APPENDIX B. (2.)
From the Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. II., 1880, Article,
"Hesiod." (Extract.)
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His earliest poem, the famous Works and Days, embodies the experiences of his life afield; and, interwoven with episodes of fable, allegory, and personal history, forms a sort of Bœotian shepherd's calendar. The first portion is an ethical enforcement of honest labor, and dissuasive of strife and idleness; the second consists of hints and rules as to husbandry; and the third is a religious calendar of the months, with remarks on the days most lucky, or the contrary, for rural or nautical employments. The connecting link of the whole poeni is the author's advice to his brother (Perses), who appears to have bribed the corrupt judges to deprive Hesiod of his already scantier inheritance, and to whom, as he wasted his substance lounging in the agora (courts of law), the poet more than once returned good for evil, though he tells him there will be a limit to this unmerited kindness. In the Works and Days the episodes which rise above an even didactic level are the "Creation and Equipment of Pandora," the "Five Ages of the World," and the much admired "Description of Winter." It is in the Works and Days especially that we glean indications of Hesiod's rank and condition in life, that of a stay-at-home farmer of the lower class, whose sole experience of the sea was a single voyage of forty yards across the Euripus, and an old-fashioned bachelor whose mysogonic views and prejudice against matrimony have been conjecturadUy traced to his brother Perses having a wife as extravagant as himself.
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