At the close of the _Shield_ Heracles goes on to Trachis to the house of Ceyx, and this warning suggests that the _Marriage of Ceyx_ may have come immediately after the ‘Or such as was’ of Alcmena in the _Eoiae_: possibly Halcyone, the wife of Ceyx, was one of the heroines sung in the poem, and the original section was “developed” into the _Marriage_, although what form the poem took is unknown.
Next to the _Eoiae_ and the poems which seemed to have been developed from it, it is natural to place the _Great Eoiae_. This, again, as we know from fragments, was a list of heroines who bare children to the gods: from the title we must suppose it to have been much longer that the simple _Eoiae_, but its extent is unknown. Lehmann, remarking that the heroines are all Boeotian and Thessalian (while the heroines of the _Catalogues_ belong to all parts of the Greek world), believes the author to have been either a Boeotian or Thessalian.
Two other poems are ascribed to Hesiod. Of these the _Aegimius_ (also ascribed by Athenaeus to Cercops of Miletus), is thought by Valckenaer to deal with the war of Aegimus against the Lapithae and the aid furnished to him by Heracles, and with the history of Aegimius and his sons. Otto Muller suggests that the introduction of Thetis and of Phrixus (frags. 1-2) is to be connected with notices of the allies of the Lapithae from Phthiotis and Iolchus, and that the story of Io was incidental to a narrative of Heracles’ expedition against Euboea. The remaining poem, the _Melampodia_, was a work in three books, whose plan it is impossible to recover. Its subject, however, seems to have been the histories of famous seers like Mopsus, Calchas, and Teiresias, and it probably took its name from Melampus, the most famous of them all.
Date of the Hesiodic Poems
There is no doubt that the _Works and Days_ is the oldest, as it is the most original, of the Hesiodic poems. It seems to be distinctly earlier than the _Theogony_, which refers to it, apparently, as a poem already renowned. Two considerations help us to fix a relative date for the _Works_. (1) In diction, dialect and style it is obviously dependent upon Homer, and is therefore considerably later than the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_: moreover, as we have seen, it is in revolt against the romantic school, already grown decadent, and while the digamma is still living, it is obviously growing weak, and is by no means uniformly effective.
(2) On the other hand while tradition steadily puts the Cyclic poets at various dates from 776 B.C. downwards, it is equally consistent in regarding Homer and Hesiod as “prehistoric”. Herodotus indeed puts both poets 400 years before his own time; that is, at about 830-820 B.C., and the evidence stated above points to the middle of the ninth century as the probable date for the _Works and Days_. The _Theogony_ might be tentatively placed a century later; and the _Catalogues_ and _Eoiae_ are again later, but not greatly later, than the _Theogony_: the _Shield of Heracles_ may be ascribed to the later half of the seventh century, but there is not evidence enough to show whether the other “developed” poems are to be regarded as of a date so low as this.
Literary Value of Homer
Quintillian’s 1111 judgment on Hesiod that ‘he rarely rises to great heights... and to him is given the palm in the middle-class of speech’ is just, but is liable to give a wrong impression. Hesiod has nothing that remotely approaches such scenes as that between Priam and Achilles, or the pathos of Andromache’s preparations for Hector’s return, even as he was falling before the walls of Troy; but in matters that come within the range of ordinary experience, he rarely fails to rise to the appropriate level. Take, for instance, the description of the Iron Age (_Works and Days_, 182 ff.) with its catalogue of wrongdoings and violence ever increasing until Aidos and Nemesis are forced to leave mankind who thenceforward shall have ‘no remedy against evil’. Such occasions, however, rarely occur and are perhaps not characteristic of Hesiod’s genius: if we would see Hesiod at his best, in his most natural vein, we must turn to such a passage as that which he himself—according to the compiler of the _Contest of Hesiod and Homer_—selected as best in all his work, ‘When the Pleiades, Atlas’ daughters, begin to rise...’ (_Works and Days_, 383 ff.). The value of such a passage cannot be analysed: it can only be said that given such a subject, this alone is the right method of treatment.
Hesiod’s diction is in the main Homeric, but one of his charms is the use of quaint allusive phrases derived, perhaps, from a pre-Hesiodic peasant poetry: thus the season when Boreas blows is the time when ‘the Boneless One gnaws his foot by his fireless hearth in his cheerless house’; to cut one’s nails is ‘to sever the withered from the quick upon that which has five branches’; similarly the burglar is the ‘day-sleeper’, and the serpent is the ‘hairless one’. Very similar is his reference to seasons through what happens or is done in that season: ‘when the House-carrier, fleeing the Pleiades, climbs up the plants from the earth’, is the season for harvesting; or ‘when the artichoke flowers and the clicking grass-hopper, seated in a tree, pours down his shrill song’, is the time for rest.
Hesiod’s charm lies in his child-like and sincere naivete, in his unaffected interest in and picturesque view of nature and all that happens in nature. These qualities, it is true, are those pre-eminently of the _Works and Days_: the literary values of the _Theogony_ are of a more technical character, skill in ordering and disposing long lists of names, sure judgment in seasoning a monotonous subject with marvellous incidents or episodes, and no mean imagination in depicting the awful, as is shown in the description of Tartarus (ll. 736-745). Yet it remains true that Hesiod’s distinctive title to a high place in Greek literature lies in the very fact of his freedom from classic form, and his grave, and yet child-like, outlook upon his world.
The Ionic School
The Ionic School of Epic poetry was, as we have seen, dominated by the Homeric tradition, and while the style and method of treatment are Homeric, it is natural that the Ionic poets refrained from cultivating the ground tilled by Homer, and chose for treatment legends which lay beyond the range of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. Equally natural it is that they should have particularly selected various phases of the tale of Troy which preceded or followed the action of the _Iliad_ or _Odyssey_. In this way, without any preconceived intention, a body of epic poetry was built up by various writers which covered the whole Trojan story. But the entire range of heroic legend was open to these poets, and other clusters of epics grew up dealing particularly with the famous story of Thebes, while others dealt with the beginnings of the world and the wars of heaven. In the end there existed a kind of epic history of the world, as known to the Greeks, down to the death of Odysseus, when the heroic age ended. In the Alexandrian Age these poems were arranged in chronological order, apparently by Zenodotus of Ephesus, at the beginning of the 3rd century B.C. At a later time the term _Cycle_, “round” or “course”, was given to this collection.
Of all this mass of epic poetry only the scantiest fragments survive; but happily Photius has preserved to us an abridgment of the synopsis made of each poem of the “Trojan Cycle” by Proclus, _i.e._ Eutychius Proclus of Sicca.
The pre-Trojan poems of the Cycle may be noticed first. The _Titanomachy_, ascribed both to Eumelus of Corinth and to Arctinus of Miletus, began with a kind of Theogony which told of the union of Heaven and Earth and of their offspring the Cyclopes and the Hundred-handed Giants. How the poem proceeded we have no means of knowing, but we may suppose that in character it was not unlike the short account of the Titan War found in the Hesiodic _Theogony_ (617 ff.).
What links bound the _Titanomachy_ to the Theben Cycle is not clear. This latter group was formed of three poems, the _Story of Oedipus_, the _Thebais_, and the _Epigoni_. Of the _Oedipodea_ practically nothing is known, though on the assurance of Athenaeus (vii. 277 E) that Sophocles followed the Epic Cycle closely in the plots of his plays, we may suppose that in outline the story corresponded closely to the history of Oedipus as it is found in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_. The _Thebais_ seems to have begun with the origin of the fatal quarrel between Eteocles and Polyneices in the curse called down upon them by their father in his misery. The story was thence carried down to the end of the expedition under Polyneices, Adrastus and Amphiarus against Thebes. The _Epigoni_ (ascribed to Antimachus of Teos) recounted the expedition of the “After-Born” against Thebes, and the sack of the city.
The Trojan Cycle
Six epics with the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ made up the Trojan Cycle—The _Cyprian Lays_, the _Iliad_, the _Aethiopis_, the _Little Iliad_, the _Sack of Troy_, the _Returns_, the _Odyssey_, and the _Telegony_.