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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Remains of Hesiod the Ascr√¶an, Including the Shield of Hercules," the ancient poet Hesiod presents a rich tapestry of mythological themes and moral reflections that reflect the cultural and societal norms of his time. Characterized by its didactic style and the use of vivid imagery, this work delves into the complexities of human existence, weaving in the ethos of ancient Greek civilization. Particularly notable is the "Shield of Hercules," which serves not only as an exploration of heroic valor but also as a symbolic representation of justice, duty, and the divine order, standing as a testament to the poetic tradition of epic narrative interlaced with pragmatism. Hesiod, active in the 8th century BCE, is often regarded as one of the earliest figures in Western literature, offering a counterpoint to Homer's epics with his focus on agrarian life and labor. His own experiences as a farmer during a time of social and political upheaval would have deeply influenced his writing, leading him to address the moral and ethical considerations central to daily life and personal responsibility as echoed in this collection of works. This book is highly recommended for readers interested in the foundations of Western thought and literature, as it not only captures the essence of Ancient Greece but also provides insights into the human condition through Hesiod's profound reflections. Scholars, students, and lovers of poetry will find solace in its pages, gaining a valuable perspective on cultural heritage and the timeless questions of existence. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The Remains of Hesiod the Ascræan, Including the Shield of Hercules
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers the principal surviving poems traditionally attributed to Hesiod and presents them alongside interpretive materials designed to guide modern readers. By bringing together The Works and Days, The Theogony, and the Shield of Hercules, it offers a coherent view of the Hesiodic corpus as it has been transmitted and read through antiquity and beyond. The collection’s organizing ambition is comprehensive rather than fragmentary: it aims to situate each poem within the larger fabric of early Greek thought, belief, and poetic practice, while preserving the distinctive voice that has made Hesiod a foundational figure in the classical canon.
The purpose of the collection is both archival and explanatory. It preserves the poetic texts that constitute Hesiod’s enduring legacy and accompanies them with a Preface, a multi-part Dissertation on his life, era, poems, and mythology, concise Arguments that summarize the structure and scope of each work, and an Appendix. Together, these materials sketch the historical and literary context, clarify difficult points of myth and diction, and chart the reception of Hesiod’s poetry. The design allows readers to approach the poems as artistic achievements and as cultural documents, without presupposing specialist knowledge of archaic Greece.
The contents span multiple textual modes. The core is poetic: didactic verse in The Works and Days, mythological genealogy in The Theogony, and a heroic narrative in the Shield of Hercules. To this are added critical and scholarly prose in the Preface and Dissertation, succinct prose outlines in the Arguments, and reception-focused materials in the Appendix, including a biographical notice and specimens of George Chapman’s early modern English Hesiod with glossarial and critical explanations. The result is a collection that unites verse and commentary, ancient composition and later interpretation, offering a rounded portrait of the Hesiodic tradition.
What unifies these varied materials is a sustained meditation on order—divine, civic, and domestic—and on the moral economy that underpins it. Across the poems, labor, justice, and rightful measure are central concerns, while the genealogical mapping of the divine frames a cosmos where power and legitimacy are interwoven. Stylistically, the diction is formulaic and elevated, shaped by the rhythms of oral performance and the discipline of hexameter. The collection emphasizes how these hallmarks function together: didactic precepts gain authority from mythic sanction, and mythic narratives receive contour from ethical and practical imperatives.
The Works and Days presents a speaker who counsels his community through reflections on work, prudence, and fair dealing. Its outlook is practical yet moral, interlacing seasonal rhythms with advice on conduct, and illustrating points with memorable myths. The poem’s didactic stance is notable for its lucidity and compression: maxims are framed by narrative, and narrative is disciplined by purpose. Readers encounter a world where prosperity depends not only on effort but also on alignment with a larger order of justice. The Arguments in this volume help outline the poem’s progression, highlighting its interplay of counsel and exemplum.
The Theogony offers a systematic account of the gods, tracing lines of descent and episodes that define the distribution of power. Its catalogue-like structure is not merely enumerative; it arranges a cosmos, making intelligible the relations among divine figures and the emergence of rulership. The poem’s architecture reveals how genealogical thinking organizes mythic memory and theological speculation. In this collection, the accompanying materials clarify the poem’s sequences and groupings, guiding readers through its transitions and reinforcing the sense that the Theogony is both a poetic artifact and a conceptual framework for understanding divine order.
The Shield of Hercules, long transmitted with Hesiod’s poems, focuses on a hero poised for combat, culminating in an elaborate description of his armor. Its centerpiece is an extended ekphrasis of the shield, a tour of imagery that exemplifies the richness of archaic descriptive art. The poem invites comparison with other early epic treatments of heroic arms, yet remains distinctive in its emphasis on crafted detail and spectacle. Within this collection, it functions as a complement to the moral and genealogical concerns of the other poems, showing how visual imagination and narrative momentum combine in archaic hexameter.
Across the corpus, several stylistic traits recur. The verse is composed in dactylic hexameter, balancing formulaic expressions with pointed aphorisms. Catalogues, lists, and genealogies provide scaffolds for memory and meaning, while gnomic statements distill experience into portable counsel. The tone shifts with genre—from authoritative instruction to mythic narration to martial display—yet remains bound by a consistent architecture of measure and proportion. The editing strategy of this volume foregrounds these continuities, enabling readers to see how technique and thought reinforce one another, and how Hesiodic poetry fashions authority from tradition, clarity, and moral seriousness.
The significance of these works extends well beyond literary history. They are essential witnesses to early Greek religion, social ethics, and agrarian life, and they supplied later authors and thinkers with a shared repertoire of myths, genealogies, and moral paradigms. As documents of an archaic worldview, they record tensions between necessity and justice, prosperity and restraint, divine prerogative and human responsibility. The collection underscores this breadth of relevance by pairing poems with contextual essays and summaries, encouraging a reading that appreciates both immediate poetic effects and the longer intellectual legacy shaped by Hesiod’s themes and structures.
The Dissertation is organized to orient readers step by step: the life of Hesiod as preserved in ancient testimonies, the chronological and cultural era in which the poems emerged, the distinctive qualities of each poem, and the wider mythological framework they inhabit. Without presuming to resolve every scholarly debate, it gathers the principal lines of context that aid comprehension. The Arguments distill narrative and thematic arcs into clear pathways, priming the reader for the poetic text while avoiding interpretive overreach. Together, these materials model a responsible approach to an author whose voice is at once personal and traditional.
The Appendix extends the volume’s scope into the realm of reception. The biographical notice consolidates information from classical sources and later summaries, while the specimens of Chapman’s Hesiod reveal how early modern English poetry encountered and reshaped Hesiodic verse. Glossarial notes elucidate archaisms and choices of diction, and critical explanations illuminate priorities in translation and interpretation. By placing ancient poems beside later renderings and commentary, the collection traces a lineage of reading that is part of Hesiod’s legacy, inviting readers to consider how form, language, and cultural expectation converge in the act of transmission.
Taken together, these components form a single, comprehensive resource: the remains of Hesiod’s poetry in full, presented with guides that clarify their form, context, and afterlife. The aim is not to fix a definitive interpretation but to provide a reliable foundation for informed reading. The poems reward attention with their union of ethical reflection, mythic architecture, and verbal economy; the surrounding materials frame that experience without diminishing it. Readers may enter through practice, myth, or spectacle, yet encounter a unified vision of order and measure. That unity is the enduring reason these works continue to matter.
Author Biography
Hesiod is an archaic Greek poet, active in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, whose surviving works define key contours of Greek myth, religion, and ethical thought. Associated with Boeotia in central Greece, he is most securely credited with two hexameter poems, Theogony and Works and Days. Together they shaped how later Greeks imagined the origins of the gods, the order of the cosmos, and the everyday virtues of labor and justice. Ancient writers often contrasted his didactic, personal voice with the heroic narratives of Homer, making the pair foundational authorities for Greek culture and for subsequent literary traditions.
Biographical certainty is limited and largely derives from passages within his poems. Works and Days situates the poet in the village of Ascra, near Mount Helicon, and evokes the rhythms and hardships of small-scale farming. The poem addresses a brother and alludes to a legal dispute, yet scholars treat such details with caution as poetic framing. Hesiod presents himself as an ordinary cultivator endowed with song by the Muses, emphasizing moral instruction over heroic exploits. He remarks that his family had moved to Boeotia from the coast of Asia Minor, a detail widely noted, but otherwise reliable external information about his life is scarce.
Nothing firm is known about his education in a formal sense. His diction, meter, and techniques place him within the oral epic tradition, employing Homeric Greek while allowing for regional features. The proem of Theogony recounts a poetic commissioning by the Muses of Helicon, a conventional claim that signals inspiration and authority. Scholars have long compared parts of his theogonic narrative with Near Eastern cosmogonies, noting structural and thematic parallels without positing direct dependence. More securely, his work exemplifies the emergence of didactic epic in Greece, blending practical counsel with reflections on divine order, justice, and the limits of human knowledge and power.
Theogony is a genealogical poem that organizes a vast array of mythic materials into a coherent account of cosmic origins and divine rule. It traces the generation of gods from primordial entities to the establishment of Zeus’s kingship, integrating local traditions into a broadly persuasive system. The poem balances catalogue and narrative, dramatizing conflicts such as succession and the containment of chaos, and concluding with a stable order under Zeus. Its authority in antiquity was immense: later poets, historians, and philosophers drew on it to name and relate the gods, to think about cosmic justice, and to mark boundaries between mortal and divine.
Works and Days, by contrast, addresses the human sphere. Structured as a didactic address to his brother, it offers maxims about work, justice, piety, and timing, interwoven with farming and seafaring lore appropriate to central Greece. The poem includes the myths of the Ages of Men and of Pandora to explain suffering and the necessity of toil. It castigates corrupt judges and urges reliance on honest labor, fair measure, and prudent speech. Its seasonal calendar, festivals, and practical counsel reflect a lived agrarian environment, making it a rare early source for social history as well as a touchstone for later ethical discourse.
Ancient audiences recognized Hesiod as a counterpoint to Homer: less concerned with heroic warfare, more with cosmic genealogy and everyday justice. By the classical period his verses were quoted by dramatists and philosophers, and his authority as a teacher of divine affairs was frequently invoked. His poems circulated widely in written form and were studied by scholars who sought to explain obscure names, reconcile variant myths, and order the transmitted text. Later authors crafted imitative didactic works under his name, attesting to his prestige even as their authenticity is debated. Despite such accretions, Theogony and Works and Days remained the core Hesiodic corpus.
Little can be reliably said about Hesiod’s later years or death; later biographies preserve legends rather than verifiable facts. His legacy, however, is clear. Roman poets, notably Virgil in the Georgics, adapted his didactic mode to new literary and political contexts. Philosophers engaged his notions of justice and cosmic order, while mythographers relied on Theogony as a map of divine relationships. Modern readers turn to him for early Greek perspectives on labor, law, and religious imagination, and for evidence of oral traditional poetics transitioning into written culture. Translated and studied worldwide, his poems continue to inform discussions of myth, ethics, and social history.
Historical Context
Hesiod’s oeuvre is anchored in the transformative centuries of Archaic Greece, roughly the late eighth to early seventh century BCE, when oral song met the newly adopted alphabet and emergent poleis reorganized social life. Living at Ascra in Boeotia, under Mount Helicon, he stands beside Homer as a founder of hexameter poetry. His poems engage both household labor and divine genealogy, reflecting a world that prized ancestral myth yet wrestled with contemporary disputes and scarcity. The panhellenic consolidation of gods and heroes, the diffusion of Near Eastern ideas through Aegean exchange, and an expanding festival circuit formed the cultural matrix within which his voice acquired authority.
Ancient biographical tradition reports that Hesiod’s father migrated from Cyme in Aeolis (on the Anatolian coast) to Boeotian Ascra, seeking relief from hardship. That east-to-west movement mirrors the wider currents of the era: Euboean trading ventures to Pithekoussai (Ischia) ca. 770–730 BCE, settlements across Sicily and Italy, and increased traffic through the Euboean Gulf. The poet’s personal link to Aeolis and residence in mainland Greece illuminate the bidirectional flow of stories, craft, and cults between Asia Minor and the Greek mainland. This setting situates advice about farming, seafaring, and justice within a landscape shaped by migration, credit, and competition for arable land.
Hesiod’s repeated appeals to Dike (Justice) and warnings against hubris correspond to political realignments from clan chieftaincies toward institutionalized poleis. Local basileis—gift-eating “kings”—still presided over adjudication, yet communities sought predictable norms. The imagery of crooked judgments and bribed dikastai suggests friction familiar across Boeotia and central Greece during the seventh century BCE. While formal statutes like the Dreros law (Crete, mid-seventh century) and later Athenian reforms of Solon (early sixth) lie beyond Hesiod’s lifetime, his ethical program anticipates them. He addresses status anxieties, inheritance disputes, and the weight of oaths, mapping the moral economy that policed reputation, credit, and household survival.
The agricultural calendar woven through his counsel draws upon naked-eye astronomy and seasonal cues that fit Boeotia’s Mediterranean climate: the heliacal rising of the Pleiades in spring signaled reaping; their setting in late autumn, ploughing. Arcturus’ emergence around early autumn and Orion’s heat mark labor rhythms and seafaring windows. This practical skyscape intersects with Mediterranean hemerologies—lists of lucky and unlucky days—that have Near Eastern analogues in Babylonian almanacs. By synchronizing toil to stars and winds, Hesiod embeds rural expertise in a cosmological order. The same attention to auspicious timing that governs tillage and trade also frames ritual observance and oaths, binding household prudence to cosmic regularity.
Economic life in Hesiod’s milieu balances subsistence agriculture with artisanal craft and opportunistic exchange. The poet’s references to iron tools and bronze panoply capture a society long in the Iron Age yet imaginatively haunted by earlier Bronze heroes. Ox-drawn ploughs, threshing floors, granaries, and careful storage reduce exposure to winter scarcity. Shipboard risk—coastal sailings, a compact vessel, and strict timing—augments income while hedging danger. He treats labor as moral discipline and risk management: measure, weighing, and the avoidance of debt litigation are as central as prayers and sacrifices. In this portrait, justice, technology, and household foresight cohere as the grammar of survival.
Religious institutions underwrite that grammar. Zeus, enthroned as guarantor of xenia and oaths, presides over a hierarchy of gods who answer to an ethic of measure and reciprocity. The Muses of Helicon authorize poetic speech in a famed epiphany, converting local cult prestige into panhellenic legitimacy. Sacrifices, purifications, and festival rhythms punctuate labor and litigation, aligning community behavior with divine surveillance. The figure of Themis, adviser to Zeus, and the Moirai (Fates) render justice into cosmic structure rather than mere custom. Thus theology overlaps with social control: failure to honor the gods threatens harvests and reputations as surely as negligence in husbandry.
The divine succession—from Ouranos to Kronos to Zeus—belongs to a myth-pattern attested across the eastern Mediterranean. Parallels with the Hittite-Hurrian Kumarbi cycle and with Babylonian cosmogonies (e.g., the Enuma Elish) reflect storytelling currents moving through Phoenician and Anatolian channels into Greece during the eighth–seventh centuries BCE. Chaos, Gaia, Eros, and the Titanomachy articulate a world generated by genealogical bonds and contest. The figure of Typhon, a monstrous adversary subdued by Zeus, further aligns with Levantine storm-god victories. Hesiod’s arrangement does not merely list names; it domesticates rival myth-strands into a moral cosmos where just kingship replaces primordial violence.
Genealogical thinking is the technology of that domestication. Rivers, Nereids, Muses, Graces, and daimones enter the system as kin, spouses, or offspring, rendering cults from disparate locales coherent under an Olympian umbrella. Heroes and heroines inherit divine bloodlines, linking the legendary past to civic identities and local sanctuaries. Such catalogic ordering guided later mythographers and historians, furnishing a reference map for worship, poetry, and law. The same impulse structures heroic genealogies into prose compendia and verse catalogues, allowing communities in Boeotia, Thessaly, and beyond to see their founders and rites reflected within a panhellenic story that still honored regional nuance.
In martial scenes that elaborate shields and spears, the poetry intersects with changing military practice. The richly described shield—its concentric imagery of towns at peace and war, monsters, and dances—echoes Homeric ekphrasis while mirroring emergent hoplite panoply in the seventh century BCE: bronze-faced aspis, greaves, crested helmets. Heracles’ cult had deep roots in Boeotia and Trachis, and his combats, including a duel with Cycnus, stage the passage from heroic single combat to organized ranks. The poetic spectacle of armor and gorgon devices registers evolving civic militarization, even as it remains anchored in mythic time—an imaginative ledger of power, order, and fear.
Performance contexts illuminate dating and transmission. Hesiod reports winning a tripod at funeral games for Amphidamas in Chalcis, Euboea—events commonly placed in the early seventh century BCE, against the backdrop of the Lelantine War between Chalcis and Eretria. Such contests drew aoidoi and rhapsodes who circulated hymns, genealogies, and counsel among sanctuaries and courts. Boeotia’s proximity to Euboea facilitated exchange of styles and stories. The poet’s claim that he sailed no farther than Euboea underscores a regional network robust enough to project local song into panhellenic ears, shaping how advice, myth, and public praise were adapted for competitive recitation.
