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parentage and the marvellous events of his life. It was on Mt. Helicon, the ancient seat of the Thracian Muses, that he was believed ta have been born and bred, and his descent was traced to Apollo; the idea of his having composed a work on the genealogies of the gods and heroes cannot, therefore, have appeared to the ancients as very surprising. That the author of the Theogony was a Bœotian is evident, from certain peculiarities of the language. The Theogony gives an account of the origin of the world and the birth of the gods, explaining the whole order in a series of genealogies, for every part of physical as well as moral nature appears there personified in the character of a distinct being. The whole concludes with an account of some of the most illustrious heroes, whereby the poem enters into some kind of connection with the Homeric epics. The whole poem may be divided into three parts: 1. The cosmogony, which widely differs from the simple Homeric notion, and afterwards served as the groundwork for the various physical speculations of the Greek philosophers who looked upon the Theogony of Hesiod as containing in an allegorical form all the physical wisdom that they were able to propound, though Hesiod himself was believed not to have been aware of the profound philosophical and theological wisdom he was uttering. The cosmogony extends from verse 116 to 452. 2. The Theogony in the strict sense of the word, from 453 to 962; and 3. The last portion, which is in fact a hero-ogony, being an account of the heroes borne by mortal mothers whose charms had drawn the immortals from Olympus. This part is very brief, extending only from verse 963 to 1,021, and forms the transition Eœae, of which we shall speak presently. If we ask for the sources from which Hesiod drew his information respecting the origin of the world and the gods, the answer cannot be much more than a conjecture, for there is no direct information on the point. Herodotus asserts that Homer and Hesiod made the theogony of the Greeks; and in reference to Hesiod in particular, this probably means that Hesiod collected and combined into a system the various local legends, especially of northern Greece, such as they had been handed down by priests and bards. The assertion of Herodotus further obliges us to take into consideration the fact, that in the earliest Greek theology the gods do not appear in any definite forms, whereas Hesiod strives to anthropomorphize all of them, the ancient elementary gods as well as the later dynasties of Cronus and Zeus (Saturn and Jupiter). Now both the system of the gods and the forms under which he conceived them, afterwards became firmly established in Greece; and, considered in this way, the assertion of Herodotus is perfectly correct. Whether the form in
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