Cooke explains the “Works” of Hesiod to mean the labours of agriculture, and the “Days” the proper seasons for the Works; but erroneously. The term _Works_ is to be taken with greater latitude, as including not only labours, but actions; and as referring equally to the moral, as to the industrious œconomy of human life. It is evident also that the term “Days” does not respect the seasons of labour specified in the course of the poem, but the days of superstitious observance at the end of it: and of these many have no reference whatever to the works of husbandry. The Theogony has all the appearance of being a patchwork of fragments; consisting of some genuine Hesiodéan passages;[13] pieced together with verses of other poets, and probably of a different age. The mythology is occasionally inconsistent with itself: thus the god Chrysaor is re-introduced among the demi-gods; and the Fates are born over again from different parents: an incongruity which Robinson attempts to obviate by an ingenious, but over-refined construction. The proem bears the internal marks of comparatively modern refinement. It has not the simple outline of Hesiod. The whole passage has the air of one of those introductions which the rhapsodists were accustomed to prefix to their recitations: it is conceived in a more florid taste than the usual composition of Hesiod, but expressed with considerable elegance of fancy. These arguments are not affected by the individual opinions of Romans and Greeks, themselves modern with respect to Hesiod. Ovid in his “Art of Love” alludes to this proem: The sister Muses did I ne’er behold, While, Ascra! midst thy vales, I fed my fold. Plutarch in the ninth book of his Symposiacs, quotes two of the verses in illustration of the propriety of epithets: Pausanias appeals to the presentation of the branch as evidence that Hesiod did not sing to the lyre; and Lucian in his dialogue “on the illiterate book-collector” observes, “how can you have known these things without having learnt them? how or whence? unless at any time you have received a branch from the Muses like that shepherd. They, indeed, did not disdain to appear to the shepherd, though a rough hairy man, with a sun-burnt complexion; but they would never have deigned to come near you:” and in the “Dialogue with Hesiod” he banters him as promising to sing of futurity; and affecting the Chalcas or Phineas, when there is nothing of prophecy in his whole poem. An indirect argument for the spuriousness of the verses.