# Hesiod, and Theognis/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.
THE WORKS AND DAYS.
The meaning of the title prefixed to Hesiod's great didactic poem appears to be properly "Farming Operations," "Lucky and Unlucky Days," or, in short, "The Husbandman's Calendar;" but if the ethical scope of it be taken into account, it might, as Colonel Mure has remarked, be not inaptly described as "A Letter of Remonstrance and Advice to a Brother." And inasmuch as its object is to exhort that brother to amend his ways, and take to increasing his substance by agriculture, rather than dreaming of schemes to enhance it by frequenting and corrupting the lawcourts, the two descriptions are not inconsistent with each other. It has been imputed as blame to the poem that it hangs loosely together, that its connection is obscure and vague,—in short, that its constituent parts, larger and smaller, are seldom fitly jointed and compacted. But some allowance is surely to be made for occasional tokens of inartistic workmanship in so early a poet, engaged upon a task where he had neither pattern nor master to refer to; and besides ​this, a closer study of the whole will prove that the want of connectedness in the work is more seeming than real. Didactic poetry, from Hesiod's day until the present, has ever claimed the privilege of arranging its hortatory topics pretty much as is most convenient, and of enforcing its chief idea, be that what it may, by arguments and illustrations rather congruous in the main than marshalled in the best order of their going. But the 'Works and Days' is capable of tolerably neat division and subdivision. The first part (vv. 1-383) is ethical rather than didactic,—a setting-forth by contrast, and by the accessory aid of myth, fable, allegory, and proverb-lore, of the superiority of honest labour to unthrift and idleness, and of worthy emulation to unworthy strife and envying. The second part (vv. 384-764) consists of practical hints and rules as to husbandry, and, in a true didactic strain, furnishes advice how best to go about that which was the industrious Bœotian's proper and chief means of subsistence. It thus follows naturally on the general exhortation to honest labour which formed the first part of the poem. The third and last part is a religious calendar of the months, with remarks upon the days most lucky or unpropitious for this or that duty or occupation of rural and nautical life. All three, however, more or less address Perses as "a sort of ideal reader," and thus hang together quite sufficiently for didactic coherence; whilst in each of the two first parts episodic matter helps to relieve the dry routine of exhortation or precept, and is introduced, as we shall endeavour to show, with more skill and sys​tem than would appear to a perfunctory reader. The first part, as is almost universally agreed by editors and commentators, begins properly at v. 11, which in the Greek reads as if it were a correction of the view held by the author in his 'Theogony,' that there was but one "Eris," or "Contention," and which is therefore of some slight weight in the question of unity of authorship for the two poems. The introductory ten verses are in all probability nothing more than a shifting proem, in the shape of an address to Jove and the Muses, available for the use of the Hesiodian rhapsodists, in common with divers other like introductions. According to Pausanias, the Heliconians, who kept their countryman's great work engraved on a leaden tablet, knew nothing of these ten verses. Starting, then, at this point, the poet distinguishes between two goddesses of strife, the one pernicious and discord-sowing, the other provocative of honest enterprise. The elder and nobler of the twain is the parent of healthy competition, and actuates mechanics and artists, as well as bards and beggars, between which last trades it is obvious that the poet traces a not fortuitous connection:—
The wandering minstrel and the professional beggar of the heroic age exercise equally legitimate callings in Hesiod's view, and the picture which he draws ​recalls to us those of the banquet-hall in the Odyssey. When Antinous rates the swine-herd Eumæus for bringing Ulysses disguised as a beggar-man into the hall of feasting, his grievance is that
It is probable that the beggar's place was nearer the threshold than that of Phemius the bard, who had just before been singing to his harp, or of other inspired minstrels, of whom it is said that
But that he had an assured footing and dole in such assemblies is plain from Irus's jealousy of a supposed rival beggar, which results in the boxing-match with Ulysses in the 18th Book.
