Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/108

86 86 HISTORY OF THE sense, nay, even a dash of interested calculating shrewdness, which were deeply rooted in the Greek character, are comhined with honourable principles of justice, expressed in nervous apophthegms and striking images. When we consider that the poet was hrought up in these hereditary maxims of wisdom, and moreover that he was deeply convinced of the necessity of a life of laborious exertion, we shall easily comprehend how strongly an event such as that in which he was concerned with his brother Perses was calculated to strike his mind; and from the contrast which it offered to his convictions, to induce him to make a connected exposition of them in a poem. This brings us to the true source of the Didactic Epos, which never can proceed from a mere desire to instruct ; a desire which has no connexion with poetry. Genuine didactic poetry always proceeds from some great and powerful idea, which has something so absorbing and attractive that the mind strives to give expression to it. In the Works and Days this fundamental idea is distinctly perceptible ; the decrees and institutions of the gods protect justice among men, they have made labour the only road to prosperity, and have so ordered the year that every work has its appointed season, the sign of which is discernible by man. In announcing these immutable ordinances and eternal laws, the poet himself is impressed with a lofty and solemn feeling, which manifests itself in a sort of oracular tone, and in the sacerdotal style with which many exhortations and precepts are delivered*. We have remarked this priestly character in the concluding part of the poem, and it was not unnatural that many in antiquity should annex to the last verse, " Observing the omens of birds, and avoiding transgressions," another didactic epic poem of the same school of poetry upon divination f. It is stated that this poem treated chiefly of the flight and cries of birds; and it agrees with this statement, that Hesiod, according to Pausanias, learned divination among the Acarnanians : the Acarnanian families of diviners deriving their descent from Melampus, whose ears, when a boy, were licked by serpents, whereupon he immediately under- stood the language of the birds. A greater loss than this supplement on divination is another poem of the same school, called the Lessons of Chiron (Xapwvoc virodrjKai), as this was in some measure a companion or counterpart to the Works and Days. For while the extant poem keeps wholly within the circle of the yearly occupations of a Boeotian husbandman, the lost one repre- sented the wise Centaur, in his grotto upon Mount Pelion, instructing the young Achilles in all the knowledge befitting a young prince and hero. KgoTfft of the Pythia : and to the truly oracular expressions of. the Works and Days, as, the "branch of five," vruro&t, for the "hand;" the "day-sleeper," ri/u,i^oxoiTos avng, for the thief, &c. : on which see Gottling's Hesiod, Preef. p. xv. f 'Youroi; xa,y,ou<r'i thus rhv ogvifof&avTiiav, anvu ' AtfoXXavias o 'Polios ah~t7. — Pl'oclus on the Works and Days, at the end, v. 824.
 * We allude particularly to the fiiyx vnvu Tligan of Hesiod, and the {Aya. tWn