Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/103

 D.EMONS IN HESIOD. 71 show that not only in Homer, but in the general language of early pagans, all the gods generally were spoken of as daemons and therefore, verbally speaking, Clemens and Tatian seemed to affirm nothing more against Zeus or Apollo than was employed in the language of paganism itself. Yet the audience of Homer or Sophokles would have strenuously repudiated the proposition, if it had been put to them in the sense which the word dcemon bore in the age and among the circle of these Christian writers. In the imagination of the author of the "Works and Days," the daemons occupy an important place, and are regarded as being of serious practical efficiency. When he is remonstrating with the rulers around him upon their gross injustice and corrup- tion, he reminds them of the vast number of these immortal ser- vants of Zeus who are perpetually on guard amidst mankind, and through whom the visitations of the gods will descend even upon the most potent evil doers. 1 His supposition that the dae- mons were not gods, but departed men of the golden race, allowed him to multiply their number indefinitely, without too much cheapening the divine dignity. As this poet has been so much enslaved by the current legenda as to introduce the Heroic race into a series to which it does not legitimately belong, so he has under the same influence inserted in another part of his poem the mythe of Pandora and Prome- theus, 2 as a means of explaining the primary diffusion, and actual abundance, of evil among mankind. Yet this mythe can in no way consist with his quintuple scale of distinct races, and is in fact a totally distinct theory to explain the same problem, the transition of mankind from a supposed state of antecedent hap- piness to one of present toil and suffering. Such an inconsistency is not a sufficient reason for questioning the genuineness of either passage ; for the two stories, though one contradicts the other, both harmonize with that central purpose which governs the author's mind, a querulous and didactic appreciation of the pres- ent. That such was his purpose appears not only from the whole tenor of his poem, but also from the remarkable fact that his own personality, his own adventures and kindred, and his own suffer- ings, figure in it conspicuously. And this introduction of self 1 Opp. Di. 252. Tpif I'tip nvpioi elaiv irl p9ov< TovtofloTfipri, etc.
 * Opp. Di. 50-105.