TO HIS GRACE

JOHN DUKE OF ARGYLL AND

GREENWICH, &c.

MY LORD,

As this is the only method by which men of genius and learning, though small perhaps my claim to either, can show their esteem for persons of extraordinary merit, in a superior manner to the rest of mankind, I could never embrace a more favourable opportunity to express my veneration for your grace than before a translation of so ancient and valuable an author as Hesiod. Your high descent, and the glory of your illustrious ancestors, are the weakest foundations of your praise; your own exalted worth attracts the admiration, and I may say the love, of all virtuous and distinguishing souls; and to that only I dedicate the following work. The many circumstances which contributed to the raising you to the dignities which you now enjoy, and which render you deserving the greatest favours a prince can bestow, and, what is above all, which fix you ever dear in the affection of your country, will be no small part of the English history, and shall make the name of Argyll sacred to every generation; nor is it the least part of your character, that the nation entertains the highest opinion of your taste and judgment in the polite arts.

You, my lord, know how the works of genius lift up the head of a nation above her neighbours, and give it as much honour as success in arms; among these we must reckon our translations of the classics; by which, when we have naturalized all Greece and Rome, we shall be so much richer than they were, by so many original productions as we shall have of our own. By translations, when performed by able hands, our countrymen have an opportunity of discovering the beauties of the ancients, without the trouble and expense of learning their languages; which are of no other advantage to us than for the authors who have writ in them; among which the poets are in the first rank of honour, whose verses are the delightful channels through which the best precepts of morality are conveyed to the mind; they have generally something in them so much above the common sense of mankind, and that delivered with such

dignity of expression, and in such harmony of numbers, all which put together constitute the os divinum, that the reader is inspired with sentiments of honour and virtue, he thinks with abhorrence of all that is base and trifling; I may say, while he is reading, he is exalted above himself.

You, my lord, I say, have a just sense of the benefits arising from works of genius, and will therefore pardon the zeal with which I express myself concerning them: and great is the blessing, that we want not persons who have hearts equal to their power cherish them and here I must beg leave to pay a debt of gratitude to one, who, I dare say, is as highly thought of by all lovers of polite learning as by myself, I mean the earl of Pembroke; whose notes I have used in the words in which he gave then to me, and distinguished them by a particular mark from the rest. Much would I say in commendation of that great man; but I am checked by the fear of offending that virtue which every one admires. The same reason makes me dwell less on the praise of your grace than my heart inclines me to.

The many obligations which I have received from a lady, of whose virtues I can never say too much, make it a duty in me to mention her in the most grateful manner, and particularly before a translation, to the perfecting which I may with propriety say she greatly conduced by her kind solicitations in my behalf, and her earnest recommendation of me to several persons of distinction. I believe your grace will not charge me with vanity, if I confess myself ambitious of being in the least degree of favour with so excellent a lady as the marchioness of Annandale.

I shall conclude, without troubling your grace with any more circumstances relating to myself, sincerely wishing what I offer was more worthy your patronage; and at the same time I beg it may be received as proceeding from a just sense of your eminence in ail that is great and laudable. I am,

A DISCOURSE ON THE LIFE OF HESIOD.

THE lives of few persons are confounded with so many incertainties, and fabulous relations, as those of Hesiod and Homer; for which reason, what may possibly be true is sometimes as much disputed as the romantic part of their stories. The first has been more fortunate than the other, in furnishing as, from his writings, with some circumstances of himself and family, as the condition of his father, the place of his birth, and the extent of his travels; and he has put it out of dispute, though he has not fixed the period, that he was one of the earliest writers of whom we have any account.

He tells us, in the second book of his Works and Days, that his father was an inhabitant of Cuma, in one of the Æolian isles; from whence he removed to Ascra, a village in Baotia, at the foot of mount Helicon; which was doubtless the place of our poet's birth, though Suidas, Lilius Gyraldus, Fabricius, and others, say he was of Cuma. Hesiod himself seems, and not undesignedly, to have prevented any mistake about his country; he tells us positively, in the same book, he never was but once at sea, and that in a voyage from Aulis, a seaport in Boeotia, to the island Euboea. This, connected with the former passage of his father sailing from Cuma to Boeotia, will leave us in no doubt concerning his country.

