IV. When we come to Hesiod, we seem to be in another world. We hear stories of the gods which are not only irrational but repulsive, and these stories are told quite seriously. Hesiod makes the Muses say: “We know how to tell many false things that are like the truth; but we know too, when we will, to utter what is true.”[[4]] This means that he was quite conscious of the difference between the Homeric spirit and his own. The old light-heartedness is gone, and it is important to tell the truth about the gods. Hesiod knows, too, that he belongs to a later and a sadder time than Homer. In describing the Ages of the World, he inserts a fifth age between those of Bronze and Iron. That is the Age of the Heroes, the age Homer sang of. It was better than the Bronze Age which came before it, and far better than that which followed it, the Age of Iron, in which Hesiod lives.[[5]] He also feels that he is singing for another class. It is to shepherds and husbandmen he addresses himself, and the princes for whom Homer sang have become remote persons who give “crooked dooms.” For common men there is no hope but in hard, unceasing toil. It is the voice of the people we now hear for the first time, and of a people for whom the romance and splendour of the Greek Middle Ages meant nothing. The primitive view of the world had never really died out among them; so it was natural for their first spokesman to assume it in his poems. That is why we find in Hesiod these old, savage tales, which Homer disdained to speak of.
Yet it would be wrong to see in the Theogony a mere revival of the old superstition. Nothing can ever be revived just as it was; for in every reaction there is a polemical element which differentiates it completely from the earlier stage it vainly seeks to reproduce. Hesiod could not help being affected by the new spirit which trade and adventure had awakened over the sea, and he became a pioneer in spite of himself. The rudiments of what grew into Ionic science and history are to be found in his poems, and he really did more than any one to hasten that decay of the old ideas which he was seeking to arrest. The Theogony is an attempt to reduce all the stories about the gods into a single system, and system is necessarily fatal to so wayward a thing as mythology. Hesiod, no less than Homer, teaches a panhellenic polytheism; the only difference is that with him this is more directly based on the legends attached to the local cults, which he thus sought to invest with a national significance. The result is that the myth becomes primary and the cult secondary, a complete inversion of the primitive relation. Herodotos tells us that it was Homer and Hesiod who made a theogony for the Hellenes, who gave the gods their names, and distributed among them their offices and arts,[[6]] and it is perfectly true. The Olympian pantheon took the place of the old local gods in men’s minds, and this was as much the doing of Hesiod as of Homer. The ordinary man had no ties to this company of gods, but at most to one or two of them; and even these he would hardly recognise in the humanised figures, detached from all local associations, which poetry had substituted for the older objects of worship. The gods of Greece had become a splendid subject for art; but they came between the Hellenes and their ancestral religions. They were incapable of satisfying the needs of the people, and that is the secret of the religious revival which we shall have to consider in the sequel.
Cosmogony.
V. Nor is it only in this way that Hesiod shows himself a child of his time. His Theogony is at the same time a Cosmogony, though it would seem that here he was following others rather than working out a thought of his own. At any rate, he only mentions the two great cosmogonical figures, Chaos and Eros, and does not really bring them into connexion with his system. The conception of Chaos represents a distinct effort to picture the beginning of things. It is not a formless mixture, but rather, as its etymology indicates, the yawning gulf or gap where nothing is as yet.[[7]] We may be sure that this is not primitive. Savage man does not feel called upon to form an idea of the very beginning of all things; he takes for granted that there was something to begin with. The other figure, that of Eros, was doubtless intended to explain the impulse to production which gave rise to the whole process. That, at least, is what the Maoris mean by it, as may be seen from the following remarkable passage[[8]]:—
From the conception the increase,
From the increase the swelling,
From the swelling the thought,
From the thought the remembrance,
From the remembrance the desire.
The word became fruitful,