To return to Hesiod. The bettermost kind of rivalry is the goddess to whom he would have Perses give heed, and not her wrangling sister, who inspires wrongful dealing, chicanery, and roguish shifts, and has no fancy for fair-play or healthy emulation. She, says the poet, has had it too much her own way since Prometheus stole the fire from heaven, because Zeus, as a punishment, made labour toilsome, and the idle, ​to shirk their inevitable lot, resort to injustice. "If the gods had not ordained toil, men might stow away their boat-paddles over the smoke, and there would be an end to ploughing with mules and oxen:"—
Till the Titan's offence, toil and sickness and human ills had been unknown; but after that transgression they were introduced—as sin into the world through our mother Eve—by Zeus's "beauteous evil," Pandora, The Father creates her, and the immortals rival each other in the gifts that shall make her best adapted for her work of witchery, and presently send her as a gift to Epimetheus, the personification of "Unreflection," who takes her in spite of the remonstrances of his elder and more foresighted brother, Prometheus. If, as has been suggested, we may take the wise Prometheus to represent the poet, and Perses to be implied in the weaker Epimetheus—and if, too, in Pandora there is a covert allusion to the foolish wife of Perses, who encouraged his extravagance, and seems to have inspired Hesiod with an aversion for her sex—it will bring home the more closely the pertinence of this myth to the moral lesson which, in the first part of ​the poem, the poet designed to teach. The creation and equipment of Pandora is one of Hesiod's finest nights above a commonly-even level:—
The Olympians almost overdo the bidding of their chief, calling in other helpers besides those named in the above extract:—
And when the conclave deemed that they had perfected an impersonation of mischief,—
How this gift of "woman" was to be the source of prolific evil and sorrow, the poet, it must be confessed, does not very coherently explain. Nothing is said, in the account of her equipment, of any chest or casket sent with her by Zeus, or any other god, as an apparatus for propagating ills. And when in v. 94 of the poem we are brought face to face with the chest and the lid, and Pandora's fatal curiosity, the puzzle is "how they got there." Homer, indeed, glances at two chests, one of good the other of evil gifts, in Jove's heavenly mansion:—
And those who hold Hesiod to have lived after Homer, or to have availed himself here and there of the same pre-existent legends, may infer that the poet leaves it to be surmised that Pandora was furnished with the less desirable casket for the express purpose of woe to man. But it is a more likely solution that Prometheus, the embodiment of mythic philanthropy, had im​prisoned "human ills" in a chest in the abode of Epimetheus, and this chest was tampered with through the same craving for knowledge which actuated Mother Eve. This account is supported by the authority of Proclus. In Hesiod, the first mention of the chest is simultaneous with the catastrophe—
It is a beautiful commentary on that part of the legend which represents Hope as lying not at the bottom of the casket, but just beneath the lid which in closing shuts her in, that this did not happen through inadvertence on Pandora's part, but with her connivance, and that of her divine prompter, who, though desirous to punish mankind, represents a partial benefactor to the race. The concluding lines of the last extract recall the reader to the drift of the first part of the poem, by repeating that the moral governance of the universe will not suffer wrong to ​go unpunished, or allow innocence to succumb to fraud.
And yet, the poet goes on to argue, the times in which he lives are out of joint. Such men as his brother prosper in an age which in wickedness distances its precursors. His lot, he laments, is cast in the fifth age of the world; and here he takes occasion to introduce the episode of the five ages of the world, and of the increase of corruption as each succeeds the other. In this episode, which Mr Paley considers to bear a more than accidental resemblance to the Mosaic writings, the golden age comes first—those happy times under Cronos or Saturn, when there was neither care nor trouble nor labour, but life was a blameless holiday spent in gathering self-sown fruits; and death, unheralded by decay or old age, coming to men even as a sleep, was the very ideal of an Euthanasia:—
It was with sin, in Hesiod's view as in that of the author of the Book of Genesis, that death, deserving the name, came into the world. As for the golden race, when earth in the fulness of time closed upon it, they became dæmons or genii, angelic beings invisibly ​moving over the earth—a race of which Homer, indeed, says nought, but whose functions, shadowed forth in Hesiod, accord pretty much with the account Diotima gives of them in the 'Banquet of Plato.' Here is Hesiod's account:—
With this dim forecasting by a heathen of the "ministry of angels" may be compared the poet's reference further on in the poem to the same invisible agency, where he uses the argument of the continual oversight of these thrice ten thousand genii as a dissuasive to corrupt judgments, such as those which the Bœotian judges had given in favour of his brother:—