Of what quality his father was we are not very certain; that he was drove from Cuma to Ascra, by misfortunes, we have the testimony of Hesiod. Some tell us he fled to avoid paying a fine; but what reason they have to imagine that I know not. It is remarkable that our poet, in the first book of his Works and Days, calls his brother diov yevos; we are told indeed that the name of his father was Dios, of which we are not assured from any of his writings now extant; but if it was, I rather believe, had he designed to call his brother of the race of Dios, he would have used Aloyɛvnç or Air yavor; he must therefore by dov yevoç intend to call him of race divine. Le Clerc observes, on this passage, that the old poets were always proud of the epithet divine, and brings an instance from Homer, who styled the swineherd of Ulysses so; in the same remark he says, he thinks Hesiod debases the word in his application of it, having spoke of the necessitous circumstances of his father in the following book. I have no doubt but Le Clerc is right in the meaning of the word do, but at the same time I think his observation on it trifling; because, if his father was reduced to poverty, we are not to infer from thence he was never rich, or, if he was always poor, that is no argument against his being of a good family; nor is the word divine in the least debased by being an epithet to the swineherd, but a proof of the dignity of that office in those times. We are supported in this reading by Tzetzes: and Valla, and Frisius, have took the word in the same sense, in their Latin translations of the Works and Days:

-Frater ades (says Valla) generoso e sanguine Perse.

And Frisius calls him, Perse divine.

The genealogy likewise which the author of the contention betwixt Homer and Hesiod gives us very much countenances this interpretation: we are told in that work, that Linus was the son of Apollo and of Thoose the daughter of Neptune; king Pierus was the son of Linus, Oeagrus of Pierus and the nymph Methone, and Orpheus of Oeagrus and the muse Calliope; Orpheus was the father of Othrys, Othrys of Harmonides, and Harmonides of Philoterpus; from him sprung Euphemus, the father of Epiphrades, who begot Menalops, the father of Dios; Hesiod and Perses were the sons of Dios by Pucamede, the daughter of Apollo; Perses was the father of Mæon, whose daughter, Crytheis, bore Homer to the river Meles. Homer is here made the great grandson of Perses the brother of Hesiod. I do not give this account with a view it should be much depended on; for it is plain, from the poetical etymologies of the names, it is a fictitious generation; yet two useful inferences may be

made from it; first, it is natural to suppose, the author of this genealogy would not have forged such an honourable descent unless it was generally believed he was of a great family; nor would he have placed him so long before Homer, had it not been the prevailing opinion he was first.

of

Mr. Kennet quotes the Danish astronomer, Longomontanus, who undertook to settle the age Hesiod from some lines in his Works and Days; and he made it agree with the Arundelian marble, which makes him about thirty years before Homer.

Herodotus assures us that Hesiod, whom he places first in his account, and Homer, lived for hundred years, and no more, before himself; this must carry no small weight with it, when we coosider it as delivered down to us by the oldest Greek historian we have.

The pious exclamation against the vices of his own times, in the beginning of the iron age, and the manner in which the description of that age is wrote, most of the verbs being in the future tense, giv us room to imagine he lived when the world had but just departed from their primitive virtue, just a the race of heroes was at an end, and men were sunk into all that is base and wicked.

Justus Lipsius, in his notes to the first book of Velleïus Paterculus, says, "there is more simplicity, and a greater air of antiquity, in the works of Hesiod thau of Homer," from which he would infer he is the older writer: and Fabricius gives us these words of Ludolphus Neocorus, who writ a critics! history of Homer; " if a judgment of the two poets is to be made from their works, Homer has the advantage, in the greater simplicity, and air of antiquity, in his style. Hesiod is more finished and elegant." One of these is a flagrant instance of the random judgment which the critics, and com mentators, often pass on authors, and how little dependance is to be laid on some of them. In shor they are both in an errour; for had they considered through how many hands the Iliad and Odysse have been, since they came from the first author, they would not have pretended to determine the question, who was first, by their style.

Dr. Samuel Clarke (who was indeed a person of much more, extensive learning and nicer discern ment than either Neocorus or Lipsius) has founded an argument for the antiquity of Homer on 2 | quantity of the word xaos: in his note on the 43d verse of the 2d book of the Iliad he observes 1 that Homer has used the word xaos in the Iliad and Odyssey above two hundred and seventy times, and has in every place made the first syllable long; whereas Hesiod frequently makes it long, and often short: and Theocritus uses it both long and short in the same verse: from which our learned critic infers that Hesiod could not be cotemporary with Homer (unless, says he, they spoke different languages in different parts of the country) but much later; because he takes it for granted that the liberty of making the first syllable of xao; short was long after Homer; who uses the word above two hundred and seventy times, and never has the first syallable short. This is a curious piece of criticism, but productive of no certainty of the age of Homer or Hesiod. The Ionic poets, Dr. Clarke observes, had one fixed rule of making the first syllable in xaλo long: the Attic poets, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, in innumerable places, he says, make it short; the Doric poets do the same: all therefore that can be inferred from this is, that Homer always used it in the Ionic manner, and Hesiod often in the Ionic, and often in the Doric. This argument of Dr. Clarke's, founded on a single quantity of a word, is entirely destructive of sir Isaac Newton's system of chronology; who fixes the time of Troy being taken but thirty-four years before Hesiod flourished. Troy, he says*, was taken nine hundred and four years before Christ, and Hesiod, he says, flourished eight hundred and seventy. This shows sir Isaac Newton's opinion of the age of Hesiod in regard to his vicinity to Homer: his bringing the chronology of both so low as he does is to support his favourite scheme of reducing all to Scripture chronology.

