most part in husbandry, "collected for it in a fuller and a more graceful body the precepts with which the simple wisdom of their forefathers had ordered their rural labours and their domestic life;" at the same time that, "from the songs of their earlier bards, and the traditions of their temples, he drew the knowledge of nature and of superhuman things which he delivered in the popular form of the 'Theogony.'"[1]
Of the aim which he proposed to himself in that ancient poem, no better description has been given than Mr Grote's, who designates it as "an attempt to cast the divine functions into a systematic sequence." The work of Homer and Hesiod was, to reduce to system the most authentic traditions about the Hellenic gods and demi-gods, and to consolidate a catholic belief in the place of conflicting local superstitions. So far as we are able to judge, Homer's share in the task consisted in the passing notices of gods and goddesses which are scattered up and down the Iliad and the Odyssey. For Hesiod may be claimed the first incorporation and enumeration of the generation and genealogy of the gods and goddesses in a coherent system; and so it was from his 'Theogony,' as Mr Grote has shown, that "men took their information respecting their theogonic antiquities; that sceptical pagans, and later assailants of paganism, derived their subjects of attack; and that, to understand what Plato deprecated and Xenophanes denounced, the Hesiodic stories must be recounted in naked simplicity."[2] Whence he derived his information, which is older than the so-called