In the second or silver age began declension and degeneracy. The blessedness of this race consisted in long retention of childhood and its innocence—even up to a hundred years. Manhood attained, it became quarrelsome, irreligious, and ungrateful to the gods—its creators. This generation soon had an end:—
In Hesiod's account of this race it is curious to note a correspondence with holy Scripture as to the term of life in primitive man; curious, too, that Jove is not said to have created, but to have laid to sleep, the silver race. It obtained from men, after its demise, the honours of propitiatory sacrifice, and represented the "blessed spirits of the departed," and perhaps the "Manes" of the Latin, without, however, attaining to immortality. A rougher type was that of the brazen age, which the Elizabethan translator Chapman seems right in designating as
"Of wild ash fashioned, stubborn and austere,"—
though another way of translating the words which he ​so interprets represents these men of brass as "mighty by reason of their ashen spears." The question is set at rest by the context, in which the arms of this race are actually said to have been of brass. This age was hard and ferocious, and, unlike those preceding it, carnivorous. It perished by mutual slaughter, and found an end most unlike the posthumous honours of the silver race, in an ignominious descent to Hades:—
At this stage Hesiod suspends awhile the downward course of ages and races, and reflecting that, having commemorated the "genii" on earth and the blessed spirits in Hades, he must not overlook the "heroes," a veneration for whom formed an important part of the religion of Hellas, brings the "heroic age"—apparently unmetallic—into a place to which their prowess entitled them, next to the brazen age; and at the same time, contrasting their virtues with the character of their violent predecessors, assigns to them an after​state nearer to that of the gold and silver races. Of their lives and acts Hesiod tells us that—
Their rest is in the Isles of the Blest, and in
Who does not recognise the same regions beyond circling ocean, of which Horace long after says in his sixteenth Epode,—
But with this exception and interval, the ages tend to the worse. Now conies the iron age, corrupt, unrestful, and toilsome; wherein, in strong contrast to the silver age, which enjoyed a hundred years of childhood and youth, premature senility is an index of physical degeneracy:—
"With this race, Hesiod goes on to tell us, family ties, the sanctity of oaths, and the plighted faith, are dead letters. Might is right. Lynch-lawyers get the upper hand. All is "violence, oppression, and sword law," and
yet, as this iron age, at the transition point of which Hesiod's own lot is cast, shades off into a lower and worse generation, the lowest depth will at length be reached, and baseness, corruption, crooked ways and words, will supplant all nobler impulses,
​Having thus finished his allegory of the five ages, and identified his own generation with the last and worst, it is nowise abrupt or unseasonable in the poet to bring home to the kings and judges of Bœotia their share in the blame of things being as they are, by means of an apologue or fable. Some have said that it ought to be entitled "The Hawk and the Dove," but Hesiod probably had in his mind the legend of Tereus and Philomela; and the epithet attached to the nightingale in v. 268 probably refers to the tincture of green on its dark-coloured throat, with which one of our older ornithologists credits that bird. The fable is as follows, and it represents oppression and violence in their naked repulsiveness. Contrary to the use of later fabulists, the moral is put in the mouth of the hawk, not of the narrator:—
From fable the poet passes at once to a more direct appeal. Addressing Perses and the judges, he points out that injustice and overbearing conduct not only crush the poor man, but eventually the rich and powerful fail to stand against its consequences. He pictures ​the rule of wrong and the rule of right, and forcibly contrasts the effects of each on the prosperity of communities. Here are the results of injustice:—
And here, by contrast, are the fruits of righteousness and justice, practised by cities and nations:—
In the lines italicised the old poet anticipates that criterion of honest wedlock which Horace shapes into the line, "The father's features in his children smile" (Odes, iv. 5-23, Con.); and Catullus into the beautiful wish for Julia and Manlius, that their offspring
After a recurrence, suggested by this train of thought, to the opposite picture, and an appeal to the judges to remember those invisible watchers who evermore support the right and redress the wrong, as well as the intercession of Justice at the throne of Zeus for them that are defrauded and oppressed, the poet for a moment resorts to irony, and, like Job, asks "what profit there is in righteousness, when wrong seems to carry all before it?" But only for a moment. In a short but fine image, Perses is invited to lift up his eyes to the distant seat,—
