It is in this poem of "Works and Days" that those proverbs are found which have been perpetuated, as--"the potter is jealous of the potter," and he adds, "the musician of the musician, and the poor even of the poor." We there find the original of our fable of the nightingale fallen into the claws of the vulture. The nightingale sings in vain to soften him; the vulture devours her. Hesiod does not conclude that a hungry belly has no ears, but that tyrants are not to be mollified by genius. A hundred maxims worthy of Xenophon and Cato are to be found in this poem. Men are ignorant of the advantage of society: they know not that the half is more valuable than the whole. Iniquity is pernicious only to the powerless. Equity alone causes cities to flourish. One unjust man is often sufficient to ruin his country. The wretch who plots the destruction of his neighbor often prepares the way to his own. The road to crime is short and easy. That of virtue is long and difficult, but towards the end it is delightful. God has placed labor as a sentinel over virtue. Lastly, the precepts on agriculture were worthy to be imitated by Virgil. There are, also, very fine passages in his "Theogony." Love, who disentangles chaos; Venus, born of the sea from the genital parts of a god nourished on earth, always followed by Love, and uniting heaven, earth, and sea, are admirable emblems. Why, then, has Hesiod had less reputation than Homer? They seem to me of equal merit, but Homer has been preferred by the Greeks because he sang their exploits and victories over the Asiatics, their eternal enemies. He celebrated all the families which in his time reigned in Achaia and Peloponnesus; he wrote the most memorable war of the first people in Europe against the most flourishing nation which was then known in Asia. His poem was almost the only monument of that great epoch. There was no town nor family which did not think itself honored by having its name mentioned in these records of valor. We are even assured that a long time after him some differences between the Greek towns on the subject of adjacent lands were decided by the verses of Homer. He became, after his death, the judge of cities in which it is pretended that he asked alms during his life, which proves, also, that the Greeks had poets long before they had geographers. It is astonishing that the Greeks, so disposed to honor epic poems which immortalized the combats of their ancestors, produced no one to sing the battles of Marathon, Thermopylæ, Platæa, and Salamis. The heroes of these times were much greater men than Agamemnon, Achilles, and Ajax.