offending is, that the "beauteous evil," woman, is a drone in the hive, and consumes the fruits of man's labour without adding to them. The author of the 'Theogony' holds in exceptionally high esteem the wealth-giving divinity Plutus, and this is quite consistent with the hereditary and personal antipathy to poverty and its visitations so manifest in the bard of the 'Works.' Again, there is reason to believe that the proper commencement of the 'Works and Days'—which, to translate the Greek idiom, might run, "Well, it seems that after all Contention is of two kinds, and not of one only" (v. 11)—is nothing less than the poet's correction of a statement he had made in his poem on the generation of the gods, that Eris, or Contention, was one and indivisible, the daughter of Night, and the mother of an uncanny progeny, beginning with Trouble and ending with Oath.[1] We might add, too, curious coincidences of expression and verse-structure, such as the use of a characteristic epithet standing by itself for the substantive which it would commonly qualify (e. g., "the boneless" to represent "the caterpillar," and "the silvery" for "the sea"), and the peculiarity of the commencement of three consecutive lines with one and the same word. Instances of both are common to the two poems. But for the purposes of the present volume it is perhaps sufficient to rest our acquiescence in a common authorship upon the plausibility and reasonableness of Bishop Thirlwall's view, that Hesiod, living amidst a people rich in sacred and oracular poetry, and engaged for the
- ↑ See Theog., v. 225.
