Prof. Mahaffy remarks that the writings of Hesiod differed from those of the other early Greek authors in being addressed, not to “the powers that were,” but to the common people.[29] Referring to the style of Hesiod’s works, Simcox says, rather naïvely, “Hesiod would certainly have written in prose, if prose had then existed.” _Works and Days_ (the only one of Hesiod’s poems which the later Greek commentators accept as certainly genuine) consists of ethical and economic precepts, written in a homely and unimaginative style, and setting forth the indisputable doctrine that labor is the only road to prosperity. Mahaffy is my authority for the statement that Hesiod’s poems came into use “at an early period as a favorite handbook of education.”[30] I wish this brilliant student of Greek life had given us some clue as to the methods by which copies of this literature were multiplied and brought into the hands of the country people and common people to whom it was more particularly addressed. The difficulty of circulating books among this class of readers must have been very much greater than that of reaching the scholarly circles of the cities. While it was a long time before authors were to be in a position to secure any compensation from those who derived pleasure from their productions, they began at an early date (as in the case before mentioned of Theognis) to raise questions with each other on the score of plagiarisms, and to be jealous of retaining undisturbed the full literary prestige to which they might be entitled. Clement remarks that “an enlightened public opinion helped to defend Greek authors against the borrowing of literary thieves, by stigmatizing plagiarism as a crime, and by expressing for a writer detected in appropriating the work of another a well merited contempt instead of the approbation for which he had hoped.”[31] It seems probable, however, that this is too favorable a view to take as to the effectiveness of public opinion in preserving among Greek writers a spirit of exact conscientiousness, as the complaints in the literature of the time concerning unauthorized and uncredited “borrowings” are numerous and bitter. Such terms as “accidental coincidence,” “identity of thought,” “unconscious cerebration” (in absorbing the expressions of another), were doubtless used in these earlier as in the later days of literature to explain certain suspicious cases of “parallelisms” or similarities. In fact, at least one Greek author, the sophist Aretades, wrote a volume, unfortunately lost, on the similarity or identity of thought creations.[32]