"Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory, and given them everlasting glory?"[1]
So far as the poet's life and character can be approximately guessed from his poems, it would seem to have been temperately and wisely ordered, placid, and for the most part unemotional. That one who so clearly saw the dangers of association with bad women that he shrank from intimacy with good, should have met his death through an intrigue at Œnoe, in Ozolian Locris, with Clymene, the sister of his hosts, is doubtless just as pure a bit of incoherent fiction as that his remains were carried ashore, from out of the ocean into which they had been cast, by the agency of dolphins; or that a faithful dog—no doubt the sharp-toothed specimen we have seen recommended in the 'Works and Days'—traced out the authors of the murder, and brought them to the hands of justice. Some accounts attribute to the poet only a guilty knowledge of the crime of a fellow-lodger; but in either shape the legend is an after-thought, as is also the halting story that Stesichorus, who lived from B.C. 643 to B.C. 560, was the offspring of this fabled liaison. All that can be concluded from trustworthy data for his biography, beyond what has been already noticed, is that in later life he must have exchanged his residence at Ascra for Orchomenus, possibly to be further from the importunities of
