Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/24

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HESIOD.

of Asiatic rivers, and even mentions the Nile and the Phasis, neither of which occur in Homer. But this would seem to have been a hearsay knowledge of geography, for he distinctly declares his experience of his father's quondam calling to be limited to a single passage to Eubœa from the mainland; and as he is less full when he should enumerate Greek rivers, the reasonable supposition is that he was no traveller, and, depending on tradition, was most correct and communicative touching those streams of which he had heard most in childhood. The one voyage to which he owned was made with a view to the musical contest at Chalcis above alluded to; and it is surely not without a touch of quiet humour that this sailor's son owns himself a landlubber in the following verses addressed to his ne'er-do-well brother:—

"If thy rash thought on merchandise be placed, Lest debts ensnare or woeful hunger waste, Learn now the courses of the roaring sea, Though ships and voyages are strange to me. Ne'er o'er the sea's broad way my course I bore, Save once from Aulis to the Eubœan shore; From Aulis, where the mighty Argive host, The winds awaiting, lingered on the coast, From sacred Greece assembled to destroy The guilty walls of beauty-blooming Troy."—'Works and Days,' E. 901-910.

This, the poet goes on to say, is all he knows practically about navigation, and truly it is little enough; for it is no exaggeration, but a simple fact, that the strait which constituted Hesiod's sole experience of a

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