Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/117

95 LITERATURE UF ANCIENT GREECE. 95 making an edition of the Theogony, in which the pieces belonging to it were introduced into the series of the poem, nothing remained but to insert the hymn to the Muses as well as the epilogue in the procemium ; an adaptation which, however, could only have been made in an age when the true feeling for the ancient epic poetry had nearly passed away*. Lastly, with regard to the relation between the Theogony and the Works and Days, it cannot be doubted that there is a great resemblance in the style and character of the two poems ; but who shall pretend to decide that this resemblance is so great as to warrant an opinion that these poems were composed by an individual, and not by a succession of minstrels? It is, however, certain that the author of the Theogony and the author of the Works and Days wish to be considered as the same person; viz., as the native of Helicon who had been trained to a country life, and had been endowed by the Muses with the gift of poetry. Nor can it be doubted that the original Hesiod, the ancestor of this family of poets, really rose to poetry from the occupations of common life ; although his successors may have pursued it as a regular pro- fession. It is remarkable how the domestic and economical spirit of the poet of the Works appears in the Theogony, wherever the wide dif- ference of the subjects permits it ; as in the legend of Prometheus and Epimetheus. It is true that this takes a somewhat different turn in the Theogony and in the Work?; as in the latter it is the casket brought by Pandora from which proceed all human ills, while in the former this charming and divinely endowed maiden brings woe into the world by being the progenitress of the female sex. Yet the ancient bard views the evil produced by women not in a moral but in an econo- mical light. He does not complain of the seductions and passions of which they are the cause, but laments that women, like the drones in a hive, consume the fruits of others' industry instead of adding to the sum. § 4. It is remarkable that the same school of poetry which was accustomed to treat the weaker sex in this satiric spirit should have produced epics of the heroic mythology which pre-eminently sang the praises of the women of antiquity, and connected a large part of the heroic legends with renowned names of heroines. Yet the school of Hesiod might probably find a motive in existing relations and political institutions for such laudatory catalogues of the women of early times. The neighbours of the Boeotians, the Locrians, possessed a nobility consisting of a hundred families, all of which (according to Polybiust) founded their title to nobility upon their descent from heroines. contained at the end a passage deriving the origin of Hephaestus and Athene from a contest of Zeus and Here, appears from the testimony of Chrysippus, in Galen de Hippocratis et Platonis dogm. iii. 8, p. 349, seq. f xii. 5.
 * That there was another and wholly different version of the Theogony, which