But if the passage in “The Works” be authentic, the spuriousness of this inscriptive record detects itself; as Hesiod there confines his voyages to the crossing the Euripus.
Pausanias mentions the institution of a contest at the temple in Delphos, where a hymn was to be sung in honour of Apollo: and says that Hesiod was excluded from the number of the candidates because he had not learnt to sing to the harp. He adds, that Homer came thither also; and was incapacitated from trying his skill by the same deficiency: and, what is very strange, he gives as a reason why he could not have taken a part in the contest, even were he a harper, that he was blind.
From Plutarch, Pausanias, and the author of “The Contest,” we are enabled to cull some gossiping traditions of the latter life of Hesiod, which are scarcely worth the gleaning, except that, like the romancing Lives of Homer, they are proofs of the poet’s celebrity.
Hesiod, we are told, set out on a pilgrimage to the Delphic Oracle, for the purpose of hearing his fortune: and the old bard could scarcely get in at the gates of the temple, when the prophetess could refrain no longer: “afflata est numine quando jam propriore Dei:”
Blest is the man who treads this hallow’d ground,
With honours by th’ immortal Muses crown’d:
The bard whose glory beams divinely bright
Far as the morning sheds her ambient light:
But shun the shades of fam’d Nemean Jove;
Thy mortal end awaits thee in the grove.