After all, it is universally agreed he was before, or at least cotemporary with, Homer; but I think we have more reason to believe him the older; and Mr. Pope, after all the authorities he could find in behalf of Homer, fixes his decision on the Arundelian marble. To enter into all the disputes which have been on this head would be endless, and unnecessary; but we may venture to place him a thou sand years before Christ, without exceeding an hundred, perhaps, on either side.

Having thus far agreed to his parents, his country, and the time in which he rose, our next business is to trace him in such of his actions as are discoverable; and here we have nothing certain but what occurs to us in his works. That he tended his own flocks on mount Helicon, and there first received his notions of poetry, is very probable from the beginning of his Theogony; but what he there says of the Muses appearing to him, and giving him a sceptre of laurel, I pass over as a poetical flight. It

In his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms amended.

likewise appears, from the first book of his Works and Days, that his father left some effects, when he died, on the division of which his brother Perses defrauded him, by bribing the judges. He was so far from being provoked to any act of resentment by this injustice, that he expressed a concern for those poor mistaken mortals, who placed their happiness in riches only, even at the expense of their virtue. He lets us know, in the same poem, that he was not only above want, but capable of assisting his brother in time of need; which he often did after the ill usage he had met with from him. The last passage, relating to himself, is his conquest in a poetical contention. Amphidamas, king of Euboea, had instituted funeral games in honour of his own memory, which his sons afterwards ṣaw performed: Hesiod here was competitor for the prize in poetry, a tripod, which he won, and, as he tells us himself, consecrated to the Muses.

Plutarch, in his Banquet of the Seven Wise Men, makes Periander give an account of the poetical contention at Chalcis; in which Hesiod and Homer are made antagonists; the first was conqueror, who received a tripod for his victory, which he dedicated to the Muses, with this inscription;

Ησιοδος Μεσαις Ελικωνισι τονδ' ανέθηκεν,
Υμνω νίκησας εν χαλκιδι θειον Ομηρον.

This Hesiod vows to th' Heliconian Nine,

In Chalcis won from Homer the divine.

This story, as related by Plutarch, was doubtless occasioned by what Hesiod says of himself, in the second book of his Works and Days; which passage might possibly give birth to that famous treatise, Ayur Qungu nai Hoods, mentioned in the fourth section of this discourse. Barnes, in his Præloquium to the same treatise, quotes three verses, two from Eustathius, and the third added by Lilius Gyraldus, in his life of our poet, which inform us, that Hesiod and Homer sung in Delos to the honour of Apollo.

Εν Δηλῳ τότε πρωτον εγω και Ομηρος, αοιδοι,
Μελπομεν, εν νεαρόεις υμνοις ραψαντες αοίδην,
Φοίβον Απόλλωνα χρυσάορον ον τεκε Λητώ.

Homer, and I, in Delos sung our lays,
There first we sung, and to Apollo's praise;
New was the verse in which we then begun
In honour to the god, Latona's son.

But these, together with the contention betwixt these two great poets, are regarded as no other than fables and Barnes, who had certainly read as much on this head as any man, and who seems, by some expressions, willing to believe it if he could, is forced to decline the dispute, and leave it in the same incertainty in which he found it. The story of the two poets meeting in Delos is a manifest forgery; because, as I observed before, Hesiod positively says he never took any voyage but that to Chalcis; and these verses make his meeting in Delos, which is contrary to his own assertion, precede his contention at Chalcis. Thus have I collected, and compared together, all that is material of his life; in the latter part of which, we are told, he removed to Locris, a town near the same distance from mount Parnassus as Ascra from Helicon. Lilius Gyraldus, and others, tell us he left a son, and a daughter; and that his son was Stesichorus the poet; but this wants better confirmation than we have of it. It is agreed by all that he lived to a very advanced age.

The story of his death, as told by Solon, in Plutarch's Banquet of the Seven Wise Men, is very remarkable. The man, with whom Hesiod lived at Locris, ravished a maid in the same house. Hesiod, though entirely ignorant of the fact, was maliciously accused, as an accomplice, to her brothers, who barbarously murdered him with his companion, whose name was Troilus, and throwed their bodies into the sea. The body of Troilus was cast on a rock, which retains the name of Troilus from that accident. The body of Hesiod was received by a shoal of dolphins as soon as it was hurled into the water, and carried to the city Molicria, near the promontory Rhion; near which place the Locrians then held a solemn feast, the same which is at this time celebrated with so much pomp. When they 3 в

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