[32] The extract from the Nostoi in Proclus, Chrest., is particularly inadequate and evidently gives no full idea of the very wide and various subject matter of that poem. Thus, too, the notices of it preserved from other sources give details of its subject matter (esp. of the Nekyia which was included in it) that cannot be fitted into the limits of Proclus’ outline.
[33] The idea that the Bronze age is really identical with the age of Heroes is at first sight attractive (see e.g. Steitz, Die W. u. T. des Hesiod, p. 61); one soon finds, however, that it breaks down on closer examination.
[34] It does not seem to me absolutely necessary to strike out lines 124 f. (οἵ ῥα φυλάσσουσίν τε δίκας καὶ σχέτλια ἔργα, ἠέρα ἑσσάμενοι πάντη φοιτῶντες ἐπ’ αἶαν). They are repeated in lines 254 f., but that is a natural place to repeat them. Proclus does not comment on them; but it does not follow that he did not have them before him; and Plutarch, D.O. 37, p. 431 B, seems to allude to l. 125 in its present context.
[35] Plu., D.O., 10, p. 415 B, in obvious error, takes Hesiod’s δαίμονες for such an intermediate class of beings; he supposes that Hesiod distinguishes four classes τῶν λογικῶν, θεοί, δαίμονες, ἥρωες, ἄνθρωποι. In this Platonist division the ἥρωες would correspond rather with Hesiod’s δαίμονες of the first age. (What Proclus has to say on Hesiod, Op. 121, p. 101, Gaisf., is taken evidently word for word from Plutarch’s commentary on Hesiod and resembles closely the remarks in the passage cited from the Def. Orac.) Modern critics have often failed to notice the difference between the Hesiodic δαίμονες and the Platonic. Plato himself is very decided about the difference (Crat. 397 E–398 C).
[36] ἠέρα ἑσσάμενοι 125 (cf. 223; Ξ 282) is a naive equivalent for “invisible” as Tzet. correctly explains. This is how it is to be understood regularly in Homer whenever there is mention of envelopment in a cloud and the like.
[37] These daimones are called ἐπιχθόνιοι in contrast (not to the ὑποχθόνιοι of l. 141, but) to the θεοὶ ἐπουράνιοι, as Proclus on l. 122 rightly remarks. Thus in Homer we have ἐπιχθόνιοι regularly used as an adjective, or, standing alone, as an equivalent of men as distinguished from gods. Then the ὑποχθόνιοι of 141 are brought in to form another and secondary contrast with the ἐπιχθόνιοι.
[38] ρ 485 ff. It follows that the descriptions of the visits paid by gods to the homes of men are of great antiquity; cf. my Griech. Roman, p. 506 ff. Zeus Philios in particular is fond of visiting men: Diod. Com. Ἐπίκληρ., Mein. Com. iii, p. 543 f. (ii, p. 420 K.).
[39] τιμὴ καὶ τοῖσιν ὀπηδεῖ 142. τιμή in the sense not of simple honour but of practical worship, as frequently in Homer, e.g. in such phrases as: τιμὴ καὶ κῦδος ὀπηδεῖ, Ρ 251; τιμῆς ἀπονήμενος, ω 30: τιμὴν δὲ λελόγχασιν ἶσα θεοῖσιν, λ 304; ἔχει τιμήν, λ 495, etc. In the same way here, l. 138: οὕνεκα τιμὰς οὐκ ἐδίδουν μακάρεσσι θεοῖς.
[40] Light and dark, i.e. good and bad, δαίμονες are acc. to Roth, Myth. v. d. Weltaltern (1860), pp. 16–17, distinguished in Hesiod’s daimones of the golden and silver age. Such a distinction, however, never appears in Hesiod; and it is hardly credible that the gods and spirits of ancient Greek popular belief (which never really admitted the categories good and bad) should in this primitive period have been actually classified in accordance with such categories. At any rate, Greek readers never found anything of the kind expressed in Hesiod: [86] the conception of bad daimones is regularly supported by reference to the philosophers alone (e.g. Plut., D.O., 17, p. 419 A), and the conception is certainly no older than the earliest philosophic speculation.
[41] l. 141: τοὶ μὲν ὑποχθόνιοι (ἐπιχθόνιοι all MSS. except one, see Köchly’s Apparatus; also Tz.) μάκαρες θνητοὶ καλέονται.—φύλακες θνητοὶ was read and explained by Proclus. This is clearly wrong, and is corrected to φύλακες θνητῶν (as in l. 123) by Hagen and Welcker. But this transfers from the first to the second race an expression that we cannot be sure Hesiod meant to be transferred. Not merely the words but the sense, too, is thus corrected, without due ground. μάκαρες does not look like a corruption; it is more likely that φύλακες is an accidental alteration. ὑπ. μάκαρες θνητοῖς καλέονται is the reading of the latest editor: but here to say the least of it the addition of θνητοῖς is superfluous. We should rather try to understand and explain the traditional text and show how the poet came by the remarkable expression.