The love of song, and strains that breathe of heaven.
From the conjunction of this passage with the account of Pausanias, has probably arisen a confused supposition that Hesiod was actually a priest of the Heliconian temple. The circumstance, although destitute of express evidence, is however probable, from his acquaintance with theogonical traditions and his tone of religious instruction.
Guietus rejects the whole passage as supposititious, which respects the voyage to Eubœa, and the contest in poetry at the funeral games of Amphidamas. Proclus supposes Plutarch to have also rejected it: because he speaks of the contest as τα εωλα πραγματα: which some interpret trite or threadbare tales: others old wives’ stories. But if the latter sense be the correct one, Plutarch may have meant to intimate his disbelief only of Hesiod and Homer having contended; not altogether of a contest in which Hesiod took part. In fact it seems reasonable to infer the authenticity of the passage from this very tradition of Homer and Hesiod having disputed a prize in poetry.
In the pseudo-history entitled “The Contest of Homer and Hesiod,” is an inscription purporting to be that on the tripod which Hesiod won from Homer in Eubœa:
This Hesiod vow’d to Helicon’s blest nine,
Victor in Chalcis crown’d o’er Homer, bard divine.
Now that the passage in “The Works” was extant long before this piece was in existence, is susceptible of easy proof: but if we conceive with the credulity of Barnes, that the piece is a collection of scattered traditionary matter of genuine antiquity, that the passage was not constructed on the narration may be inferred from the former wanting the name of Homer. The nullity of purpose in such a forgery seems to have struck those, who in the indulgence of the same fanciful whim have substituted, as Proclus states, for the usual reading in the text of Hesiod,
Υμνω νικησαντα φερειν τριποδ’ ωτωεντα,
I bore a tripod ear’d, my prize, away: