Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/105

 HESIODIC POEMS. 73 may be traced in the two poets above mentioned, placing both of them in contrast with the Homeric epic. Such an internal analogy, in the absence of good testimony, is the best guide which we can follow in determining the date of the "Works and Days," which we should accordingly place shortly after the year 700 B. c. The style of the poem might indeed afford a proof that the ancient and uniform hexameter, though well adapted to continuous legendary narrative or to solemn hymns, was somewhat monotonous when called upon either to serve a polemical purpose or to impress a striking moral lesson. When poets, then the only existing com- posers, first began to apply their thoughts to the cut and thrust of actual life, aggressive or didactic, the verse would be seen to require a new, livelier and smarter metre ; and out of this want grew the elegiac and the iambic verse, both seemingly contempo- raneous, and both intended to supplant the primitive hexameter for the short effusions then coming into vojme. CHAPTER III. LEGEND OF THE IAPETIDS. THE sons of the Titan god lapetus, as described in the Hesi- odic theogony, are Atlas, Menoetius, Prometheus and Epimetheus. 1 Of these, Atlas alone is mentioned by Homer in the Odyssey, and even he not as the son of lapetus : the latter himself is named in the Iliad as existing in Tartarus along with Kronos. The Homeric Atlas " knows the depths of the whole sea, and keeps by himself those tall pillars which hold the heaven apart from the earth." 2 1 Hesiod, Theog. 510. "Ar'havTOf $uyar^p 6^o6povo^, oare 9aaoor]f IIa<7!7c J3ev&ea otcJe, s^st 6s TS Kiovaf atrdf MaKpuf, ai yalav TE K.a.1 ovpavbv uiufiif VOL. i. 4
 * Horn. Odyss. i. 120.