Composition and preservation straddle orality and writing. Dactylic hexameter, with formulaic diction and traditional scenes, sustained memorization and improvisation. The Greek alphabet, adopted in the late eighth century BCE, enabled sporadic textual fixation—epigraphic traces like the “Cup of Nestor” inscription from Pithekoussai (ca. 730 BCE) attest to hexameter on pottery. Over centuries, scholars and librarians at Hellenistic Alexandria standardized texts, while scholiasts collated variants. That philological labor, applied to Homer and, by extension, to Hesiodic poetry, produced stabilized books, arguments, and glosses. The result is a layered text: archaic song shaped by performance, later curated by editorial practice and classroom needs.
Antiquity already debated authorship and scope. Besides the didactic and cosmogonic poems, a Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and other genealogical works circulated under his name. The Shield poem shows signs of later composition or interpolation, prompting ancient and modern doubts while remaining embedded in the “Hesiodic” brand. Biographical lore—murder in Locris, the transfer of bones to Orchomenus—reflects the prestige of claiming the poet’s tomb. Such traditions, however fabulous, reveal how communities used biography to authenticate poems, festivals, and civic memory. The collection’s organization mirrors that ancient habit: life, era, poems, and mythology are treated as mutually illuminating categories.
Hesiod’s ethical architecture—labor as virtue, justice as cosmic law, and moderation as survival strategy—proved foundational for Greek moral discourse. The Ages of Humankind (Golden to Iron, with an interposed “Heroic” age) render historical decline in the language of metals familiar to craft communities. The Pandora story articulates anxieties about gender, exchange, and mortality, themes that later poets and philosophers reworked or contested. Fables like the hawk and nightingale exhibit early Greek use of parable to reflect power and law. Solon’s sixth-century reforms and Athenian debates on wealth and measure resonate with this earlier Boeotian program of discipline and fairness.
Hellenistic poets and philosophers mined this legacy. Aratus of Soli, in the Phaenomena (third century BCE), transformed the didactic sky into a refined literary atlas, while Stoic hymns to Zeus, such as Cleanthes’, echo Hesiodic praise of divine order. Roman writers formalized the reception: Virgil’s Georgics (29–19 BCE) dignify agriculture with philosophical gravitas owing much to Boeotian precedent; Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti refract Pandora and genealogical myth through Augustan sensibilities. Mythographers like Apollodorus systematized divine family trees in prose, indebted to Hesiod’s template. Thus, cosmology, weather, work, and law migrated from Boeotia into imperial libraries and school curricula.
Late antique and Byzantine transmission preserved the corpus through manuscript culture. Scholia attributed to Proclus and other grammarians supplied etymologies, variants, and moralizing notes; compilers excerpted agricultural dicta and mythic catalogues for encyclopedic use. Monastic scriptoria maintained exemplars, adding marginalia that reflect pedagogy as much as piety. With the revival of Greek learning in Italy, Greek scholars exiled after 1453 joined Latin humanists in preparing copy-texts. The first printed editions, including the Aldine Hesiod (Venice, 1495), standardized readings and disseminated the poet across Europe. The apparatus of arguments and glosses that accompanies modern editions descends from this long scholastic chain.
Renaissance and early modern interpreters aligned Hesiod with Christian moralizing and civic prudence. The Aldine text encouraged humanist mythographers such as Natale Conti to allegorize the gods, while vernacular translators spread didactic precepts into emerging national literatures. In England, George Chapman issued The Georgicks of Hesiod (1618), coupling Elizabethan-Jacobean poetics to ancient counsel on work and measure; his versions of Homer and Hesiod together framed a foundational canon. The georgic mode—later cultivated by Milton, Dryden, and Pope—owes a conceptual debt to Boeotia’s blending of labor and song. Translation thus became a vehicle for reinscribing archaic ethics within modern states.
By the early nineteenth century, British classicists compiled “remains” with dissertations on life, era, poems, and mythology, reflecting new historicism and comparative philology. Editors such as Thomas Cooke (1728) and Charles Abraham Elton (1815) offered English Hesiod with notes, while German scholarship pursued Indo-European comparanda and linguistic rigor. The inclusion of arguments, biographical notices, and specimens of Chapman situated original verse within a lineage of reception. This framing crystallized a Hesiod who is at once agrarian moralist, cosmogonic architect, and textual tradition—an author whose Works and Days, Theogony, and martial ekphraseis were read as documents of Archaic society and as seeds of European literary history.
Synopsis (Selection)
Preface
Introduces the edition’s scope and aims, outlining editorial choices, translation principles, and the materials included to frame Hesiod’s corpus for readers.
