The sentence willed, and stamped the false decree:
O fools and blind! to whose misguided soul
Unknown how far the half exceeds the whole,
Unknown the good that healthful mallows yield,
And asphodel, the dainties of the field."
—E. 44-58.
The gnomic character of the last four lines must not blind the reader to the fact that they have a personal reference to the poet and his brother, and represent the anxiety of the former that the latter should adopt, though late, his own life-conviction, and act out the truth that a dinner of herbs with a clear conscience is preferable to the luxuries of plenty purchased by fraud. Consistent with this desire is the unselfish tone in which he constantly recurs to the subject throughout the 'Works and Days,' and that not so much as if he sought to work this change in his brother for peace and quietness to himself, as for a real interest in that brother's amendment—we do not learn with what success. Perhaps, as has been surmised, Perses had a wife who kept him up to his extravagant ways, and to the ready resource of recouping his failing treasure by endeavouring to levy a fresh tax upon Hesiod. Such a surmise might well account for the poet's curious misogynic crotchets. Low as is the value set upon a "help-meet" by Simonides, Archilochus, Bacchylides, and, later still, by Euripides, one might have expected better words in favour of marriage from one whose lost works included a catalogue of celebrated women of old, than the railing tone which
