2 HESIOD.

cess and the obstacles to it. But notwithstanding the explicitness natural to his school of composition, he has failed to leave any record of the date of his life and poems. For an approximation to this the chief authority is Herodotus, who, in discussing the Hellenic theogonies, gives it as his opinion that " Hesiod and Homer lived not more than four hundred years before " his era, and places, it will be observed, the didactic poet first in order of the two. This would correspond with the testimony of the Parian marble which makes Hesiod Homer's senior by about thirty years; and Ephorus, the historian of the poet's fatherland, main- tained, amongst others, the higher antiquity of Hesiod. There was undoubtedly a counter theory, referred to Xenophanes, the Eleatic philosopher, which placed Hesiod later than Homer; but the problem is in- capable of decisive solution, and the key to it has to be sought, if anywhere, in the internal evidence of the poems themselves, as to "the state of man- ners, customs, arts, and political government fami- liar to the respective authors." Tradition certainly conspires to affix a common date to these pre-eminent stars of Hellenic poetry, by clinging to a fabled contest for the prize of their mutual art ; and, so far as it is of any worth, corroborates the consistent be- lief of the ancients, that Hesiod nourished at least nine centuries before Christ. As to his parentage, although the names of his father and mother have not been preserved, there is internal .evidence of the most trustworthy kind. In his ' Works and Days ' the poet tells us that his father migrated across the ^Egean