others.

If we inquire after the exact age of Hesiod, we are informed, by Herodotus that he lived 400 years before his time, that is, about B.C. 850. Velleius Paterculus considers that between Homer and Hesiod there was an interval of a hundred and