[42] When philosophers and philosophizing poets of a later age occasionally refer to the soul when freed from the body as a δαίμων, the expression has a totally different sense.
[43] Similarly, though the oxymoron is much less daring in his case, Isocrates, 9, 72, has δαίμων θνητός. In order to describe a daimon who has originally been a mortal later ages boldly invented the compound ἀνθρωποδαίμων which corresponds fairly well with the Hesiodic μάκαρ θνητός: [Eur.] Rhes., 971; Procop., An. 12, p. 79, 17 D. (νεκυδαίμων on a defixio from Carthage, BCH. xii, 299). Later still a king destined to become a god is called, even at his birth, by Manetho (i, 280) θεὸν βροτὸν ἀνθρώποισιν.
[44] The silver race was created by the gods of Olympos, like the golden before them (l. 110; 128); only the third race (l. 143) and then the fourth (158) by Zeus alone. It might be supposed from this that the silver age as well as the golden age occurred in the period before Zeus’ rule, ἐπὶ Κρόνου ὅτ’ οὐρανῷ ἐμβασίλευεν (l. 111); and in this sense “Orpheus” understood the words of Hesiod when he τοῦ ἀργυροῦ γένους βασιλεύειν φησὶ τὸν Κρόνον (Proclus on l. 126). But it would be very difficult to reconcile l. 138 Ζεὺς Κρονίδης κτλ. with this view. Hesiod may then have placed the silver age in the time when sub Iove mundus erat (as Ovid explicitly states, M. i, 113 f.); but all the same it lay for him in the far distant past before all history.
[45] νώνυμνοι 154 may quite as well mean “nameless”, i.e. without name or special title, as “fameless” (as it does for the most part though not invariably in Homer).
[46] See Welcker, Kl. Schr. ii, 6, who, however, in the desire to rule out all possibility of identifying Scherie with Korkyra asserts too positively that it was a part of the mainland. ζ 204 (compared with δ 354) at least comes very close to regarding it as an island. But it is clear that nowhere is it explicitly called an island.—It is possible that Σχερίη, connected with σχερός, may really mean “mainland” (Welcker, loc. cit.; Kretschmer, Einl. Gesch. gr. Spr., 281): but the question still remains whether the Homeric poet, who did not invent the name, understood or respected its original significance. At any rate, it was no longer understood by those who in very early times identified Scherie with the island Korkyra.
[47] The objections to l. 169 as regards its form are brought out by Steitz, Hesiods W. u. T., p. 69. The line is missing in most of the MSS.; it was rejected (together with the line following, which, however, [87] is quite sound) by ancient critics (Proclus on l. 158). Later editors are united in condemning it. But the interpolation is at any rate old: probably even Pindar already knew the line in this place (O. ii, 70).
[48] λῦσε δὲ Ζεὺς ἄφθιτος Τιτᾶνας Pi. (P. iv, 291), in whose time, however, this was a well-known myth to which he is only making a passing allusion for the sake of an example. The Hesiodic Theogony still knows nothing of it.
[49] Before Hesiod we have no mention of the myth of a Golden, Saturnian Age, nor any complete description of the imaginary life upon Blessed Islands. But epic poetry had already, as we have seen, provided him with occasional examples of translation to a place of blessedness, and he only collects these into a combined picture of such a place. To that extent the belief in a blessed life beyond the grave meets us earlier than the myth of a Golden Age. But we have not the slightest ground for saying that the former “must have existed from the beginning among the Greeks” (as Milchhöfer at least thinks, Anf. Kunst, p. 230). On the other hand, it may be mere accident that the myth of the Golden Age has no older authority than Hesiod—the story itself may be much earlier. After Hesiod it was frequently taken up and improved upon; not, however, first by Empedocles as Graf supposes, ad aureæ aet. fab. sym. (Leip. Stud. viii, p. 15), but already in the epic Ἀλκμεωνίς, see Philod. Piet., p. 51 Gp. (See also some remarks by Alfred Nutt, The Voyage of Bran, p. 269 f., 1895, with which I cannot agree.)