Dissertation on the Life and Æra of Hesiod (Sections I–IV: Life, Æra, Poems, Mythology)
A scholarly survey that reconstructs Hesiod’s biography and historical context, evaluates the dating and authenticity of the Hesiodic poems, and summarizes their mythological system, synthesizing ancient testimonia and internal evidence across four themed sections.
The Works and Days (including Argument; Works; Days)
A didactic poem addressed to Perses that combines moral counsel on justice and labor with practical guidance for farming and seafaring, framed by myths such as Pandora and the Five Ages; its latter parts set out seasonal tasks and a calendar of auspicious and inauspicious days.
The Theogony (including Argument)
A genealogical epic charting the origins of the cosmos and the gods from Chaos through the rise of Zeus, cataloging divine births, rivalries, and the establishment of cosmic order, including the Titanomachy and related myths.
The Shield of Hercules (including Argument)
A short heroic narrative centered on Heracles’ encounter with Cycnus and an elaborate ekphrasis of his shield, blending combat scenes with allegorical imagery and briefly involving Ares.
Appendix (Biographical Notice; Specimens of Chapman’s Hesiod with Glossarial and Critical Explanations)
Offers a concise life of Hesiod and selections from George Chapman’s early English translation, accompanied by glosses and critical notes that illustrate early modern reception and clarify language and interpretation.
The Remains of Hesiod the Ascræan, Including the Shield of Hercules
PREFACE.
The remains of Hesiod are not alone interesting to the antiquary, as tracing a picture of the rude arts and manners of the ancient Greeks. His sublime philosophic allegories; his elevated views of a retributive Providence; and the romantic elegance, or daring grandeur, with which he has invested the legends of his mythology, offer more solid reasons than the accident of coeval existence for the traditional association of his name with that of Homer.
Hesiod has been translated in Latin hexameters by Nicolaus Valla, and by Bernardo Zamagna. A French translation by Jacques le Gras bears date 1586. The earliest essay on his poems by our own countrymen appears in the old racy version of “The Works and Days,” by George Chapman, the translator of Homer, published in 1618. It is so scarce that Warton in “The History of English Poetry” doubts its existence. Some specimens of a work equally curious from its rareness, and interesting as an example of our ancient poetry, are appended to this translation. Parnell has given a sprightly imitation of the Pandora, under the title of “Hesiod, or the Rise of Woman:” and Broome, the coadjutor of Pope in the Odyssey, has paraphrased the battle of the Titans and the Tartarus.[1] The translation by Thomas Cooke omits the splendid heroical fragment of “The Shield,” which I have restored to its legitimate connexion. It was first published in 1728; reprinted in 1740; and has been inserted in the collections of Anderson and Chalmers.
This translator obtained from his contemporaries the name of “Hesiod Cooke.” He was thought a good Grecian; and translated against Pope the episode of Thersites, in the Iliad, with some success; which procured him a place in the Dunciad:
and a passage in “The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” seems pointed more directly at the affront of the Thersites:
Satire, however, is not evidence: and neither these distichs, nor the sour notes of Pope’s obsequious commentator, are sufficient to prove, that Cooke, any more than Theobald and many others, deserved, either as an author or a man, to be ranked with dunces. A biographical account of him, with extracts from his common-place books, was communicated by Sir Joseph Mawby to the Gentleman’s Magazine: vol. 61, 62. His edition of Andrew Marvell’s works procured him the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke: he was also a writer in the Craftsman. Johnson has told (Boswell’s Tour to the Hebrides, p. 25.) that “Cooke lived twenty years on a translation of Plautus: for which he was always taking subscriptions.” The Amphitryon was, however, actually published.
With respect to Hesiod, either Cooke’s knowledge of Greek was in reality superficial, or his indolence counteracted his abilities; for his blunders are inexcusably frequent and unaccountably gross: not in matters of mere verbal nicety, but in several important particulars: nor are these instances, which tend so perpetually to mislead the reader, compensated by the force or beauty of his style; which, notwithstanding some few unaffected and emphatical lines, is, in its general effect, tame and grovelling. These errors I had thought it necessary to point out in the notes to my first edition; as a justification of my own attempt to supply what I considered as still a desideratum in our literature. The criticisms are now rescinded; as their object has been misconstrued into a design of raising myself by depreciating my predecessor.
Some remarks of the different writers in the reviews appear to call for reply.
