THE THEOGONY. divisions: a cosmogony, or creation of the [HESIOD, next to Homer, the oldest of the Grecian world, its powers, and its fabric; a theogony poets whose works are known to us, and founder of the proper, recording the history of the dynas epic-didactic school of poetry at the foot of Mt. Helicon ties of Cronus and Zeus; and a fragmentary in Boeotia, as Homer was the representative of the epic-generation of heroes, sprung from the interIonian school of Asia Minor. The two schools had little course of mortals with immortals. Hesiod in common except the epic form and dialect, for while and his contemporaries considered that in Homer sang the exploits of heroes, and sought to in- their day Jupiter or Zeus was the lord of spire admiration for adventurous enterprises, Hesiod Olympus; but it was necessary to chronicle inculcates the duty of labor and frugality, and treats of the antecedents of his dynasty, and hence the daily round of domestic life. From these character- the account of the stages and revolutions istics Cleomenes claimed the former as the bard of the which had led up to the established order Spartan warriors, while Hesiod was termed by him the under which Hesiod's generation found itpoet of the Helots. Of the period when he flourished self. And so, after a preface containing and the circumstances of his life, we know little. What amongst other matters the episode of the little is known is derived from his own writings; for Muses' visit to the shepherd poet, Hesiod while Homer, in whom there is greater objectivity than proceeds to his proper task, and represents Chaos as primeval, and Earth, Tartarus, and Eros (Love), as coming next into ex in any other poet, has left in his productions no personal allusions, Hesiod has introduced in many passages incidental accounts of his life and family relations. But in neither poet isany indication given of the period in which he lived. Nor is there any external testimony worthy of confidence. Herodotus says that Hesiod and Homer lived 400 years before his time, and not more, which would give their date about 840 B. C. Most writers make the two contemporary, while some place Hesiod before, others 100 years later than Homer. The various statements are collected in Clinton's Fasti Hellenici, (vol. I, pp. 359-361.) Göttling coincides in the istence : "Love then arose, Most beauteous of immortals; he at once -Elton, 171-175. At first Chaos spontaneously produces opinion of Herodotus, while Grote, from the internal Erebus and Night, the latter of whom gives evidence of style and sentiment, places him shortly birth to Ether and Day; whilst Earth creafter 700 B. C.. Hesiod was of Eolian parentage, boru ates in turn the heaven, the mountains, and at Ascra in Boeotia. His father had been a resident of the sea, the cosmogony so far corresponding But at this Cyme, a town of Æolis in Asia Minor, but had removed generally with the Mosaic. to Ascra, where he possessed and cultivated a farm point Eros or Love begins to work. The which he left at his death to his two sons, Hesiod and union of Earth with Heaven results in the Perses. After the division, Perses, the younger brother, birth of Oceanus and the Titans, the Cycwho seems to have been fond of lawsuits, and the har- lopes, and the hundred-handed giants. The assing business of the agora, managed by bribing the sire of so numerous a progeny, and first judges to defraud his brother of a portion of his inheri- ruler of creation, Uranus, conceiving that tance. Hesiod thereupon in disgust left his native his sovereignty is imperilled by his offspring, Ascra, and removed to Orchomenus, where he spent the resorts to the expedient of relodging each rest of his life. He further intimates that he was child, as soon as it is born, within the bowengaged in farming pursuits, and precepts which are els of its mother, Earth. Groaning under embodied in his Works and Days appear to be the re- such a burden, she arms her youngest and sult of a practical acquaintance with agriculture. The wiliest son, Cronus, with a sickle of her own way in which he was led to attempt poetic composition product, iron, and hides him in an ambush is related in the opening of the Theogony. The Muses, with a view to his mutilating his sire. The who frequented Mt. Helicon, on one occasion met Hesiod conspiracy is justified on the principle of as he was pasturing his flocks at the foot of the moun- retributive justice. Uranus is disabled and tain. They thereupon bestowed on him the gift of dethroned, and, by a not very clear nor prepoetry, and consecrated him to their service by present-sentable legend, the foam-born goddess, The Rev. James Davies, M. A., of Oxford, has given such a clear review of Hesiod's great work, "The Theogomy," that we cannot do a better service to the reader ing him a laurel branch. than make extract from his criticism and use the translation which he has adopted.] Aphrodite, is fabled to have sprung from his mutilation. Here is the poet's account of her rise out of the sea:— "So severing with keen steel The sacred spoils, he from the continent Hesiod's "Theogony" consists of three Amid the many surges of the sea Hurled them. Full long they drifted o'er the deeps, To wave-encircled Cyprus came she then, Had pressed the sands, green herbage, flowering sprang. The foam-born goddess: and her name is known As Cytherea with the blooming wreath, She rose amid the multitude of waves. -Frere-258-283. The concluding verses of this passage are notable as enumerating the fabled accessories of Venus; and the italicised lines, which find modern parallels in Milton, Scott, and Tennyson, may have suggested the invocation of the benignant goddess in the opening of Lucretius :— "Before thee, goddess, thee! the winds are hushed, -Lucret. i. 7-12 (Johnson). By the act of Cronus, the Titans, released from durance, arose to a share in the deliverer's dynasty, the Cyclopes and giants still, it would seem, remaining shut up in their prison-house. Before the poet proceeds to the history of this dynasty and succession of rulers, he apparently conceives it to be his duty to go through the generations of the elder deities with a genealogical minuteness which, it must be confessed, is now and then tedious; though, on the other hand, there are occasional points of interest in the process, which would be interminable if not so relieved. It is curious, for example, to find "the Hesperian maids". "Whose charge o'ersees the fruits of bloomy gold ranked with Death, and Sleep, and Gloom and its kindred, as the unbegotten brood of Night. Possibly the clue is to be found in Hesiod's having a glimmering of the Fail and its consequences, because death and woe were in the plucking of the fruit of "that forbidden tree." Again, from the union of Nereus, the sea-god par excellence, and the eldest offspring of Pontus, one of the original powers, with the Oceanid Doris, are said to have sprung the fifty Nereids, whose names, taken from some characteristic of the sea-its wonders, its treasures, and its good auguries-correspond in many instances with Homer's list in the Iliad (xviii. 38-48), and point to a pre-existent legend approached by both poets. In due order, also, are recorded the children of Tethys and the Titan Oceanus, -to wit, the endless rivers and springs, and the water nymphs, or Oceanids, whose function is to preside over these, and to convey nourishment from the sire to all things liv. that Hesiod includes the Nile, known to ing. As to the list of rivers, it is noticeable Homer only by the name of Egyptus-and the Eridanus, supposed to represent the Rhodanus or Rhone; also that the rivers of Greece appear to be slighted in comparison with those of Asia Minor and the Troad-a circumstance to be accounted for by the Asiatic origin of the poet's father, which would explain his completer geographical knowledge of the colonies than of the mother country. The names of the waternymphs are referable to islands and continents-e. g. Europa, Asia, Doris, "Persiaor to physical characteristics, such as clearness, turbidness, violet hue, and the like. But the poet gives a good reason for fur nishing only a selection : "More remain untold. Three thousand nymphs Of Oceanic line, in beauty tread With ample step, and far and wide dispersed Haunt the green earth and azure depth of lakes, A blooming race of glorious goddesses. As many rivers also yet untold, Rushing with hollow dashing sound, were born To awful Tethys, but their every name Is not for mortal man to memorate. Arduous, yet known to all the dwellers round." -Elton, 492-501. We must not trespass upon our readers' patience, by enumerating with the conscientious genealogist the progeny of the rest of the Titans. Two goddesses, however, stand out from amidst one or other of these | According to Hesiod, Cronus or Saturn was broods, as of more special note, and more alive to the faults of his sire's policy of direct bearing on the world's government self-protection, and conceived an improveand order. Asteria, the goddess of stars, a ment in the means of checking revolutionTitanid in the second generation, bears to ary development on the part of his offPerses, a god of light, and a Titan of the spring, by imprisoning them in his own original stock, one only daughter, Hecate. bowels rather than their mother's. MindThe attributes of this goddess, as de- ful of the destiny that "to his own child he scribed by Hesiod, are so discrepant from should bow down his strength," he prothose ascribed to her by later poets, as to ceeded to swallow up his progeny with such afford strong proof of the antiquity of this regularity, that the