The Theogony embraces subjects of a higher order than the Works and Days. "It ascends," says THIRLWALL, "to the birth of the gods and the origin of nature, and unfolds the whole order of the world in a series of genealogies, which personify the beings of every kind contained in it." A late writer of prominence says that "it was of greater value to the Greeks than the Works and Days, as it contained an authorized version of the genealogy of their gods and heroes--an inspired dictionary of mythology--from which to deviate was hazardous." [Footnote: "The Greek Poets," by John Addington Symonds.] This work, however, has not the poetical merit of the other, although there are some passages in it of fascinating power and beauty. "The famous passage describing the Styx," says PROFESSOR MAHAFFY, "shows the poet to have known and appreciated the wild scenery of the river Styx in Arcadia; and the description of Sleep and Death, which immediately precedes it, is likewise of great beauty. The conflict of the gods and Titans has a splendid crash and thunder about it, and is far superior in conception, though inferior in execution, to the battle of the gods in the Iliad." [Footnote: Mahaffy's "History of Classical Greek Literature," vol. i., p. 111.] The poems of Hesiod early became popular with the country population of Greece; but in the cities, and especially in Sparta, where war was considered the only worthy pursuit, they were long cast aside for the more heroic lines of Homer. * * * * * II. LYRIC POETRY. From the time of Homer, down to about 560 B.C., many kinds of composition for which the Greeks were subsequently distinguished were practically unknown. We are told that the drama was in its infancy, and that prose writing, although more or less practiced during this period for purposes of utility or necessity, was not cultivated as a branch of popular literature. There was another kind of composition, however, which was carried to its highest perfection in the last stage of the epic period, and that was lyric poetry. But of the masterpieces of lyric poetry only a few fragments remain. CALLI'NUS. The first representative of this school that we may mention was Callinus, an Ephesian of the latter part of the eighth century B.C., to whom the invention of the elegiac distich, the characteristic form of the Ionian poetry, is attributed. Among the few fragments from this poet is the following fine war elegy, occasioned, probably, by a Persian invasion of Asia Minor: