In verse and dialect the Hesiodic poems are not dissimilar from the Homeric, which, supposing their date to have been later, proves that the Iliad had determined the style and standard of epic composition, or, supposing a contemporary origin, would show that the Greeks of the so-called heroic age had agreed upon a common literary language. We may refer the Theogony and the Works and Days, after the deduction of numerous interpolations, to Hesiod, but only in the same sense and with the same reservation as we assign the Iliad and the Odyssey to Homer.[37] Unlike the heroic epos, they were recited, not to the accompaniment of the cithara, but by the poet standing with a laurel staff, called ῥάβδος or σκῆπτρον, in his hand. Hesiod, at the opening of the Theogony, tells us how he had received a staff of this kind from the Muse upon Mount Helicon. Either, then, the laurel ῥαβδος had already been recognized in that part of Greece as the symbol of the poet's office, or else, from the respect which the followers of Hesiod paid to the details of his poem, they adopted it as their badge.
Of the two poems ascribed to Hesiod, the Theogony and the Works and Days, the former—though its genuineness as a Hesiodic production seems to have been disputed from a very early period—was, perhaps, on the whole, of greater value than the latter to the Greeks. It contained an authorized version of the genealogy of their gods and heroes, an inspired dictionary of mythology, from which to deviate was hazardous. Just as families in England try to prove their Norman descent by an appeal to the Roll of Battle Abbey, so the canon of the Theogony decided the claims of god or demi-god to rank among celestials. In this sense Herodotus should be interpreted when he says that Hesiod joined with Homer in making their Theogonia for the Greeks. But though this poem had thus a unique value for the ancients, it is hardly so interesting in the light of modern criticism as the Works and Days. The Works and Days, while for all practical purposes we may regard it as contemporaneous with the Iliad, marks the transition from the heroic epic to the moral poetry of the succeeding age, and forms the basis of direct ethical philosophy in Hellas. Hesiod is thus not only the mouthpiece of obscure hand-workers in the earliest centuries of Greek history, the poet of their daily labors, sufferings, and wrongs, the singer of their doubts and infantine reflections on the world in which they had to toil; he is also the immediate parent of gnomic verse, and the ancestor of those deep thinkers who speculated in the Attic age upon the mysteries of human life.
The first ten verses of the Works and Days are spurious—borrowed, probably, from some Orphic hymn to Zeus, and recognized as not the work of Hesiod by critics as ancient as Pausanias. The poem begins with these words: "Not, as I thought, is there only one kind of strife; but on the earth there are two, the one praiseworthy, the other to be blamed." It has been conjectured that Hesiod is referring to that passage of the Theogony[38] in which Eris, daughter of Night, is said to have had no sister. We are, therefore, justified in assuming that much of his mythology is consciously etymological; and this should be borne in mind while dealing with the legend of Prometheus. The strife whereof he speaks in his exordium is what we should now call competition. It rouses the idle man to labor; it stirs up envy in the heart of the poor man, making him eager to possess the advantages of wealth; it sets neighbor against neighbor, craftsman against craftsman, in commendable emulation. Very different, says the poet, is this sort of strife from that which sways the law-courts; and at this point he begins to address his brother Perses, who had litigiously deprived him of his heritage. The form of didactic poetry, as it has since been practised by the followers of Hesiod, was fixed by the appeal to Perses. Empedocles, it will be remembered, addressed his poem on Nature to the physician Pausanias; Lucretius invoked the attention of Memmius, and Virgil that of Mæcenas; the gnomes of Theognis were uttered to the Megarian Cyrnus; Poliziano dedicated his Silva to Lorenzo de' Medici, Vida his Poetics to the Dauphin, Fracastorio his medical poem to Bembo, and Pope the Essay on Man to Bolingbroke. After this preface on competition as the inducement to labor, and on strife as the basis of injustice, the poet proceeds to the mythus of Prometheus, which is so artificially introduced as to justify the opinion that it may be an interpolation by some later craftsman of the Hesiodic school. Work, he says, is necessary for men, because Zeus has concealed and hidden far away our means of livelihood; so that we are forced to toil and suffer in the search for sustenance. This grudge Zeus owed mankind because of the sin of Prometheus. In the Works and Days the account given of the trick played upon Zeus is brief; Hesiod only says, "seeing that Prometheus of crooked counsel deceived him." We may, however, supplement the story from the Theogony.