[37] There are probably few scholars who would now venture to maintain confidently that the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ were composed by one and the same poet. The name Homer must be used like the _x_ of algebra for an unknown power. [38] Line 225. [39] Line 535. [40] That Prometheus was _Pramanthas_, the fire-lighting stick, has been ascertained by modern philology, but was not known by Hesiod. [41] _Works and Days_, 286. [42] _Works and Days_, 686. It must here again be repeated that though it is convenient to talk of Hesiod as a poet and a person, the miscellaneous ethical precepts of the _Works and Days_ are derived from a variety of sources. [43] Lines 587-612. CHAPTER VI. _PARMENIDES._ Greek Philosophical Poetry.--The Emergence of Philosophy from Mythology.--The Ionian Sages.--The Pythagoreans.--Anaxagoras.--Democritus.--The Eleatics.--Heraclitus.--Xenophanes of Colophon.--His Critique of the Myths.--Assertion of Monotheism.--Fragments of his Poem on Nature.--Parmenides of Elea.--His Political Importance.--Parmenides in the Dialogues of Plato.--His Metaphysic of Being.--His Natural Philosophy.--The Logic Deduced from him by Zeno and Melissus.--Translation of the Fragments of his Poem.--The Dualism of Truth and Opinion.--Impossibility of Obtaining Absolute Knowledge. It might well be questioned whether the founders of the Eleatic School deserve to rank among Greek poets; for though they wrote hexameters, composing what the Greeks call #epê#, yet it is clear that they did this with no artistic impulse, but only because in the dawn of thought it was easier to use verse than prose for fixed and meditated exposition. The moment in the development of human thought when abstractions were being wrung for the first time with toil from language, and when as yet the vehicle of rhythmic utterance seemed indispensable, is so interesting that a point in favor of Xenophanes and Parmenides may be fairly stretched, and a place may be given them between Hesiod, the creator of didactic poetry, and Empedocles, the inspired predecessor of Lucretius.