maternal feelings of his poem. She is not, as in later poetry, the consort, Rhea, roused her to a spirit of oppatron of magic arts, but the goddess who position. When about to be delivered of blesses labour and energy, in field, senate, her sixth child, Zeus, she called in the aid of her parents, Heaven and Earth, in the concealment of his birth : and forum:— "When the mailed men rise To deadly battle, comes the goddess prompt The other goddess, Styx, a daughter of Oceanus, is memorable not more for her own prominent position in ancient fable, than for having amongst her offspring those iron-handed ministers of Jove, Strength (Kratos) and Force (Bia), whom the classical reader meets again in the opening of the 'Prometheus' of Eschylus. Their nearness to Zeus is ascribed by Hesiod to the decision with which their mother es poused his cause in the struggle with Cro nus and the Titans: "Lo! then incorruptible Styx the first, Swayed by the awful counsels of her sire, But here Hesiod has been anticipating the sequence of events, and forestalling, to this extent, the second stage of the poem. "And her they sent to Lyctus, to the clime Of fruitful Crete; and when her hour was come, As the gods in ancient mythology grow apace, Zeus is soon ripe for the task of aiding his mother, whose craft persuades Cronus to disgorge first the stone which he had mistaken for his youngest-born, and then the five children whom he had previously devoured. A stone, probably meteoric, was shown at Delphi in Pausanias's day as the stone in question, and an object of old memorial to the devout Greek. The rescued brethren at once take part with their deliverer. The first act of Zeus was, as we have seen, to advance Force and Strength, with their brothers Victory and Rivalry, to the dignity of "a body-guard," and to give their mother Styx the style and functions of "oath-sanctioner." His next was to free from the prison to which their father Uranus had consigned them, the hundred-handed giants, and the Cyclopes, who furnished his artillery of lightnings and hot thunderbolts. His success in the struggle was assured by the oracles of Gæa (Earth), if only he could band these towers of strength and muscularity against Cronus and his Titans; and so the battle was set in array, and a fierce war ensued "Each with each Ten years and more the furious battle joined Unintermitted; nor to either host Was issue of stern strife nor end; alike Did either stretch the limit of the war." -Elton, 846-850. Hesiod's description of the contest, which has been justly held to constitute his title to a rank near Homer as an epic poet, is prefaced by a feast at which Zeus addresses his allies, and receives in turn the assurance of their support. The speeches are not wanting in dignity, though briefer than those which, in his great epic, Milton has moulded on their model. Our English poet had bathed his spirit in Hesiod before he essayed the sixth book of his 'Paradise Lost;' and it was well and wisely done by the translator of the following description of the war betwixt Zeus and the Titans to aim at a Miltonic style and speech : "All on that day roused infinite the war, The gods from Cronus sprang, and those whom Zeus Roared: earth resounded: the wide heaven throughout Of hollow tramplings and strong battle-strokes, Of heaven: with mighty war-cries either host Elton, 883-908. In the conflict with the Titans, Zeus has to exert all his might to insure victory:— "Nor longer then did Zeus Curb his full power, but instant in his soul The immensity of forests crackling blazed: Yea, the broad earth burned red, the streams that mix With ocean and the deserts of the sea. Rolled the hot vapour on its fiery surge. The liquid heat air's pure expanse divine Strong though they were, intolerable smote, To heighten the turmoil, the winds and ele- "There Night And Day, near passing, mutual greeting still At once constrain. This passes forth and roams Beams upon earthly dwellers: but a cloud Pernicious Night, aye leading in her hand -Elton, 992-1014. To bring the great oath in a golden ewer, Through shades of darkest night the Stygian horn So great an oath the deities of heaven -Elton, 1038-1072. Such, according to Hesiod, are the surroundings of the infernal prison-house which received the vanquished Titans when Jove's victory was assured. Not yet, however, could he rest from his toil: he had yet to scotch the half-serpent, Typhoeus, the offspring of a new union betwixt Earth and Tartarus,-a monster so terror-inspiring by means of its hundred heads and voices to match, that Olympus might well dread another and less welcome master should this pest attain full development. Zeus, we are told, foresaw the danger : "Intuitive and vigilant and strong Trembled Olympus: groaned the steadfast earth. The gloomy monarch of th' infernal dead |