Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/104

 72 HISTORY OF GREECE. imparts to it a peculiar interest. The father cf Hesiod come over from the JEolic Kyme, with the view of bettering his con- dition, and settled at Askra in Bocotia, at the foot of Mount Heli con. After his death his two sons divided the family inheritance : but Hesiod bitterly complains that his brother Perses cheated and went to law with him, and obtained through corrupt judges an unjust decision. He farther reproaches his brother with a prefer- ence for the suits and unprofitable bustle of the agora, at a time when he ought to be laboring for his subsistence in the field. Askra indeed was a miserable place, repulsive both in summer and winter. Hesiod had never crossed the sea, except once from Aulis to Euboca, whither he went to attend the funeral games of Amphidamas, the chief of Chalkis : he sung a hymn, and gained as prize a tripod, which he consecrated to the muses in Helicon. 1 These particulai's, scanty as they are, possess a peculiar value, as the earliest authentic memorandum respecting the doing or suffering of any actual Greek person. There is no external tes- timony at all worthy of trust respecting the age of the " Works and Days:" Herodotus treats Hesiod and Homer as belonging to the same age, four hundred years before his own time ; and there are other statements besides, some placing Hesiod at an earlier date than Homer, some at a later. Looking at the internal evi- dences, we may observe that the pervading sentiment, tone and purpose of the poem is widely different from that of the Iliad and Odyssey, and analogous to what we read respecting the com- positions of Archilochus and the Amorgian Simonides. The au- thor of the " Works and Days" is indeed a preacher and not a satirist : but with this distinction, we find in him the same pre- dominance of the present and the positive, the same disposition to turn the muse into an exponent of his own personal wrongs, the same employment of JEsopic fable by way of illustration, and the same unfavorable estimate of the female sex,2 all of which 1 Opp. Di. 630-650, 27-45. in Archilochus, Fr. xxxviii. and xxxix., Gaisford, respecting the fox and the ape; and the legend of Pandora (v. 95 and v. 705) with the fragment of Simonides of Amorgos respecting women (Fr. viii. ed. Wclcker, v. 95-115): also Phokylide's ap. Stobaeum Florileg. Ixri. Isokrates assimilates the character of the " Works and Days " to that of Theognis and Phokylides (ad Nikokl. Or. ii. p. 23).
 * Compare the fable (alvog) in the " Works and Days," v. 200, with those