Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/101

 HESIODIC WORKS AND DAYS. 69 like Phokylides, or Solon, or Theognis, yet he had present to hia feelings, in common with his countrymen, the picture of Grecian foretime, as it was set forth in the current mythes, and still more in Homer and those other epical productions which were then the only existing literature and history. It was impossible for him to exclude, from his sketch of the past, either the great persons or the glorious exploits which these poems ennobled ; and even if he himself could have consented to such an exclusion, the sketch would have become repulsive to his hearers. But the chiefs who figured before Thebes and Troy could not be well identified either with the golden, the silver, or the brazen race : morover it was essential that they should be placed in immediate contiguity with the present race, because their descendants, real or supposed, were the most prominent and conspicuous of exist- ing men. Hence the poet is obliged to assign to them the fourth place in the series, and to interrupt the descending ethical move- ment in order to interpolate them between the brazen and the iron race, with neither of which they present any analogy. The iron race, to which the poet himself unhappily belongs, is the legitimate successor, not of the heroic, but of the brazen. Instead of the fierce and self-annihilating pugnacity which characterizes the latter, the iron race manifests an aggregate of smaller and meaner vices and mischiefs. It will not perish by suicidal extinction but it is growing worse and worse, and is gradually losing its vigor, so that Zeus will not vouchsafe to preserve much longer such a race upon the earth. "We thus see that the series of races imagined by the poet of the " Works and Days " is the product of two distinct and incongruous veins of imagination, the didactic or ethical blending with the primitive mythical or epical. His poem is remarkable as the most ancient didactic production of the Greeks, and as one of the first symptoms of a new tone of sentiment finding its way into their literature, never afterwards to become extinct. The tendency of the "Works and Days" is anti- heroic : far from seeking to inspire admiration for adventur- ous enterprise, the author inculcates the strictest justice, the most unremitting labor and frugality, and a sober, not to say anxious, estimate of all the minute specialties of the future. Prudence and probity are his means, practical comfort and