He is urged again to rely on his own industry, and encouraged to find in work the antidote to famine, and the favour of bright-crowned Demeter, who can fill his barns with abundance of corn. That which is laid up in your own granary (he is reminded in a series of terse economic maxims, which enforce Hesiod's general exhortation) does not trouble you like that which you ​borrow, or that which you covet. Honesty is the best policy. Shame is found with poverty born of idleness; whereas a just boldness inspirits him whose wealth is gained by honest work and the favour of Heaven. Some of these adagial maxims will form part of the chapter on "Hesiod's Proverbial Philosophy; "and of the rest it may suffice to say, that the poet has his own quaint forceful way of prescribing the best rules for dealing with friends and neighbours, as to giving and entertaining, and with regard to women, children, and domestics. In most of these maxims the ruling motive appears to be expediency. In reference to the fair sex, it is plain that he is on the defensive, and regards them as true representatives of Pandora, with whom the less a man has to do, the less he will be duped, the less hurt will there be to his substance. As old Chapman renders it,
As to family, his view is that "the more children the more cares." The best thing is to have an only son, to nurse and consolidate the patrimony; and if a man has more, it is to be desired that he should die old, so as to prevent litigation (a personal grievance this) between young heirs. And yet, adds the pious bard, it lies with Zeus to give store of wealth to even a large family; and he seems to imply that where such ​a family is thrifty there will be the greater aggregate increase of property. Such is the advice, he remarks in concluding the first part of his poem, which he has to offer to any one who desires wealth; to observe these rules and cautions, and to devote himself to the systematic routine of the farming operations, which, to his mind, constitute the highroad to getting rich.
From the very outset of the second part of the 'Works and Days,' a more definite and practical character attaches to Hesiod's precepts touching agriculture. Hitherto his exhortation to his brother had harped on the one string of "work, work;" and now, as agriculture was the Bœotian's work, he proceeds to prescribe and illustrate the modus operandi, and the seasons best adapted for each operation. This is really the didactic portion of Hesiod's Georgics, if we may so call his poem on agriculture; and it is curiously interesting to study, by the light he affords, the theory and practice of very old-world farming.
As apparently he was ignorant of any calendar of months by which the time of year might be described, he has recourse to the rising and setting of the stars, whose annual motion was known to him, to indicate the seasons of the year. Thus the husbandman is bidden to begin cutting his corn at the rising of the Pleiads (in May), and his ploughing when they set (in November). They are invisible for forty days and nights, during which time, as he tells us later on, sailing, which with the Bœotian was second in importance to agriculture (inasmuch as it subserved the exportation of his produce), was suspended, and works ​on the farm came on instead. To quote Elton's version:—
With Hesiod, therefore, as with us, ploughing and sowing began, for early crops, in late autumn; and to be even with the world around him, and not dependent on his neighbours, a man must (he tells his ne'er-do-well brother) "strip to plough, strip to sow, and strip to reap,"—advice which Virgil has repeated in his first Georgic. He seems to imply, too, in v. 398, that it is a man's own fault if he does not avail himself of the times and the seasons which the Gods have assigned and ordained, and of which the stars are meant to admonish him. If he neglect to do so, he and his wife and children cannot reasonably complain if friends get tired of repeated applications for relief. But suppose the better course of industrious labour resolved upon. The first thing the farmer has to do is to take a house, and get an unmarried female slave, and an ox to plough with, and then the farming im​plements suited to his hand. It will never do to be always borrowing, and so waiting till others can lend, and the season has glided away. Delay is always bad policy:—
Accordingly, on the principle of having all proper implements of one's own, the poet proceeds to give instructions for the most approved make of a wain, a plough, a mortar, a pestle, and so forth. The time to fell timber, so that it be not worm-eaten, and so that it may not be cut when the sap is running, is when in autumn the Dog-star, Sirius, "gets more night and less day;"—in other words, when the summer heats abate, and men's bodies take a turn to greater lissomness and moisture. The pestle and mortar prescribed were a stone handmill or quern, for crushing and bruising corn and other grain, and bring us back to days of very primitive simplicity, though still in use in the days of Aristophanes. So minute is the poet in his directions for making the axle-tree of a waggon, that he recommends its length to be seven feet, but adds that it is well to cut an eight-foot length, that one foot sawn off may serve for the head of a mallet for driving in stakes. The axles of modern carts are about six feet long. But his great concern is, to give full particulars about ​the proper wood and shape for the various parts of his plough. The plough-tail (Virgil's "buris," Georg. i. 170) is to be of ilex wood, which a servant of Athena—i.e., a carpenter—is to fasten with nails to the share-beam, and fit to the pole. It is well, he says, to have two ploughs, in case of an accident to a single one. And whilst one of these was to have plough-tail, sharebeam, and pole all of one piece of timber, the other was to be of three parts, each of different timber, and all fastened with nails. This latter is apparently the better of the two, that which is all of one wood being a most primitive implement, simply "a forked bough." The soundest poles are made of bay or elm, share-beams of oak, and plough-tails of ilex oak. For draught and yoking together, nine-year-old oxen are best, because, being past the mischievous and frolicsome age, they are not likely to break the pole and leave the ploughing in the middle. Directions follow this somewhat dry detail as to the choice of a ploughman:—
