The Remains of Hesiod the Ascræan, Including the Shield of Hercules: Translated into English rhyme and blank verse; with a dissertation on the life and æra, the poems and mythology of Hesiod, and copious notes.Hesiod
General
The Remains of Hesiod the Ascræan, Including the Shield of Hercules: Translated into English rhyme and blank verse; with a dissertation on the life and æra, the poems and mythology of Hesiod, and copious notes.
Hesiod
Heracles (Greek mythological character) -- Poetry; Hesiod -- Translations into English
Blest is the man who treads this hallow’d ground,
With honours by th’ immortal Muses crown’d:
The bard whose glory beams divinely bright
Far as the morning sheds her ambient light:
But shun the shades of fam’d Nemean Jove;
Thy mortal end awaits thee in the grove.
But after all her sweet words, the priestess was but a jilting gypsey;
and meant only to shuffle with the ambiguity of her trade. The old
gentleman carefully turning aside from the Peloponnesian Nemea, fell into
the trap of a temple of the Nemean Jupiter at Ænoe, a town of Locris.
He was here entertained by one Ganyctor; together with a Milesian, his
fellow-traveller, and a youth called Troilus. During the night this
Milesian violated the daughter of their host, by name Ctemene: and the
grey hairs of Hesiod, who we are told was an old man twice over,[5] and
whose name grew into a proverb for longevity, could not save him from
being suspected of the deed by the young lady’s brothers, Ctemenus
and Antiphus: they without much ceremony murdered him in the fields,
and “to leave no botches in the work,” killed the poor boy into the
bargain. The Milesian, we are to suppose, escaped under the cloud of his
miraculous security, free from gashes and from question. The body of
Hesiod was thrown into the sea; and a dolphin,[6] or a whole shoal of
them, according to another account, conveyed it to a part of the coast,
where the festival of Neptune was celebrating: and the murderers, having
confessed, were drowned in the waves. Plutarch (_de solertiâ animalium_)
states that the corpse of Hesiod was discovered through the sagacity of
his dog.
The body of a murdered poet, however, was not to rest quiet without
effecting some further extraordinary prodigies. The inhabitants of
Orchomenos, in Bœotia, having consulted the oracle on occasion of a
pestilence, were answered that, as their only remedy, they must seek
the bones of Hesiod; and that a crow would direct them. The messengers
accordingly found a crow sitting on a rock; in the cavity of which they
discovered the poet’s remains; transported them to their own country, and
erected a tomb with this epitaph:
The fallow vales of Ascra gave him birth:
His bones are cover’d by the Mingan earth:
Supreme in Hellas Hesiod’s glories rise,
Whom men discern by wisdom’s touchstone wise.
Among the Greek Inscriptions is an epitaph on Hesiod with the name of
Alcæus, which has the air of being a genuine ancient production, from its
breathing the beautiful classic simplicity of the old Grecian school:
Nymphs in their founts midst Locris’ woodland gloom
Laved Hesiod’s corse and piled his grassy tomb:
The shepherds there the yellow honey shed,
And milk of goats was sprinkled o’er his head:
With voice so sweetly breathed that sage would sing,
Who sip’d pure drops from every Muse’s spring.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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