Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/44

moving over the earth—a race of which Homer, indeed, says nought, but whose functions, shadowed forth in Hesiod, accord pretty much with the account Diotima gives of them in the 'Banquet of Plato.'^[1] Here is Hesiod's account:—

"When on this race the verdant earth had lain,
By Jove's high will they rose a 'genii' train;
Earth-wandering demons they their charge began,
The ministers of good, and guards of man:
Veiled with a mantle of aerial night,
O'er earth's wide space they wing their hovering flight,
Disperse the fertile treasures of the ground,
And bend their all-observant glance around;
To mark the deed unjust, the just approve,
Their kingly office, delegates of Jove."
—E. 163-172.

With this dim forecasting by a heathen of the "ministry of angels" may be compared the poet's reference further on in the poem to the same invisible agency, where he uses the argument of the continual oversight of these thrice ten thousand genii as a dissuasive to corrupt judgments, such as those which the Bœotian judges had given in favour of his brother:—

"Invisible the gods are ever nigh,
Pass through the midst, and bend the all-seeing eye;
Who on each other prey, who wrest the right,
Aweless of Heaven's revenge, are open to their sight.
For thrice ten thousand holy daemons rove
The nurturing earth, the delegates of Jove;
Hovering they glide to earth's extremest bound,
A cloud aerial veils their forms around—

1. Jowett's transl., i. 519.