ISBN: 9780217632430

James Adam, Paperback, English-language edition, Pub by General Books LLC Books Religion~~History The-Religious-Teachers-of-Greece-Being-Gifford-Lectures-on-Natural-Religion-Delivered-at-… More...

James Adam, Paperback, English-language edition, Pub by General Books LLC Books Religion~~History The-Religious-Teachers-of-Greece-Being-Gifford-Lectures-on-Natural-Religion-Delivered-at-Aberdeen~~James-Adam General Books LLC Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE IV FROM HESIOD TO BACCHYLIDES In the present lecture, we have first to examine the theology of Hesiod; and afterwards we shall endeavour to see how the principal religious ideas of Homer and Hesiod were further developed and expanded in lyric, elegiac, and iambic poetry from Archilochus down to Bacchylides. Although Pindar falls within the period we are about to discuss, his importance is so great that he must be reserved for separate treatment hereafter. The poems of Hesiod which require to be considered are the Works and Days and the TJieogony. That the bulk of the Works and Days is from the hand of Hesiod, may be taken as generally admitted. Pausanias, indeed, informs us that it was the only Hesiodic work which the Boeotians of Helicon conceded to be genuine.1 About the Theogony there is more doubt. In his Histoire de la literature Grrecque? M. Croiset maintains that the poem is later than Hesiod, though emanating from the Hesiodic school: he is inclined to assign it to the early part of the seventh century B.c., whereas Hesiod belongs, he thinks, to the first half of the eighth. Other historians of Greek literature, for example, Wilhelm Christ, while admitting the presence of interpolated passages, consider that far the larger portion of the poem is by Hesiod; and with the exception of the testimony already quoted from Pausanias, it would seem that the Hesiodic authorship was never seriouslyquestioned in antiquity. There is, moreover, every reason to believe that both the Works and Days and the Theogony were read by the Greeks of the fifth century B.c. in nearly the form which they now present; so that we may use each of the two poems indifferently in order to illustrate the religious ideas which the ancients associated with the name of Hesiod. 1 ix. 31. 4....<