In verse and dialect the Hesiodic poems are not dissimilar from the Homeric, which, supposing their date to have been later, proves that the _Iliad_ had determined the style and standard of epic composition, or, supposing a contemporary origin, would show that the Greeks of the so-called heroic age had agreed upon a common literary language. We may refer the _Theogony_ and the _Works and Days_, after the deduction of numerous interpolations, to Hesiod, but only in the same sense and with the same reservation as we assign the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ to Homer.[37] Unlike the heroic epos, they were recited, not to the accompaniment of the cithara, but by the poet standing with a laurel staff, called #rhabdos# or #skêptron#, in his hand. Hesiod, at the opening of the _Theogony_, tells us how he had received a staff of this kind from the Muse upon Mount Helicon. Either, then, the laurel #rhabdos# had already been recognized in that part of Greece as the symbol of the poet's office, or else, from the respect which the followers of Hesiod paid to the details of his poem, they adopted it as their badge. Of the two poems ascribed to Hesiod, the _Theogony_ and the _Works and Days_, the former--though its genuineness as a Hesiodic production seems to have been disputed from a very early period--was, perhaps, on the whole, of greater value than the latter to the Greeks. It contained an authorized version of the genealogy of their gods and heroes, an inspired dictionary of mythology, from which to deviate was hazardous. Just as families in England try to prove their Norman descent by an appeal to the Roll of Battle Abbey, so the canon of the _Theogony_ decided the claims of god or demi-god to rank among celestials. In this sense Herodotus should be interpreted when he says that Hesiod joined with Homer in making their Theogonia for the Greeks. But though this poem had thus a unique value for the ancients, it is hardly so interesting in the light of modern criticism as the _Works and Days_. The _Works and Days_, while for all practical purposes we may regard it as contemporaneous with the _Iliad_, marks the transition from the heroic epic to the moral poetry of the succeeding age, and forms the basis of direct ethical philosophy in Hellas. Hesiod is thus not only the mouthpiece of obscure hand-workers in the earliest centuries of Greek history, the poet of their daily labors, sufferings, and wrongs, the singer of their doubts and infantine reflections on the world in which they had to toil; he is also the immediate parent of gnomic verse, and the ancestor of those deep thinkers who speculated in the Attic age upon the mysteries of human life.