GENERAL ARGUMENT OF THE POEM.
A brief analysis of the following poem is thought advisable, in order that the probable influences under which it was written may be better known, and its object and scope better understood. Hesiod, a farmer and shepherd, as well as poet, dwelling upon Mount Helicon, in Greece, had been robbed of his small patrimony, through the connivance of his brother, Perses, who had succeeded in bribing the judges of the Agora, or law tribunals, of his native place. Outraged by this treatment, instead of resorting to the usual methods of retaliation in vogue at that day, he writes a book, in which, in his effort to reform him, he unconsciously embalms the memory of his unnatural brother, and also of the "bribe-swallowing" judges, and holds them up, like flies in amber, to the eternal gaze of his countrymen. It is not probable that he anticipated, himself, the immortality this work was to confer upon him. But as "one touch of nature makes the whole world kin," so the denunciations against wrong in every shape to which he gives utterance, and the almost Christian morals he inculcates, have found an echo in all succeeding ages, not only among his own countrymen, but in countries also which at that time had no existence as nations. Perses, therefore, so far as we are concerned, may be regarded as a sort of ideal reader, and the readers of the present day may all profit by the admonitions and advice given to Perses. The poem has come down to us under the title of "Works and Days," and some modem writers have compared it to a sort of "Shepherd's Calendar," or "Practical Hints on Farming Operations," or "Treatise on Husbandry." Others, again, more strongly impressed by its moral tone, have styled it an open "Letter of Remonstrance and Advice," addressed to his brother. It might, perhaps, still more correctly be entitled, "A Poem in Praise of Justice and Virtue, and of the Pursuits of Rural Life," for such, in fact, it is; and I have always thought that these two cardinal virtues were oftener found traveling hand
