Addison, with that squeamish artificial taste which distinguishes the age of Anne, as compared with that of Elizabeth, underrates, as might have been expected, the vigorous simplicity of Hesiod. But the strong though simple sketches of the old Ascræan bard are often more striking than the finished paintings of the Mantuan. Critics admire the pastoral board of Virgil’s Corycian husbandman; but there is a far greater charm in the summer-repast of Hesiod: so picturesque in its scenery; so patriarchal in its manners. The winter tempest is a bolder copy of nature than any thing in the Latin Georgics; more fresh in colouring; more circumstantiated in detail. The rising of the north-wind, moving the ocean, rooting the pines and oaks from the tops of the mountains, and strewing them along the valleys, and after a pause, suddenly roaring in its strength through the depths of the forests; the exquisite circumstances of life intermingled with the effects of the storm on inanimate nature; the beasts quaking and grinding their teeth with cold and famine; shuddering at the snowflakes, and shrinking into dens and thickets; the old man bent double with the blast;[16] the delicate contrast of the young virgin, sheltered in a soft chamber under her mother’s roof, and bathing previously to her nightly rest, compose a picture wild, romantic, and interesting in an uncommon degree.
As a legendary mythologist the elegant tale of Pandora, and the Island of the Blessed Spirits, are far beyond any thing of Ovid, and can only be compared with Homer: and as a poetical moralist, the strongest proof of his merit is, that innumerable sentences of Hesiod, as is well remarked by Voltaire in his “Dictionnaire Philosophique” have grown into proverbial axioms. Cicero observes in one of his Epistles; “Let our dear Lepta learn Hesiod, and have by heart ‘the gods have placed before virtue the sweat of the brow.’” His plain and downright rules of decency,[17] his superstitious saws, and his lumber of names, belong to the manners of a semi-barbarous village and the learning of a dark age: his genius and his wisdom are his own. From that which remains, mutilated as it obviously is, we may form a judgment of what he would appear to us, if the whole of his numerous works, complete and unadulterated by foreign mixture, were submitted to our observation. Ex pede Herculem.
FOOTNOTES
[12] The following are enumerated as the lost poems of Hesiod.
The Catalogue of Women or Heroines, in five parts, of which the fifth appears to have been entitled “The Herogony.” Suidas.
The Melampodia; from the sooth-sayer Melampus; a poem on divination. Pausanias, Athenæus.
The great Astronomy or Stellar Book. Pliny.
Descent of Theseus into Hades. Pausanias.
Admonitions of Chiron to Achilles. Pausanias, Aristophanes.
Soothsayings and Explications of Signs. Pausanias.