There are also various fragments styled Homeric, supposed to have been dropped from the poet’s genuine or spurious works. Among these is the beautiful couplet quoted by Plato:— “Asked and unasked, thy blessings give, O Lord! The evil, though we ask it, from us ward.” =Cyclic Poets.=—After the death of Homer, a host of imitators sprung up in Greece and Asia Minor. Rhapsodists by profession, as they wandered among the Grecian cities reciting the Homeric poems, their attention was naturally directed to epic composition, and they sought to supply in verse like Homer’s what the Iliad and Odyssey had left untold. Confining themselves to the Cycle (_circle_) of the Trojan War, they were called _Cyc’lic_ poets. One bard sung of the preparations made by the Grecian chiefs and the events of the war prior to Achilles’ withdrawal; two others took up the narrative where the Iliad left it, and described the sack of Troy; a fourth celebrated the return voyages of the Greek heroes; a fifth supplemented the Odyssey with the later history of Ulysses. Fragments only of these Cyclic epics survive. HESIOD AND HIS WORKS. =Hesiod.=—Homer was an Ionian of Asia Minor. Shortly after his time, or, as some think, contemporaneously with him, a new school of epic poetry appeared in the mother-country. Its founder was Hesiod, who, like Homer, wrote in the Ionic dialect. Hesiod was born at Ascra in Bœotia, and brought up in the midst of rural life at the base of Mount Helicon. Here first he held free converse with the Muses. On his father’s death, he was defrauded of his portion of the estate by his younger brother Perses, who bribed the judges charged with making the division. Hesiod felt the wrong keenly, yet seems to have regarded his unnatural brother with fraternal interest; for one object of his poem entitled “Works and Days,” was to reclaim Perses from dissolute improvidence and incite him to a life of industry. The first portion of this work is devoted to moral lessons; some in a proverbial form, and others illustrated by narratives and fables. The latter part contains practical directions for the husbandman, and also treats of the art of navigation, important to the Bœotian farmer because much of his produce was shipped to other countries. The whole abounds in excellent precepts for every-day life, and forms the earliest specimen of didactic poetry among the Greeks. For ages its lines were committed to memory and recited as part of the course of ethics in their schools. FROM HESIOD’S WORKS AND DAYS. RIGHT AND WRONG.