The loaf referred to was scored crosswise, like the Latin "quadra" or our cross-bun, and the object in this case was easy and equal division of the slaves' ​rations. Theocritus, xxiv. 136, speaks of "a big Doric loaf in a basket, such as would safely satisfy a garden-digger;" and it is probable that, in prescribing a loaf with eight quarterings, Hesiod means "double rations," thereby implying that it is good economy to feed your men well, if you would have them work well.
The poet next proceeds to advise that the cattle should be kept in good condition, and ready for work, when the migratory crane's cry bespeaks winter's advent and the prospect of wet weather. Everything should be in readiness for this; and it will not do to rely on borrowing a yoke of oxen from a neighbour at the busy time. The wideawake neighbour may up and say,—
A farmer who knows what he is about will have, Hesiod says, all his gear ready. He and his slaves will turn to and plough, wet and dry, early and late, working manfully themselves, and not forgetting to pray Zeus and Demeter to bless the labour of their hand, and bestow their fruits. An odd addition to the farmer's staff is the slave who goes behind the plough ta break the clods, and give trouble to the birds by covering up the seed. In Wilkinson's 'Ancient Egyptians' (ii. 13), an engraving representing the ​processes of ploughing and hoeing gives a slave in the rear with a wooden hoe, engaged in breaking the clods. A little further on, a reference to the same interesting work explains Hesiod's meaning where he says, that if ploughing is done at the point of mid-winter, men will have to sit or stoop to reap (on account, it should seem, of the lowness of the ears), "enclosing but little round the hand, and often covered with dust while binding it up." To judge by the Egyptian paintings, wheat was reaped by men in an upright posture, because they cut the straw much nearer the ear than the ground. Of course, if the straw was very short, the reaper had to stoop, or to sit, if he liked it better. He is represented by Hesiod as seizing a handful of corn in his left hand, while he cuts it with his right, and binding the stalks in bundles in opposite directions, the handfuls being disposed alternately, stalks one way and ears the other. The basket of which Hesiod speaks as carrying the ears clipped from the straw, has its illustration also in the same pages. This is the explanation given also by Mr Paley in his notes. On the whole, the poet is strongly against late sowing, though he admits that if you can sow late in the dry, rainy weather in early spring may bring on the corn so as to be as forward as that which was early sown:—
In this part of the 'Works' our poet is exceptionally matter-of-fact; but as he proceeds to tell what is ​to be done and what avoided in the wintry season, he becomes more amusing. He warns against the error of supposing that this is the time for gossip at the smithy, there being plenty of work for an active man to do in the coldest weather. In fact, then is the time for household work, and for so employing your leisure
a figurative expression for a state of starvation, which emaciates the hand and swells the foot by reason of weakness. As a proper pendant to this sound advice, Hesiod adds his much-admired description of winter, the storms and cold of which he could thoroughly speak of from the experience of a mountain residence in Bœotia. This episode is so poetic,—even if over-wrought in some portions,—that critics have suggested its being a later addition of a rhapsodist of the post-Hesiodic school; and there are two or three tokens (e.g., the mention of "Lenæon" as the month that answers to our Christmastide and beginning of January, whereas the Bœotians knew no such name, but called the period in question "Bucatius") which bespeak a later authorship. And yet a sensitiveness to cold, and a lively description of its phenomena, is quite in keeping with the poet's disparagement of Ascra; and further, it is quite possible that, à propos of Hesiod and his works, theories of interpolation have been suffered to overstep due limits. Inclination, and ​absence of any certain data, combine to facilitate our acceptance of this fine passage as the poet's own handiwork. Indeed, it were a hard fate for any poet if, in the lapse of years, his beauties were to be pronounced spurious by hypercriticism, and his level passages alone left to give an idea of his calibre. We give the description of winter from Elton's version:—
The lines italicised scarcely realise the poet's comparison of the crouching beasts to three-footed old men, or old men crawling with the help of a stick, which in the original recalls, as Hesiod doubtless meant it to do, the famous local legend of the Sphinx.
