Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/99

77 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 77 mankind, until Zeus brings about an agreement that Cora shall be restored to her for two-thirds of the year, and shall only remain one third of the year with Hades*. United again with her daughter, she instructs her hosts, the Eleusinians, in return for their hospitality, in her sacred orgies. Even if this hymn did not directly invite persons to the celebration of the Eleusinia, and to a participation in its initiatory rites, by calling those blessed who had seen them, and announcing an unhappy lot in the infernal regions to those who had taken no part in them ; yet we could not fail to recognise the hand of an Attic bard, well versed in the festival and its ceremonies, even in many expressions which have an Attic and local colour. The ancient sacred legend of the Eleusinians lies here before us in its pure and unadulterated form ; so far as it can be clothed with an epic garb in a manner agreeable to a refined taste. We may hence infer the value of this hymn (which was not discovered till the last century, and of which a part is lost) for the history of the Creek religion. CHAPTER VIII. § 1. Circumstances of Hesiod's Life, and general character of his Pot-try. — § 2. The Works and Days, the Poem on Divination, and the Lessons of Chiron. — § 3. The Theogony — § 4. The Great Koiae, the Catalogues of Women, the Me- lampodia, the ^Egimius.— § 5. The Marriage of Ceyx, the Epithalamium of Peleiis and Thetis, the Descent of Theseus and Piiithous into Hell, the Shield of Hercules. § 1. While the fairest growth of the Grecian heroic poetry was nourishing under favourable circumstances upon the coast of Asia, Minor in the JEoYic and Ionic colonies, the mother -country of Greece, and especially Bceotia, to which we are now to direct our attention, were not so happily situated. In that country, already thickly peopled with Greek tribes, and divided into numerous small states, the migrations with which the heroic age of Greece terminated necessarily produced a state of lasting confusion and strife, sometimes even reaching into the interior of single families. It was only on the coast of Asia Minor that the conquerors could find a wide and open field for their enterprises ; this country was still for the most part virgin soil to the Greek settlers, and its native inhabitants of barbarous descent offered no very obstinate resistance to the colonists. Hence likewise it came to pass that of the TEolic Boeotians, who after the Trojan war emigrated from Thessaliotis, and obtained the sovereignty of Bceotia, a considerable number imme- festival of sowing. Cora is supposed to descend beneath the earth ; on the Authes- teria, the festival of the first bloom of spring, exactly four months afterwards, she is supposed to reascend from the infernal regions.
 * This depends on the Athenian festival cycle. At the Thesmophoria, the