SECTION III.
ON THE POEMS OF HESIOD.[12]
Pausanias informs us that “the Bœotians, who dwell round Helicon, have a tradition among them that Hesiod wrote nothing besides the poem of ‘Works:’ and from this they take away the introduction, and say that the poem properly begins with The Strifes. They showed me a leaden tablet near the fountain, which was almost entirely eaten away with age, and on which were engraven the Works and Days of Hesiod.”
It is difficult to account for the manifest mutilation and corruption of this venerable poet’s compositions, since it appears that they were extant in a complete, or at least, a more perfect form, so late as the age of Vespasian. Pliny, book xiv. complaining of the agricultural ignorance of his age, observes that even the names of several trees enumerated by Hesiod had grown out of knowledge: and in book xv. he adverts to Hesiod’s opinion of the unprofitableness of the olive. From some verses in the Astronomicon of Manilius, an Augustan writer, it would seem that he had treated of ingrafting, and of the soils adapted to corn and vines.
He sings how corn in plains, how vines in hills
Delight, how both with vast increase the olive fills:
How foreign grafts th’ adulterous stock receives,
Bears stranger fruit and wonders at her leaves.
Creech.
and it is remarkable that the line in Virgil translated by Dryden,
And old Ascrean verse through Roman cities sing,