"Now," adds the poet, "is the time to go warm-clad, thick-shod, and with a waterproof cape over the shoulders, and a fur cap, lined with felt, about the head and ears." He certainly knew how to take care of himself. But he is equally thoughtful for his hinds. When at this season the rain betokened by a misty morning sets in at night, and cold and wet interfere with, husbandry, a time "severe to flocks, nor less to man severe," then, because workmen need more food in cold weather, but cattle, having little work by day and plenty of rest at night, can do with less,—
​And now the poet turns to vine-dressing. He dates the early spring by the rising of Arcturus, sixty days after the winter solstice (February 19), which is soon followed by the advent of the swallow. This is the season for vine-trimming; but when the snail (which Hesiod characteristically, and in language resembling that used in oracular responses, designates as "house-carrier") quits the earth and climbs the trees, to shelter itself from the Pleiads, then vine-culture must give place (about the middle of May) to the early harvest. Then must men rise betimes:—
A brief and picturesque episode follows about the permissible rest and enjoyment of the summer season, when artichokes flower, and the "cicala" (as Hesiod accurately puts it) pours forth "song from its wings"—the result of friction or vibration. "Then," he says, "fat kids, mellow wine, and gay maidens are fair relaxation for the sun-scorched rustic," who, however, is supposed to make merry with temperate cups, and to enjoy the cool shade and trickling rill quite as much as the grape-juice. Hesiod prescribes three cups of water to one of wine; and, as Cratinus's question in Athenæus—"Will it bear three ​parts water?"—suggests, only generous wine will stand such dilution. If such potations are ever seasonable, however, it will be in the greatest heat of summer, when the Dog Star burns. The rising of Orion is the time for threshing and winnowing (i.e., about the middle of July); and this operation appears to have been performed by drawing over the corn the heavy-toothed plank or "tribulum," or trampling it by means of cattle on a smooth level threshing-floor. In some parts of Europe, Mr Paley informs us, the old process is still retained. After the corn has been winnowed, Hesiod counsels a revision of the household staff, in language of which Chapman catches the humour:—
When Sirius and Orion are in mid-heaven, and Arcturus is rising, then the grapes are to be gathered, so that Hesiod's vintage would be in the middle of September; and he prescribes exactly the process of (1) drying the grapes in the sun, (2) drying them in the shade to prevent fermentation, and (3) treading and squeezing out the wine:—
When the Pleiads, Hyads, and Orion set, it is time to plough again. But not to go on a voyage! Though, as we have before stated, and as Hesiod seems particularly anxious to have it known, he was no sailor, our poet gives now directions how to keep boats and tackle safe and sound in the wintry season, by means of a rude breakwater of stones, and by taking the plug out of the keel to prevent its rotting. The best season for voyaging is between midsummer and autumn, he says; only it requires haste, to avoid the winter rains. The other and less desirable time is in spring, when the leaves at the end of a spray have grown to the length of a crow's foot—a comparative measurement, which Mr Paley observes is still retained in the popular name of some species of the ranunculus—crowfoot; but Hesiod calls this a "snatched voyage," and holds the love of gain that essays it foolhardy. He concludes his remarks on this head by prudent advice not to risk all your exports in one venture, all your eggs—as our homely proverb runs—in one basket:—
After this fashion the poet proceeds to give the advice on marriage which has been already quoted, and which probably belongs to an earlier portion of the poem. From this he turns to the duties of friendship, still regulated by caution and an eye to expediency. It is better to be reconciled to an old friend with whom you have fallen out than to contract new friendships; and, above all, to put a control on your countenance, that it may betray no reservations or misgivings. A careful and temperate tongue is commended, and geniality at a feast, especially a club feast, for
