The epic lay in 480 lines called the _Shield of Heracles_--partly imitated from the 18th book of the _Iliad_--is the work of an author or authors later than Hesiod. In the Hesiodic poetry, as represented by the _Works and Days_ and the _Theogony_, we see the influence of the temple at Delphi. Hesiod recognizes the existence of [Greek: daimones]--spirits of the departed who haunt the earth as the invisible guardians of justice; and he connects the office of the poet with that of the prophet. The poet is one whom the gods have authorized to impress doctrine and practical duties on men. A religious purpose was essentially characteristic of the Hesiodic school. Its poets treated the old legends as relics of a sacred history, and not merely, in the Ionian manner, as subjects of idealizing art. Such titles as the _Maxims of Cheiron_ and the _Lay of Melampus_, the seer--lost poems of the Hesiodic school--illustrate its ethical and its mystic tendencies. The Homeric hymns. The _Homeric Hymns_ are a collection of pieces, some of them very short, in hexameter verse. Their traditional title is--_Hymns_ or _Preludes of Homer and the Homeridae_. The second of the alternative designations is the true one. The pieces are not "hymns" used in formal worship, but "preludes" or prefatory addresses ([Greek: prooimia]) with which the rhapsodists ushered in their recitations of epic poetry. The "prelude" might be addressed to the presiding god of the festival, or to any local deity whom the reciter wished to honour. The pieces (of which there are 33) range in date perhaps from 750 to 500 B.C. (though some authorities assign dates as late as the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D.; see ed. by Sikes and Allen, e.g. p. 228), and it is probable that the collection was formed in Attica, for the use of rhapsodists. The style is that of the Ionian or Homeric epos; but there are also several traces of the Hesiodic or Boeotian school. The principal "hymns" are (1) to Apollo (generally treated as two or more hymns combined in one); (2) to Hermes; (3) to Aphrodite; and (4) to Demeter. The hymn to Apollo, quoted by Thucydides (iii. 104) as Homer's, is of peculiar interest on account of the lines describing the Ionian festival at Delos. Two celebrated pieces of a sportive kind passed under Homer's name. The _Margites_--a comic poem on one "who knew many things but knew them all badly"--is regarded by Aristotle as the earliest germ of comedy, and was possibly as old as 700 B.C. Only a few lines remain. The _Batracho(myo)machia_, or _Battle of the Frogs and Mice_ probably belongs to the decline of Greek literature, perhaps to the 2nd century B.C.[2] About 300 verses of it are extant. Transition from epos to elegy.