Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/103

81 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 81 such as this that the fame of the heroic poetry, which at that time was flourishing in the colonies, must have been spread over the mother country. The ancients have eagerly seized upon this point of union in the two schools of poetry, in order to prove that a near relationship existed between Homer and Hesiod. The logographers (or historians before Herodotus) — as Hellanicus, Pherecydes, and Damastes — have combined various names handed down by tradition into comprehensive genealogies, in which it appears that the two poets were descended from a common ancestor: for example, that ApelJis (also called Apelles, or Apellasus) had two sons — Mreon, the supposed father of Homer, and Dius, who, according to an ancient but justly rejected interpretation of a verse in the Works and Days, was made the father of Hesiod*. But it is not our intention to support the opinion that the poetry of Hesiod was merely an ofFset from the Homeric stock transplanted to Bceotia, or that it is indebted to the Homeric poems either for its dialect, versification, or character of style. On the contrary, the most generally re- ceived opinion of antiquity assigns Hesiod and Homer to the same period ; thus Herodotus makes them both about four centuries earlier than his own time + : in such cases, too, Hesiod is commonly named before Homer, as, for instance, in this passage of Herodotus. As far as we know, it was firs-t maintained by Xenophanes of Colophon that Hesiod was later thau Homer; on the other hand, Ephorus, the historian of Cyme, and many others, have endeavoured to prove the higher antiquity of Hesiod. At any rate, therefore, the Greeks of those times did not consider that Homer had formed the epic language in Ionia, and that Hesiod had borrowed it, and only transferred it to other subjects. They must have entertained the opinion (which has been confirmed by the re- searches of our own time), that this epic dialect had already become the language of refinement and poetry in the mother-country before the colonies of Asia Minor were founded. Moreover, this dialect is only identical in the two schools of poetry so far as its general features are concerned. Many differences occur in particular points: and it can be proved that this ancient poetical language among the Boeotian tribe adopted many features of the native dialect, which was an yEolism approaching nearly to the Doric §. Neither does it appear that the phrases, epithets, and proverbial expressions common to both poets were X In Geliius, Noct. Att. iii. 17. Xenophanes, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, who flourished about the 70th Olympiad, was also an epic poet, and may perhaps, in his xrif/s Koo<pZvos, have found many opportunities of speaking of Homer, whom the Colophonians claimed as a countryman. See above, p. 43 (chap. v. § 2). § Thus Hesiod often shortens the ending «s in the accusative pluial of the firi.t dte'ension, like Alcm.m, Stesichorus, and Epicharmus; it has indeed been observed that it only occurs long where the syllable is in the aisis, or where it is lengthened by position. On the whole, there is in Hesiod a greater tendency to shorter, often to contracted forms ; while Homer's ear appears to have found peculiar delight in the multiplication of trowel syllables. G
 * V. 299. 'Epyufyu, Tli^ffn, A~ov yivo;. ii. 53