The charm of the _Works and Days_--the first didactic poem extant--is its apparent earnestness of purpose and simplicity of style. The author’s frequent references to, and rebuke of, legal injustices--his sense of which had been quickened by the iniquitous decisions of the judges already referred to--are as _naïve_ as they are pathetic. Of the _Theogony_, the subject, as the title implies, is the history of the generation and successive dynasties of the Olympian divinities--the objects of Greek worship. It may, indeed, be styled the Hellenic Bible, and, with the Homeric Epics, it formed the principal theology of the old Greeks, and of the later Romans or Latins. The “Proœmium,” or introductory verses--in which the Muses are represented as appearing to their votary at the foot of the sacred Helicon, and consecrating him to the work of revealing the divine mysteries by the gift of a laurel-branch--and the following verses, describing their return to the celestial mansions, where they hymn the omnipotent Father, are very charming. To the long description of the tremendous struggle of the warring gods and Titans, fighting for the possession of heaven, Milton was indebted for his famous delineation of a similar conflict. The _Works and Days_, in striking contrast with the military spirit of the Homeric epic, deals in plain and simple verse with questions ethical, political, and economic. The ethical portion exhibits much true feeling, and a conviction of the evils brought upon the earth by the triumph of injustice and of violence. The well-known passages in which the poet figures the gradual declension and degeneracy of men from the golden to the present iron race, are the remote original of all the later pleasing poetic fictions of golden ages and times of innocence. According to Hesiod, there are two everlastingly antagonistic agents at work on the Earth; the spirit of war and fighting, and the peaceful spirit of agriculture and mechanical industry. And in the apostrophe in which he bitterly reproaches his unrighteous judges-- “O fools! they know not, in their selfish soul, How far the half is better than the whole: The good which Asphodel and Mallows yield, The feast of herbs, the dainties of the field”-- he seems to have a profound conviction of the truth taught by Vegetarianism--that luxurious living is the fruitful parent of selfishness in its manifold forms.[3] That Hesiod regarded that diet which depends mainly or entirely upon agriculture and upon fruits as the highest and best mode of life is sufficiently evident in the following verses descriptive of the “Golden Age” life:-- “Like gods, they lived with calm, untroubled mind, Free from the toil and anguish of our kind, Nor did decrepid age mis-shape their frame. * * * * *