The Edinburgh Reviewer objects, as an instance of defective translation, to my version of αιδως ουκ’ αγαυη: which he says is improperly rendered “shame”: “whereas it rather means that diffidence and want of enterprise which unfits men from improving their fortune. In this sense it is opposed by Hesiod to θαρσος, an active and courageous spirit.”
But the Edinburgh Reviewer is certainly mistaken. If αιδως is to be taken in this limited sense, what can be the meaning of the line
the proper antithesis is the αιδως αγαθη, alluded to in a subsequent line,
The good shame, which deters men from mean actions, as the evil one depresses them from honest enterprise.
In my dissertation I had ventured to call in question the judgment of commentators in exalting their favourite author: and had doubted whether the meek forgiving temper of Hesiod towards his brother, whom he seldom honours with any better title than “fool,” was very happily chosen as a theme for admiration. On this the old Critical Reviewer exclaimed “as if that, and various other gentle expressions, for example blockhead, goose-cap, dunderhead, were not frequently terms of endearment:” and he added his suspicion that “like poor old Lear, I did not know the difference between a bitter fool and a sweet one.”
But, as the clown in Hamlet says, “’twill away from me to you.” The critic is bound to prove, 1st, that νηπις is ever used in this playful sense; which he has not attempted to do: 2dly, that it is so used with the aggravating prefix of ΜΕΓΑ νηπιε: 3dly, that it is so used by Hesiod.
Hector’s babe on the nurse’s bosom is described as νηπιος; and Patroclus weeping is compared by Achilles to κουρη νηπιη. These words may bear the senses of “poor innocent;” and of “fond girl;” the former is tender, the latter playful; but in both places the word is usually understood in its primitive sense of “infant.” Homer says of Andromache preparing a bath for Hector,
But this is in commiseration: or would the critic apply to Andromache the epithet of goose-cap? After all, who in his senses would dream of singling out a word from an author’s context, and delving in other authors for a meaning? The question is, not how it is used by other authors, but how it is used by Hesiod. Till the Critic favours us with some proofs of Hesiod’s namby-pamby tenderness towards the brother who had cheated him of his patrimony, I beg to return both the quotation and the appellatives upon his hands.[2]
The London Reviewer censures my choice of blank-verse as a medium for the ancient hexameter, on the ground that the closing adonic is more fully represented by the rounding rhyme of the couplet: but it may be urged, that the flowing pause and continuous period of the Homeric verse are more consonant with our blank measure. In confining the latter to dramatic poetry, as partaking of the character of the Greek Iambics, he has overlooked the visible distinction of structure in our dramatic and heroic blank verse. With respect to the particular poem, I am disposed to concede that the general details of the Theogony might be improved by rhyme: but the more interesting passages are not to be sacrificed to those which cannot interest, be they versified how they may: and as the critic seems to admit that a poem whose action passes
may be fitly clothed with blank numbers, by this admission he gives up the argument as it affects the Theogony.
In disapproving of my illustration of Hesiod by the Bryantian scheme of mythology, the London Reviewer refers me for a refutation of this system to Professor Richardson’s preface to his Arabic Dictionary; where certain etymological combinations and derivations are contested, which Mr. Bryant produces as authorities in support of the adoration of the Sun or of Fire. Mr. Richardson, however, premises by acknowledging “the penetration and judgement of the author of the Analytic System in the refutation of vulgar errors, with the new and informing light in which he has placed a variety of ancient facts:” and however formidable the professor’s criticisms may be in this his peculiar province, it must be remarked that a great part of “The New System” rests on grounds independent of etymology; and is supported by a mass of curious evidence collected from the history, the rites, and monuments of ancient nations: nor can I look upon the judgment of that critic as infallible, who conceives the suspicious silence of the Persic historians sufficient to set aside the venerable testimony of Herodotus, and the proud memorials and patriotic traditions of the free people of Greece: and who resolves the invasion of Xerxes into the petty piratical inroad of a Persian Satrap. I conceive, also, with respect to the point in dispute, that the professor’s confutation of certain etymological positions is completely weakened in its intended general effect, by his scepticism as to the universality of a diluvian tradition. If we admit that the periodical overflowings of the Nile might have given rise to superstitious observances and processions in Ægypt; and even that the sudden inundations of the Euphrates and the Tigris might have caused the institution of similar memorials in Babylonia, how are we to account for Greece, and India, and America, each visited by a destructive inundation, and each perpetuating its remembrance by poetical legends or emblematical sculptures? Surely a most incredible supposition. Nor is this all; for we find an agreement not merely of a flood, but of persons preserved from a flood; and preserved in a remarkable manner; by inclosure in a vessel, or the hollow trunk of a tree. How is it possible to solve coincidences of so minute and specific a nature[3] by casual inundations, with Mr. Richardson, or, with Dr. Gillies, by the natural proneness of the human mind to the weaknesses and terrors of superstition?
As to my choice of the Analytic System for the purpose of illustrating Hesiod, I am not convinced by the argument either of the London or the Edinburgh Reviewer, that it is a system too extensive to serve for the illustration of a single author, or that my task was necessarily confined to literal explanation of the received mythology. In this single author are concentrated the several heathen legends and heroical fables, and the whole of that popular theology which the author of the New System professed to analyse. Tzetzes, in his scholia upon Hesiod, interpreted the theogonic traditions by the phenomena of nature and the operations of the elements: Le Clerc by the hidden sense which he traced from Phœnician primitives: and to these Cooke, in his notes, added the moral apologues of Lord Bacon. In departing, therefore, from the beaten track of the school-boy’s Pantheon, I have only exercised the same freedom which other commentators and translators have assumed before me.
Clifton, October, 1815.
Footnote
[1] A blank-verse translation of the Battle of the Titans may be found in Bryant’s “Analysis:” and one of the descriptive part of “The Shield” in the “Exeter Essays.” Isaac Ritson translated the Theogony; but the work has remained in MS.
[2] The untimely death of the writer unfortunately precludes me from offering my particular acknowledgments to the translator of Aristotle’s Poetics, for the large and liberal praise which he has bestowed upon my work in the second number of The London Review: a journal established on the plan of a more manly system of criticism by the respectable essayist, whose translations from the Greek comedy first drew the public attention to the unjustly vilified Aristophanes.
[3] “Paintings representing the deluge of Tezpi are found among the different nations that inhabit Mexico. He saved himself conjointly with his wife, children, and several animals, on a raft. The painting represents him in the midst of the water lying in a bark. The mountain, the summit of which, crowned by a tree, rises above the waters, is the peak of Colhuacan, the Ararat of the Mexicans. The men born after the deluge were dumb: a dove, from the top of the tree distributes among them tongues. When the great Spirit ordered the waters to withdraw, Tezpi sent out a vulture. This bird did not return on account of the number of carcases, with which the earth, newly dried up, was strewn. He sent out other birds; one of which, the humming-bird, alone returned, holding in its beak a branch covered with leaves.—Ought we not to acknowledge the traces of a common origin, wherever cosmogonical ideas, and the first traditions of nations, offer striking analogies, even in the minutest circumstances? Does not the humming-bird of Tezpi remind us of Noah’s dove; that of Deucalion, and the birds, which, according to Berosus, Xisuthrus sent out from his ark, to see whether the waters were run off, and whether he might erect altars to the tutelary deities of Chaldæa?” Humboldt’s Researches, concerning the Institutions and Monuments of ancient America: translated by Helen Maria Williams.
DISSERTATION ON THE LIFE AND ÆRAOF HESIOD,HIS POEMS, AND MYTHOLOGY.
SECTION I.ON THE LIFE OF HESIOD.
It is remarked by Velleius Paterculus (Hist. lib. i.) that “Hesiod had avoided the negligence into which Homer fell, by attesting both his country and his parents: but that of his country he had made most reproachful mention; on account of the fine which she had imposed on him.” There are sufficient coincidences in the poems of Hesiod, now extant, to explain the grounds of this assertion of Paterculus; but the statement is loose and incorrect.
As to the mention of his country, if by country we are to suppose the place of his birth, it can only be understood by implication, and that not with certainty. Hesiod indeed relates that his father migrated from Cuma in Æolia, to Ascra, a Bœotian village at the foot of mount Helicon; but we are left to conjecture whether he himself was born at Cuma or at Ascra. His affirmation that he had never embarked in a ship but once, when he sailed across the Euripus to the Isle of Eubœa on occasion of a poetical contest, has been thought decisive of his having been born at Ascra; but the poet is speaking of his nautical experience: and even if he had originally come from Cuma, he would scarcely mention a voyage made in infancy. The observation respecting his parents tends to countenance the reading of Διου γενος; race of Dius; instead of διον γενος, race divine; but the name of one parent only is found. The reproachful mention of his country plainly alludes to his charge of corruption against the petty kings or nobles, who exercised the magistracy of Bœotia: and by the fine is meant the judicial award of the larger share of the patrimony to his brother.
