Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/120

98 98 HISTORY OF THE originated with the settlement of the Greeks of Thera, among whom were noble families of Thessalian origin. Of the remaining poems which in antiquity went by the name of Hesiod, it is still less possible to give a complete notion. The Melam- poclia is as it were the heroic representation of that divinatory spirit of the Hesiodean poetry, the didactic forms of which have been already mentioned. It treated of the renowned prince, priest, and prophet of the Argives, Melampus ; and as the greater part of the prophets who were celebrated in mythology were derived from this Melampus, the Hesiodean poet, with his predilection for genealogical connexion, pro- bably did not fail to embrace the entire race of the Melampodias. § 5. The JEgimius of Hesiod shows by its name that it treated of the mythical Prince of the Dorians, who, according to the legend, was the friend and ally of Hercules, whose son Hyllus he is supposed to have adopted and brought up with his own two sons Pamphylus and Dyman, a legend which referred to the distribution of the Dorians into three Phyla? or tribes, the Hylleis, Pamphylians, and Dymanes. The fig- ments of this poem also show that it comprehended the genealogical traditions of the Dorians, and the part of the mythology of Hercules closely allied to it ; however difficult it may be to form a well-grounded idea of the plan of this Epos. An interesting kind of composition attributed to Hesiod are the smaller epics, in which not a whole series of legends or a complicated story was described, but some separate event of the Heroic Mythology, which usually consisted more in bright and cheerful descriptions than in actions of a more elevated cast. Of this kind was the marriage of Ceyx, the well-known Prince of Trachin, who was also allied in close amity with Hercules; and a kindred subject, The Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis. We might also mention here the Descent of The- seus and Pirithous into the Infernal Regions, if this adventure of the two heroes was not merely introductory, and a description of Hades in a religious spirit the principal object of the poem. We shall best illus- trate this kind of small epic poems by describing the one which has been preserved, viz., the Shield of Hercules. This poem contains merely owe adventure of Hercules, his combat with the son of Ares, Cycnu&, in the Temple of Apollo at Pagasae. It is clear to every reader of the poem that the first 56 verses are taken out of the Eoiae, and only inserted be- cause the poem itself had been handed down without an introduction. There is no further connexion between these two parts, than that the first relates the origin of the hero, of whom the short epic then relates a separate adventure. It would have been as well, and perhaps better, to have prefixed a brief hymn to Hercules. The description of the Shield of Hercules is however far the most detailed part of the poem and that for which the whole appears to have been composed ; a descrip-