How far these stories are the invention of Hesiod himself is impossible to determine.[1] They bring us down to a cast of fancy
- ↑ That the Hesiodic Thcogony is referable to an age considerably later than the Homeric poems, appears now to be the generally admitted opinion; and the reasons for believing so are, in my opinion, satisfactory. Whether the Theogony is composed by the same author as the Works and Days is a disputed point. The Bœotian literati in the days of Pausanias decidedly denied the identity, and ascribed to their Hesiod only the Works and Days:
Pausanias himself concurs with them (ix. 31. 4; ix. 35. 1), and Völcker (Mithologie des Japetisch. Geschlechts. p. 14) maintains the same opinion, as well as Göttling (Præf. ad Hesiod. xxi.): K. O. Müller (History of Grecian Literature, ch. 8.§4) thinks that there is not sufficient evidence to form a decisive opinion.
Under the name of Hesiod (in that vague language which is usual in antiquity respecting authorship, but which modern critics have not much mended by speaking of the Hesiodic school, sect, or family) passed many different poems, belonging to three classes quite distinct from each other, but all disparate from the Homeric epic:—1. The poems of legend cast into historical and genealogical series, such as the Eoiai, the Catalogue of Women, etc. 2. The poems of a didactic or ethical tendency, such as the Works and Days, the Precepts of Cheirôn, the Art of Augural Prophecy, etc. 3. Separate and short mythical compositions, such as the Shield of Hêraklês, the Marriage of Keyx (which, however, was of disputed authenticity, Athenæ. ii. p. 49), the Epithalamium of Pêleus and Thetis, etc. (See Marktscheffel, Præfat. ad Fragment. Hesiod. p. 89).
The Theogony belongs chiefly to the first of these classes, but it has also a dash of the second in the legend of Prometheus, etc.: moreover in the portion which respects Hekatê, it has both a mystic character and a distinct bearing upon present life and customs, which we may also trace in the allusions to Krête and Delphi. There seems reason to place it in the same age with the Works and Days, perhaps in the half century preceding 700 b. c., and little, if at all, anterior to Archilochus. The poem is evidently conceived upon one scheme, yet the parts are so disorderly and incoherent, that it is difficult to say how much is interpolation. Hermann has well dissected the exordium; see the preface to Gaisford's Hesiod (Poetas Minor, p. 63).
K. O. Miiller tells us (ut sup. p. 90), "The Titans, according to the notions of Hesiod, represent a system of things in which elementary beings, natural powers, and notions of order and regularity are united to form a whole. The Cyclôpes denote the transient disturbances of this order of nature by storms, end the Hekatoncheires, or hundred-handed Giants, signify the fearful power of the greater revolutions of nature." The poem affords little presumption that any such ideas were present to the mind of its author, as, I think, will be seen if we read 140-155, 630-745.
The Titans, the Cyclôpes, and the Hekatoncheires, can no more be construed into physical phænomena than Chrysaor, Pegasus, Echidna, the Grææ, or the Gorgons Zeus, like Hêraklês, or Jasôn, or Perseus, if his adven-
