"Gifts can move gods, and gifts our godlike kings."
Whilst a third might well be a stray line from one of the exhortations to Perses; for it deprecates the preference of a shadow to a substance in some such language as this:—
That he the charm of doubtful chase may know."
Another proverb, preserved by Cicero in a letter to Atticus,[1] looks very like Hesiod's, though the orator and critical man of letters dubs it "pseudo-Hesiodian." It bids us "not decide a case until both sides have been heard." And yet another saw, referred to the Ascræan sage, appears to us in excellent keeping with the maxims respecting industry and hard work which abound in his great didactic poem. We are indebted for it to Xenophon's Memorabilia, and it may be Englished—
"Seek not the smooth, lest thou the rough shouldst find,"—
an exhortation in accord with the fine passage in the 'Works and Days,' which represents Virtue and Excellence seated aloft on heights difficult to climb.
Perhaps also the following extracts from the extant fragments of the 'Catalogue of Women,' though not succinct enough to rank as adages, may lay some claim to containing jets and sparkles of adagial wisdom. The first, taken from the pages of Athenæus,[2] concerns wine that maketh sorry, as well as glad, the heart of man:—
