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Milton's account of the most important event in his whole system of the universe, the fall of the angels, is evidently unbelievable to himself; and the more so, that it is wholly founded on, and in a great part spoiled and degraded from, Hesiod's account of the decisive war of the younger gods with the Titans.
Hesiod's view is best given in his own words: "From chaos were generated Erebos and black Night, And from Night again were generated Ether and Day, Whom she brought forth, having conceived from the embrace of Erebos." Here we have the same sexual motive at work as among the Egyptians; a motive which, as we should expect, is well-nigh universal.
Its lofty flight brings it, again in Homer, to the very gates of heaven. Hesiod and Pindar speak of its far-off cry, heard from above the clouds: and that it 'observed the time of its coming', 'intelligent of seasons', was a proverb old in Hesiod's day when the crane signalled the approach of winter, and when it bade the husbandman make ready to plough.
"Though we live in indolent Ionia, we still believe Hesiod's maxim, that industry is the guardian of virtue," rejoined Anaxagoras. "Philothea plies her distaff as busily as Lachesis spinning the thread of mortal life."
It happened the Locrians were assembled at Rhium that day to feast and make merry according to the custom which continues still among them. As soon as they perceived a carcass floating or rather swimming towards them, they hastened, not without admiration, to see what it was; and knowing the body to be Hesiod's, they instantly resolved to find out the murderers. It proved an easy discovery.
It taught him that in death all are equal and that in life the noble-minded are serene. In the Genesis of this Bible there is an account of a golden age and of a paradise into which evil was introduced by woman. The account is Hesiod's, to whom the Orient had furnished the details. It may be that both erred.
But I also got a sly taste of ambrosia and nectar; good-natured Ganymede, as often as he saw that Zeus's attention was engaged elsewhere, brought round the nectar and indulged me with a half- pint or so. During dinner, Apollo harped, Silenus danced his wild measures, the Muses uprose and sang to us from Hesiod's Birth of Gods, and the first of Pindar's odes.
A trace of this type may perhaps be recognized in Hesiod's "halfgods," the heroes of the Trojan war and others, whom he places just after the age of bronze and just before his modern age of iron; their origin is thus made relatively late, as was natural if they descended culturally from old gods.
Hesiod's heaven is what he calls the islands of the blessed, in the midst of the ocean, three times a year blooming with most exquisite flowers, and the air is tinted with purple, while games and music and horse-races occupy the time. The Scandinavian's heaven was the hall of Walhalla, where the god Odin gave unending wine-suppers to earthly heroes and heroines.
Then while this modern Paris is yet doubting, perhaps a thought may cross his mind of sterner, solitary Lake Iseo the Pallas of the three. She offers her own attractions. The sublimity of Monte Adamello, dominating Lovere and all the lowland like Hesiod's hill of Virtue reared aloft above the plain of common life, has charms to tempt heroic lovers. Nor can Varese be neglected.
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