‘Of old the tribes of mortal men on earth Lived without ills, aloof from grievous toil And catching plagues which Keres gave to men[429].’ But alas! ‘The woman with her hands took the great lid From off the cask and scattered them, and thus Devised sad cares for mortals. Hope alone Remained therein, safe held beneath the rim, Nor flitted forth, for she thrust to the lid[430].’ Who the woman was and why she opened the jar will be considered later (p. 283); for the moment we have only to note what manner of things came out of it. The account is strange and significant. She shut the cask too late: ‘For other myriad evils wandered forth To man, the earth was full, and full the sea. Diseases, that all round by day and night Bring ills to mortals, hovered, self-impelled, Silent, for Zeus the Counsellor their voice Had taken away[431].’ Proclus understands that these silent ghostly insidious things _are_ Keres, though he partly modernizes them. He says in commenting on the passage, ‘Hesiod gives them (i.e. the diseases) bodily form making them approach without sound, showing that even of these things spirits are the guardians, sending invisibly the diseases decreed by fate and scattering the Keres in the cask.’ After the manner of his day he thinks the Keres were presided over by spirits, that they were diseases sent by spirits, but primitive man believes the Keres _are_ the spirits, _are_ the diseases. Hesiod himself was probably not quite conscious that the jar or pithos was the great grave-jar of the Earth-mother Pandora (p. 286), and that the Keres were ghosts. ‘Earth,’ says Hesiod, ‘was full and full the sea.’ This crowd of Keres close-packed is oddly emphasized in a fragment by an anonymous poet[432]: ‘Such is our mortal state, ill upon ill, And round about us Keres crowding still; No chink of opening Is left for entering.’ This notion of the swarm of unknown unseen evils hovering about men haunts the lyric poets, lending a certain primitive reality to their vague mournful pessimism. Simonides of Amorgos[433] seems to echo Hesiod when he says ‘hope feeds all men’—but hope is all in vain because of the imminent demon host that work for man’s undoing, disease and death and war and shipwreck and suicide. ‘No ill is lacking, Keres thousand-fold Mortals attend, woes and calamities That none may scape.’ Here and elsewhere to translate ‘Keres’ by fates is to make a premature abstraction. The Keres are still physical actual things not impersonations. So when Aeschylus[434] puts into the mouth of his Danaid women the prayer ‘Nor may diseases, noisome swarm, Settle upon our heads, to harm Our citizens,’ the ‘noisome swarm’ is no mere ‘poetical’ figure but the reflection of a real primitive conviction of live pests.