came after. The Bronze men who next appeared were sprung from Ash-nymphs. They had bronze arms and lived in bronze houses; they ate no bread, and all their care was for war and violence. Their wars ultimately extinguished them, and they went down 'nameless' to the 'mouldering house of cold Hades; yea, wonderful and terrible though they were, black death took them and they left the light of the sun.' After them, according to the order of the metals, should come the Men of Iron. But if so, a difficulty arises. No place seems to be left for the heroes of Hellenic legend. Were the men who went on the quest of Helen to be numbered in the race of Iron, the last and the worst? On the other hand, they were more recent than the Bronze race, of which only a dim remembrance survived. Thus Hesiod-and here we see his respect for Homer was driven to assume a Fourth Age for the Homeric (and other) heroes, interpolated between the Bronze Age and the Iron, better than the Bronze, far better than the Iron. Here the gradual decline is reversed; the Bronze men are succeeded by mortals superior to themselves, and destined to a brighter lot after their death, not in the home of decay, but in the islands of the blessed, beside the ocean.

ἐν μακάρων νήσοισι παρ ὠκεανὸν βαθυδίνην.

Of the Iron race, which possessed the earth in his own day, Hesiod gives a sad account indeed. It is 'weariness and woe,' he says, by day and by night; and he wishes that he had been lucky enough to be born either at some earlier period or in later times. This glance at the future is interesting; for it shews that he did not regard the successor of the Iron race as destined to decline to a still lower degree. Degeneration did not seem to him a law of nature, the matter lying altogether in the hands of Zeus, who created what manner of men he willed, and 'hid them away' when they had played their part.

It is to be observed that Homer was not a rival of Hesiod, as far as Hesiod himself was concerned, but a model, a tradition and an influence. One sees this in the way in which he dedicates his Fourth Age especially to the heroes of whom Homer sang; one feels it in the flow of the hexameter, one re

marks it in such phrases as the measure of the 'sounding sea (πoλupλoloßolo Padá'oons). And if the Theogony only, or some of Hesiod's lost poems had been left to us, one might hardly understand the notion of a deep contrast between the two poets, who were said to have sung against each other at Chalcis. But fortunately the new world which the Boeotian poet discovered has come down to us in the Works and Days. For it was certainly a new idea to bring the Homeric hexameter to bear upon daily life. One might regard it as an attempt to reconcile men to the toil and care of their uniform work, by holding out an ideal of the way in which it should be wrought, and imposing on it a new dignity or grace by means of art. The Works and Days! The title itself is realistic. For a poem dealing with the hard details of labour, a more expressive name, suggesting the business and the time by which we measure it—the wearying or pleasant work, the days so long or too short-could not easily be chosen. It might serve as a motto for the pessimist; or it might be taken as a text by the man of enthusiasm. With Hesiod it was the title of a discourse, from an inspired point of view, neither enthusiastic nor querulous, on the best way of performing the work' and arranging the days. The Greek word pya, suggested to a Greek something different from the word by which we render it. Works, when we use it in a special sense, suggests machinery, as in ironworks, waterworks; pya, when a Greek used it in a special sense, suggested agriculture, and even meant the actual fields and farm grounds. Thus the name of Hesiod's poem had a rural sound, which is not echoed in our usual translation of it. Tillage and Days' would come nearer.

The atmosphere of the poem is certainly dismal, giving one the impression that it was written by a man who has no time to spend in contemplating anything save the hard realities of life. Hesiod did not care to linger on spring and autumn, after the manner of poets; they were really serious subjects, not playthings for the artist; and he only indicates them by quick touches. He speaks, for example, of the 'white spring,' as if white were the colour of promise, coming in between the black winter and the divers colours of summer. And he has a re

markably effective imitation of one of the characteristic sounds of spring :

ἦμος κόκκυξ κοκκύζει δρυὸς ἐν πετάλοισι,

Where one seems to hear cuckoo, cuckoo! amid the lisping of leaves; a kind of verse which, by no means belonging to the highest orders of versification, may be really pleasing in a rare place-once in a long poem of this kind, for example-suddenly surprising the reader, like an actual sound of nature breaking in upon him from without and calling his attention away from his reading. But the muse is kept strictly to business throughout the work, which is practically a Handbook to Farming. There is no scent of flowers about the poem; only the smell of clay, with a crossblown savour, once or twice, of corn or wine. There is no ornament in the house of Works and Days; it is pensive, though appertaining altogether to the concerns of physical life, and its outlook is on gloomy places. It was built, one might fancy, by an architect who had more joy in the rage of the north wind than in the pleasures of springtime or the vintage. For it is only the month Lenaeôn -extending, according to our reckoning, from the middle of January to the middle of February-the month of wicked days, shrewd enough, with the lash of winds and frosts, to flay oxen, that seduces the poet into giving a general and very lively picture of the condition of animals and men in the country during that unkindly season. It is a thoroughly realistic and homely description of the severity of winter, certain to leave a very clear impression on the mind, though not purposing to be a 'fine passage.' We hear the descent of the north wind from Thrace, the noise of earth and heaven, the falling of oaks and pines in the mountain glens amid the roaring of the multitudinous wood' (výpɩros v\n), the chill wind penetrating through the thick coverings of the wild animals, which shiver and put their tails between their legs (our nearly literal equivalent for a homely Greek phrase), and reaching the kine and the goats too, the fleeces of the lucky sheep only being proof against it. We have pictures of an old man running to keep himself warm, or to seek shelter; and of a maiden sitting in the house, safely out of the cold, beside her mother;

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this was a really happy touch, suggesting the peculiar pleasure of the sheltered, such as (to go from Boeotia to Normandy) was felt by Jeanne (in the novel of Guy de Maupassant) when she travelled in heavy rain to les Peuples. Elle jouissait de voir la désolation des paysages et de se sentir à l'abri au milieu de cette inondation.' The snowstorm soon comes, and the beasts of the fields, horned and hornless, fly through the woodland to their holes and coverts. And here the advice to the farmer is resumed. He is told how he should furnish himself against the cruelties of this season with overcoat and warm sandals, and a cap that shall protect his ears from wet.

One follows with interest in the pages of Hesiod the change of the constellations, as they divide, like sign-posts, the days of the year. Towards the end of February, Arcturus rises for the Greeks in the evening twilight, and the Spring may be said to begin, the swallow coming soon after Arcturus. The note of the swallow is heard for an instant, and we are reminded that there was a myth connected with her; but not caring to linger on the vital agitation of the springtime (he had already spoken of ploughing to be done then) the poet hurries on to the rising of the Pleiads in May-when the 'house-carrier,' as he calls the snail, begins to climb up plants-and to the preparations for harvest. But when the reaping is done, and the corn is in, the very imagination of the dead heat of summer, when things are weary, except perhaps the wild artichoke, then coming into bloom, and the grasshopper, noisier than ever, constrains Hesiod to fling himself down to rest for a space in the shade, with a milk-cake and some wine,-wine, as he tells us, being at that season best-mixed with water, in the proportion of one to three. But the appearance of Orion in the heavens soon stirs him again to the business of the threshing, and then of the vintage; and the gifts of Dionysus, the Rejoicer, do not seduce him into allowing himself another moment of relaxation; he does not even suggest a fête champêtre.

The prescriptions which he gives to the farmer, some of them touching the more general ordering of one's conduct, others regarding particular observances, give a glimpse into

some corners of the life of a Boeotian, who tried to bind his days together by ritual, as well as natural piety. These counsels are chiefly negative, prescribing what it is well not to do. The paring of the nails, for instance, at religious celebrations, is disapproved in language which has a really oracular strain of metaphor: 'Cut not the dry of the firebranch from the green thereof with bright iron at the feast of the gods.' The firebranch, as a name of the hand, sounds like an invention of the Delphic priesthood. It is said to be unlucky to set the wine ewer above the mixing-bowl at a banquet; a superstition of the same kind as those which still here and there survive among us; such, for instance, as harm in a party of thirteen at table. But in many of these 'taboos' we can see the underlying motive; such as divine presences in rivers, or a divine consecration in the season of night. The same sense of the presence and influence of the gods pervades the husbandman's calendar, with which the poem comes to an end, a tale of the Days of the Month, marking certain days as favourable or unfavourable to particular kinds of work, a matter indeed on which, when it comes to details, superstition was not quite unanimous; though it was agreed that some days were mothers to men and others stepmotherly, and that it was important for a mortal to distinguish these if he would walk altogether blameless in the sight of the gods.

This belief in the influence of the gods, and the entire dependence of men upon them, excluded the idea of a gradual improvement or development of the race. It was not worth while to contemplate possibilities. Only in a very modified sense could Hesiod have accepted the motto which Rousseau adopted for Émile-sanabilibus aegrotamus malis. The crude primary fact for mortals was that the gods have hidden the means of sustaining life; whence follows the necessity of agricultural toil. And as he is dealing with plain and crude facts, Hesiod is not afraid of common words—as men might who only played at farming; and we meet lines which, in tone, might be compared to the homely refrain in a song of Shakespeare :—

only that the dignified hexameter would convert 'Joan' into