Early Greek Philosophy

lives.¹ He also feels that he is singing for another class.
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It is to shepherds and husbandmen of the older race he
addresses himself, and the Achaian princes for whom Homer
sang have become remote persons who give "crooked
dooms." The romance and splendour of the Achaian
Middle Ages meant nothing to the common people. The
primitive view of the world had never really died out among
them; so it was natural for their first spokesman to assume
it in his poems. That is why we find in Hesiod these old
savage tales, which Homer disdained.

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Yet it would be wrong to see in the Theogony a mere
revival of the old superstition. Hesiod could not help being
affected by the new spirit, and he became a pioneer in spite
of himself. The rudiments of what grew into Ionic science
and underlined in pencil:history are to be found in his poems, and he really did
more than anyone to hasten that decay of the old ideas
which he was seeking to arrest. The Theogony is an attempt
to reduce all the stories about the gods into a single system,
and system is fatal to so wayward a thing as mythology.
Moreover, though the spirit in which Hesiod treats his theme
is that of the older race, the gods of whom he sings are for
the most part those of the Achaians. This introduces an
element of contradiction into the system from first to last.
Herodotus tells us that it was Homer and Hesiod who made
a theogony for the Hellenes, who gave the gods their names,
and distributed among them their offices and arts,² and it
is perfectly true. The Olympian pantheon took the place
of the older gods in men's minds, and this was quite as
much the doing of Hesiod as of Homer. The ordinary man
would hardly recognize his gods in the humanized figures,
detached from all local associations, which poetry had
substituted for the older objects of worship. Such gods
were incapable of satisfying the needs of the people, and

¹ There is great historical insight here. It was Hesiod, not our
modern historians, who first pointed out that the "Greek Middle Ages"
were a break in the normal development.
² Herod. ii. 53.