And now come some precepts of a ceremonial nature, touching what Professor Conington justly calls "smaller moralities and decencies," some of which, it has been suggested, savour of Pythagorean or of Judaic obligation, whilst all bespeak excessive superstition. Prayers with unwashen hands, fording a river without propitiatory prayer, paring the nails off your "bunch ​of fives" (i.e., your five fingers) at a feast after sacrifice, lifting the can above the bowl at a banquet,—all these acts of commission and omission provoke, says Hesiod, the wrath of the gods. Some of his precepts have a substratum of common sense, but generally they can only be explained by his not desiring to contravene the authority of custom; and, in fact, he finishes his second part with a reason for the observance of such rules and cautions:—
And now comes the closing portion of the poem, designated by Chapman "Hesiod's Book of Days," and, in point of fact, a calendar of the lucky and unlucky days of the lunar month, apparently as connected with the various worships celebrated on those days. The poet divides the month of thirty days, as was the use at Athens much later, into three decades. The thirtieth of the month is the best day for overlooking farm-work done, and allotting the rations for the month coming on; and it is a holiday, too, in the law-courts. The seventh of the month is specially lucky as Apollo's birthday; the sixth unlucky for birth or marriage of girls, probably because the birthday of the virgin Artemis, his sister. The fifth is very unlucky, because on it Horcus, the genius who punishes per​jury, and not, as Virgil supposed, the Roman Orcus or Hades, was born, and taken care of by the Erinnyes. The seventeenth was lucky for bringing in the corn to the threshing-floor, and for other works, because it was the festival-day, in one of the months, of Demeter and Cora, or Proserpine. The fourth was lucky for marriages, perhaps because sacred to Aphrodite and Hermes. Hesiod lays down the law, however, of these days without giving much enlightenment as to the "why" or "wherefore," and our knowledge from other sources does not suffice to explain them all. A fair specimen of this calendar is that which we proceed to quote:—
Hesiod's account of the twenty-ninth of the month is also a characteristic passage, not without a touch of the oracular and mysterious. "The prudent secret," he says, "is to few confessed." "One man praises one day, another another, but few know them." "Some​times a day is a stepmother, sometimes a mother." "Blest and fortunate he who knowingly doeth all with an eye to these days, unblamed by the immortals, discerning omens and avoiding transgression."
Such is the appropriate ending of Hesiod's didactic poem—a termination which ascribes prosperity in agricultural pursuits to ascertainment of the will of the gods, and avoidance of even unwitting transgression of their festivals. The study of omens, the poet would have it understood, is the way to be safe in these matters.
The 'Works and Days' possesses a curious interest as Hesiod's most undoubted production, and as the earliest sample of so-called didactic poetry; nor is it fair or just to speak of this poem as an ill-constructed, loose-hanging concatenation of thoughts and hints on farming matters, according as they come uppermost. That later and more finished didactic poems have only partially and exceptionally borrowed Hesiod's manner or matter does not really detract from the interest of a poem which, as far as we know, is the first in classical literature to afford internal evidence of the writer's mind and thoughts,—the first to teach that subjectivity, in which to many readers lies the charm and attraction of poetry. No doubt Hesiod's style and manner betoken a very early and rudimentary school; but few can be insensible to the quaintness of his images, the "Dutch fidelity" (to borrow a phrase of Professor Conington) of his minute descriptions, or, lastly, the point and terseness of his maxims. To these the fore-going chapter on the 'Works and Days' has been ​unable to do justice, because it seemed of more consequence to show the connection and sequence of the parts and episodes of that work. It is proposed, therefore, in the brief chapter next following, to examine "the Proverbial Philosophy of Hesiod," which is chiefly, if not entirely, found in the poem we have been discussing.
* ↑ Jowett's transl., i. 519.
* ↑ "He that hath a wife and children hath given pledges to fortune."—Bacon.
* ↑ "A slang term for the fists, in use among pugilists."—See Paley's note on v. 742.