But after all her sweet words, the priestess was but a jilting gypsey; and meant only to shuffle with the ambiguity of her trade. The old gentleman carefully turning aside from the Peloponnesian Nemea, fell into the trap of a temple of the Nemean Jupiter at Ænoe, a town of Locris. He was here entertained by one Ganyctor; together with a Milesian, his fellow-traveller, and a youth called Troilus. During the night this Milesian violated the daughter of their host, by name Ctemene: and the grey hairs of Hesiod, who we are told was an old man twice over,[5] and whose name grew into a proverb for longevity, could not save him from being suspected of the deed by the young lady’s brothers, Ctemenus and Antiphus: they without much ceremony murdered him in the fields, and “to leave no botches in the work,” killed the poor boy into the bargain. The Milesian, we are to suppose, escaped under the cloud of his miraculous security, free from gashes and from question. The body of Hesiod was thrown into the sea; and a dolphin,[6] or a whole shoal of them, according to another account, conveyed it to a part of the coast, where the festival of Neptune was celebrating: and the murderers, having confessed, were drowned in the waves. Plutarch (de solertiâ animalium) states that the corpse of Hesiod was discovered through the sagacity of his dog.
The body of a murdered poet, however, was not to rest quiet without effecting some further extraordinary prodigies. The inhabitants of Orchomenos, in Bœotia, having consulted the oracle on occasion of a pestilence, were answered that, as their only remedy, they must seek the bones of Hesiod; and that a crow would direct them. The messengers accordingly found a crow sitting on a rock; in the cavity of which they discovered the poet’s remains; transported them to their own country, and erected a tomb with this epitaph:
The fallow vales of Ascra gave him birth:
His bones are cover’d by the Mingan earth:
Supreme in Hellas Hesiod’s glories rise,
Whom men discern by wisdom’s touchstone wise.
Among the Greek Inscriptions is an epitaph on Hesiod with the name of Alcæus, which has the air of being a genuine ancient production, from its breathing the beautiful classic simplicity of the old Grecian school:
Nymphs in their founts midst Locris’ woodland gloom
Laved Hesiod’s corse and piled his grassy tomb: