PREFACE.
The remains of Hesiod are not alone interesting to the antiquary, as tracing a picture of the rude arts and manners of the ancient Greeks. His sublime philosophic allegories; his elevated views of a retributive Providence; and the romantic elegance, or daring grandeur, with which he has invested the legends of his mythology, offer more solid reasons than the accident of coeval existence for the traditional association of his name with that of Homer.
Hesiod has been translated in Latin hexameters by Nicolaus Valla, and by Bernardo Zamagna. A French translation by Jacques le Gras bears date 1586. The earliest essay on his poems by our own countrymen appears in the old racy version of “The Works and Days,” by George Chapman, the translator of Homer, published in 1618. It is so scarce that Warton in “The History of English Poetry” doubts its existence. Some specimens of a work equally curious from its rareness, and interesting as an example of our ancient poetry, are appended to this translation. Parnell has given a sprightly imitation of the Pandora, under the title of “Hesiod, or the Rise of Woman:” and Broome, the coadjutor of Pope in the Odyssey, has paraphrased the battle of the Titans and the Tartarus.[1] The translation by Thomas Cooke omits the splendid heroical fragment of “The Shield,” which I have restored to its legitimate connexion. It was first published in 1728; reprinted in 1740; and has been inserted in the collections of Anderson and Chalmers.
This translator obtained from his contemporaries the name of “Hesiod Cooke.” He was thought a good Grecian; and translated against Pope the episode of Thersites, in the Iliad, with some success; which procured him a place in the Dunciad:
Be thine, my stationer, this magic gift,
Cooke shall be Prior, and Concanen Swift:
and a passage in “The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” seems pointed more directly at the affront of the Thersites:
From these the world shall judge of men and books,
Not from the Burnets, Oldmixons, and Cookes.
Satire, however, is not evidence: and neither these distichs, nor the sour notes of Pope’s obsequious commentator, are sufficient to prove, that Cooke, any more than Theobald and many others, deserved, either as an author or a man, to be ranked with dunces. A biographical account of him, with extracts from his common-place books, was communicated by Sir Joseph Mawby to the Gentleman’s Magazine: vol. 61, 62. His edition of Andrew Marvell’s works procured him the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke: he was also a writer in the Craftsman. Johnson has told (Boswell’s Tour to the Hebrides, p. 25.) that “Cooke lived twenty years on a translation of Plautus: for which he was always taking subscriptions.” The Amphitryon was, however, actually published.