[39] In old days the human race had fire, and offered burnt sacrifice to heaven; but Prometheus by his craft deceived the gods of their just portion of the victims, making Zeus take the bones and fat for his share. Whereupon Zeus deprived men of the use of fire. Prometheus then stole fire from heaven and gave it back to men. "Then," says Hesiod, "was cloud-gathering Zeus full wroth of heart, and he devised a great woe for all mankind." He determined to punish the whole race by giving them Pandora. He bade Hephæstus mix earth and water, and infuse into the plastic form a human voice and human powers, and liken it in all points to a heavenly goddess. Athene was told to teach the woman, thus made, household work and skill in weaving. Aphrodite poured upon her head the charm of beauty, with terrible desire, and flesh-consuming thoughts of love. But Zeus commanded Hermes to give to her the mind of a dog and wily temper. After this fashion was the making of Pandora. And when she had been shaped, Athene girded and adorned her; the Graces and divine Persuasion hung golden chains about her flesh, and the Hours crowned her with spring blossoms. Zeus called her Pandora, because each dweller on Olympus had bestowed on her a gift. Then Pandora was sent under the charge of Hermes to Epimetheus, who remembered not his brother's words, how he had said: "Receive no gift from Zeus, but send it back again, lest evil should befall the race of men." But as soon as Epimetheus had housed her he recognized his error. Before this time men had lived upon the earth apart from evils, apart from painful toil, and weariful diseases which bring death on mortals. The woman with her hands lifted the lid of the great jar where all these bad things were shut up, and let them loose into the air. Hope alone remained behind—for the lot of humanity is hopeless; but a hundred thousand woes abode at large to plague the race of men. Earth is full of them; the sea is full; and sickness roams abroad by night and day, where it listeth, bearing ills to mortals in silence, for Zeus in his deep craft took away its voice that men might have no warning. Thus not in any way is it possible to avoid the will of God.
Such is the mythus of the Fall, as imagined by the early Greeks. Man in rebellion against heaven, pitted in his weakness at a game of mutual deception against almighty force, is beaten and is punished. Woman, the instrument of his chastisement, is thrust upon him by offended and malignant deity; the folly of man receives her, and repents too late. Both his wisdom and his foolishness conspire to man's undoing—wisdom which he cannot use aright, and foolishness which makes him fall into the trap prepared for him. We are irresistibly led to compare this legend with the Hebrew tradition of the Fall. In both there is an act of transgression on the part of man. Woman in both brings woe into the world. That is to say, the conscience of the Greeks and Jews, intent on solving the mystery of pain and death, convicted them alike of sin; while the social prejudices of both races made them throw the blame upon the weaker but more fascinating sex, by whom they felt their sterner nature softened and their passions quickened to work foolishness. So far the two myths have strong points of agreement. But in that of the Greeks there is no Manichæism. The sin of Prometheus is not, like the sin of Adam, the error of weak human beings tempted by the power of evil to transgress the law of good. It is rather a knavish trick played off upon the sire of gods and men by a wily gamester; and herein it seems to symbolize that tendency to overreach which formed a marked characteristic of the Hellenes in all ages. The Greek of Hesiod's time conceived of the relations between man and god as involving mutual mistrust and guile; his ideal of intellectual superiority, both in Prometheus and in Zeus, implied capacity for getting the upper hand by craft. Again, the Greek god takes a diabolical revenge, punishing the whole human race, with laughter on his lips and self-congratulation for superior cunning in his heart. We lack the solemn moment when God calls Adam at the close of day, and tells him of the curse, but also promises a Saviour. The legend of Prometheus has, for its part also, the prophecy of a redeemer; but the redeemer of men from the anger of God does not proceed from the mercy of the deity himself, who has been wronged, but from the iron will of Fate, who stands above both god and man, and from the invincible fortitude of the soul which first had sinned, now stiffening itself against the might of Zeus, refusing his promises, rejecting his offers of reconciliation, biding in pain and patience till Herakles appears and cuts the Gordian knot. This is the spectacle presented by Æschylus in his Prometheus Bound. To deny its grandeur would be ridiculous; to contend that it offers some features of sublimity superior to anything contained in the Hebrew legend would be no difficult task. In the person of Prometheus, chained on Caucasus, pierced by fiery arrows in the noonday and by frosty arrows in the night, humanity wavers not, but endures with scorn and patience and stoical acceptance. Unfortunately the outlines of this great tragic allegory have been blurred by time and travestied by feeble copyists. What we know about the tale of Prometheus is but a faint echo of the mythus apprehended by the Greeks anterior to Hesiod, and handled afterwards by Æschylus. Enough, however, remains to make it certain that it was the creation of a race profoundly convinced of present injustice in the divine government of the world. If the soul of man is raised by the attribution of stern heroism, God is lowered to the infamy of a tyrant. But neither is the Hebrew legend on its side theologically flawless. Greek and Jew fail alike to offer a satisfactory solution of the origin of evil. While in the Greek mythus Zeus plays with mankind like a cat with a mouse, the Hebrew story does not explain the justice of that omnipotent Being who created man with capacity for error, and exposed him to temptation. The true critique of the second and third chapters of Genesis has been admirably expressed by Omar Khayyam in the following stanzas:
O Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with predestination round
Enmesh me, and impute my fall to sin?
O Thou, who man of baser earth didst make,
And who with Eden didst devise the snake,
For all the sin wherewith the face of man
Is blackened, man's forgiveness give—and take!
Both tales are but crude and early attempts to set forth the primitive mystery of conscience, and to account for the prevalence of pain and death. The æsthetic superiority of the Hebrew conception lies in its idealization of the deity at all costs. God is at least grand and consistent, justified by his own august counsels; and at the very moment of punishing his creatures, he promises deliverance through their own seed. Moreover, a vast antagonistic agency of evil is brought into the field to account for the fall of man; and we are not precluded from even extending our compassion to the deity, who has been thwarted in his schemes for good.
Before quitting the discussion of this ancient tale of human suffering and sin, it would be well to notice that Hesiod identifies Prometheus with the human race. His hero is the son of the Titan Iapetus by Clymene, daughter of the Titan Oceanus; and his brethren are Atlas, Menoitios, and Epimetheus. These names are significant. Just as Prometheus signifies the forecasting reason of humanity,[40] so Epimetheus indicates the overhasty judgment foredoomed to be wise too late. These are intellectual qualities. Atlas, in like manner, typifies the endurance of man, who bears all to the very end, and holds upon his back the bulk of heaven. In Menoitios is shadowed forth the insolence and rebellious spirit for which a penalty of pain and death is meted. These, then, are moral qualities. In the children of Iapetus and Clymene we consequently trace the first rude attempt at psychological analysis. The scientific import of the mythus was never wholly forgotten by the Greeks. Pindar calls Prophasis, or excuse, the daughter of Epimetheus, or back-thought as opposed to fore-thought. Plato makes the folly of Epimetheus to have consisted in his giving away the natural powers of self-preservation to the beasts; whereupon Prometheus was driven to supplement with fire the unprotected impotence of man. Lucian, again, says of Epimetheus that repentance is his business; while Synesius adds that he provides not for the future, but deplores the past. The Titans, it should further be remarked, are demiurgic powers—elemental forces of air, fire, earth, water—conditions of existence implied by space and time—distributors of darkness and of light—parents, lastly, of the human race. Though some later Greek authors identified Prometheus with the Titans, and made him the benefactor of humanity, this was not the conception of Hesiod. Prometheus is stated, both in the Theogony and the Works and Days, to have been the son of Titans, the protagonist of men, who strove in vain to cope with Zeus. Zeus himself belongs in like manner to a secondary order of existences. Begotten by the Titan Kronos, he seems to typify the reason as distinguished from the brute powers of the universe, mind emergent from matter, and overcoming it by contest. Prometheus is connected, by his parentage, with the old material order of the world; but he represents that portion of it which is human, and which, qua human, has affinity to Zeus. Herein we trace the mystery of the divine in man, though man has been placed in antagonism to the deity. The same notion is further symbolized by the theft of fire, and by the fiction of Prometheus breathing a particle of the divine spirit into the clay figures whereof he made men. In the decaying age of Greek mythology this aspect of the legend absorbed attention to the exclusion of the elder Hesiodic romance, as students of Horace will remember, and as appears abundantly from Græco-Roman bass-reliefs. To reconcile man and Zeus, cognate in their origin, yet hostile owing to their ancient feud, it was needful that a deliverer, Herakles, should be born of god and woman, of Zeus and Alcmene, who sets free the elementary principle of humanity typified in Prometheus, and for the first time establishes a harmony between the children of earth and the dwellers on Olympus. So far I have remained within the limits of the Hesiodic legend, only hinting at such divergences as were adopted by the later handlers of the tale. The new aspect given to the whole myth by Æschylus deserves separate consideration in connection with the tragedy of Prometheus. It is to be regretted that we only possess so important a relique of Greek religious speculation in fragments; and these fragments are so tantalizingly incomplete that it is impossible to say exactly how much may be the débris of original tradition, or where the free fancy of later poets has been remoulding and recasting the material of the antique myth to suit more modern allegory.
The tale of Prometheus may be called the first canto of the Works and Days. The second consists of the vision of the four ages of man. Hesiod, in common with all early poets, imagined a state of primeval bliss, which he called the Age of Gold. Then Kronos reigned upon the earth, and men lived without care or pain or old age. Their death was like the coming on of sleep, and the soil bore them fruits untilled. When this race came to an end, Zeus made them genii of good-will, haunting the world and protecting mortals. Theirs it is to watch the decrees of justice, and to mark wrong-doing, wrapped around with mist, going up and down upon the earth, the givers of wealth; such is the royal honor which is theirs. The next age he calls the Silver, for it was inferior to the first; and Zeus speedily swept it away, seeing that the men of this generation waxed insolent, and paid no honor to the gods. The third age is the Brazen. A terrible and mighty brood of men possessed the land, who delighted in naught but violence and warfare. They first ate flesh. Their houses and their armor and their mattocks were of brass. In strife they slew themselves, and perished without a name. After them came the heroes of romance, whom Zeus made most just and worthy. They fell fighting before seven-gated Thebes and Troy; but after death Father Zeus transferred them to the utmost limits of the world, where they live without care in islands of the blest, by ocean waves, blest heroes, for whom thrice yearly the soil bears blooming fruitage honey-sweet. Then cries Hesiod, and the cry is wrenched from him with agony, Would that I had never been born in the fifth generation of men, but rather that I had died before or had lived afterwards; for now the age is of iron! On the face of the world there is naught but violence and wrong; division is set between father and son, brother and brother, friend and friend; there is no fear of God, no sense of justice, no fidelity, no truth; the better man is subject to the worse, and jealousy corrupts the world. Soon, very soon, will wing their way to heaven again—leaving the earth with her broad ways, robed in white raiment, joining the immortal choir, deserting men—both modest shame and righteous indignation. But dismal woes will stay and harbor here, and against evil there shall be no aid. This ends the second canto of the Works and Days, and brings us down to the two hundredth line of the poem. The remainder consists for the most part of precepts adapted to the doleful state in which mortals of the present have to suffer.
What may be called the third canto is occupied with justice, the advantages of which, from a purely utilitarian point of view, as well as æsthetically conceived, are urged in verse. It begins with the apologue of the hawk and nightingale already quoted. Then the condition of a city where justice is honored, where the people multiply in peace, and there is fulness and prosperity, where pestilence and calamity keep far away, is contrasted with the plagues, wars, famines, wasting away of population, and perpetual discomforts that beset the unjust nation. For the innocent and righteous folk, says the poet, the earth bears plenty, and in the mountains the oak-tree at the top yields acorns, and in the middle bees, and the woolly sheep are weighed down with their fleeces. The women give birth to children like their fathers. With blessings do men always flourish, nor need they tempt the sea in ships, but earth abundantly supplies their wants.