Hesiod testifies to the gravity of his poetic trust by averring that he speaks "the mind of ægis-bearing Jove, whose daughters, the Muses, have taught him the divine song." Pausanias (IX. xxxi. 3) records the existence of this tripod at Helicon in his own day.
But though he took his call as divine, there is no reason to think that Hesiod depended solely on this gift of inspiration for a name and place among poets. His father's antecedents suggest the literary culture which he may well have imbibed from his birthplace in Æolia. His own traditions and surroundings in the mother-country—so near the very Olympus which was the seat of the old Pierian minstrels, whatever it may have been of the fabled gods—so fed by local influences and local cultivation of music and poetry—may have predisposed him to the life and functions of a poet; but there is a distinctly practical tone about all his poetry, which shows that he was indebted to his own pains and thought, his own observation and retentiveness, for the gift which he brought, in his measure, to perfection. A life afield conduced to mould him into the poet of the 'Works and Days,'—a sort of Bœotian 'Shepherd's Calendar,' interwoven with episodes of fable, allegory, and personal history. The nearness of his native hills, as well as the traditions of elder bards, conspired to impel him to the task of shaping a theogony. And both aims are so congenial and compatible, that prima facie likelihood will always support the theory of one and the same authorship for both poems against the separatists,[1] who can no more
- ↑ The ancient critics who believed in the separate authorship
