Pausanias informs us that “the Bœotians, who dwell round Helicon, have a tradition among them that Hesiod wrote nothing besides the poem of ‘Works:’ and from this they take away the introduction, and say that the poem properly begins with The Strifes. They showed me a leaden tablet near the fountain, which was almost entirely eaten away with age, and on which were engraven the Works and Days of Hesiod.” It is difficult to account for the manifest mutilation and corruption of this venerable poet’s compositions, since it appears that they were extant in a complete, or at least, a more perfect form, so late as the age of Vespasian. Pliny, book xiv. complaining of the agricultural ignorance of his age, observes that even the names of several trees enumerated by Hesiod had grown out of knowledge: and in book xv. he adverts to Hesiod’s opinion of the unprofitableness of the olive. From some verses in the Astronomicon of Manilius, an Augustan writer, it would seem that he had treated of ingrafting, and of the soils adapted to corn and vines. He sings how corn in plains, how vines in hills Delight, how both with vast increase the olive fills: How foreign grafts th’ adulterous stock receives, Bears stranger fruit and wonders at her leaves. CREECH. and it is remarkable that the line in Virgil translated by Dryden, And old Ascrean verse through Roman cities sing, occurs in that book of the Georgics which is dedicated to planting, ingrafting, and the dressing of vines. In the “Works,” as they now appear, we find no mention of any trees but such as are fit for the fabrication of the plough: and it is plain that the countrymen of Pliny could be in no danger of forgetting the names of the oak, the elm, or the bay-tree. Of the olive, and of ingrafting, there is no mention whatever, and but a cursory notice on the vine: nor is there any comparison of the soils respectively adapted to the growth of vines and of corn. The poem in some editions has been divided into two books; under the general title of “Works and Days,” but with a subdivision entitled Days only: by which arrangement it is made virtually to consist of three books. In Loesner’s edition the distinction of the second book is done away: but the subdivision of Days is retained. From either mode of disposition this incoherency results: that Works and Days no longer appear to be the general title, but applicable only to the former part of the poem, in which there is no mention of Days at all. The ancient copies, as Heinsius has shown, had no division into parts. If any minor distinction be deemed admissible for the more convenient arrangement of the subject, the disposition of Henry Stephens is obviously the most rational: whereby the poem is divided into two parts: the first entitled “Works” only, and the second “Days.”