Both poets encircle their bucklers with the ocean. Robinson gives the preference to the author of The Shield of Hercules; alleging that his description is decorated with the utmost beauty of imagery; while that of The Shield of Achilles is naked of embellishment. To the unornamented style of the passage in Homer I appeal, as demonstrating the superiority of his judgment, and as thereby establishing beyond dispute the fact of his originality. In one condensed verse he pours around the verge of the buckler “the great strength of the ocean stream.” An image of roundness and completeness is here at once presented to the eye, and fills the mind. But the author of the Shield of Hercules, evidently striving to excel Homer, says that “high-soaring swans there clamoured aloud, and many floated on the surface of the billows, and near them fishes were leaping tumultuously.” Who does not perceive that the full image of the rounding ocean is broken and rendered indistinct by this multiplicity of images? The description is, indeed, picturesque; _at nunc non erat his locus_. Yet that Hesiod was the plagiarist will scarcely be contended, until the assertion already advanced respecting the epic simplicity of his style shall have been set aside. But the former part of the piece has all the internal marks of having been composed by an author of totally dissimilar genius. It has the stamp of the ancient simplicity upon it. A few passages are magnificent; but still in a noble and pure taste. Here then I discern the hand of Hesiod. But the presumption rests on surer grounds than characteristics of style. In the concluding verses of the Theogony, the poet invokes the Muses to sing the praises of women; and among the lost works of Hesiod, whose titles are dispersed in ancient authors, are enumerated the four Catalogues of Women or Heroines; and the Herogony, or Generation of Heroes descended from them; which are thought to have been five connected parts of the same poem. That this was the work of Hesiod we have the testimony of Pausanias; who alludes to the tale of Aurora and Cephalus, and that of Iphigenia, as treated by Hesiod in his Catalogue of Women. The fourth Catalogue had acquired a secondary title of Ηοιαι μεγαλαι; the great Eoiæ: fantastically framed out of the words η οιη, or _such as_, which introduced the stories of the successive heroines. From the use of this title a strange idea got abroad that Eoa was the name of a young woman of Ascra, the mistress of Hesiod. Bœotian Hesiod, vers’d in various lore, Forsook the mansion where he dwelt before: The Heliconian village sought, and woo’d The maid of Ascra in her scornful mood: There did the suffering bard his lays proclaim, The strain beginning with Eoa’s name. HERMISIANAX OF COLOPHON, in Athenæus, book xiii.[14]