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Updated: June 7, 2025
Then, having perfect freedom to go whithersoever we chose and to follow the bees across the boundless fields of ancient literature, we might read of the wild bees and of their honey out of a rock, and of the hive-bees too, in Homer; follow them to their first legendary home in Crete, where the infant Jupiter was fed on honey as a baby's lips are touched with it even unto this day; trace their association with Proserpine and her mother, or their subtler connexion with Ephesian Diana; find in the poets, from Hesiod to the later Anthology, a hundred sweet references to the bee-tree in the oak-wood, to the flowery hill Hymettus.
It is worthy of note that Simonides, whose inflammatory writings had led to the withdrawal of our missionary brother from Athens, pretended about this time to have discovered certain Greek manuscripts of Homer, Hesiod, etc., which he claimed to be more ancient than any others, and some men of learning thought them to be genuine; but when they were discovered to be forgeries, the people regarded him as a deceiver and liar.
Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term the greater. Those, I said, which are narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and the rest of the poets, who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind. But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do you find with them? A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.
And is it conceivable that the contemporaries of Homer, or again of Hesiod, would have allowed either of them to go about as rhapsodists, if they had really been able to make mankind virtuous? Would they not have been as unwilling to part with them as with gold, and have compelled them to stay at home with them?
Drawing his falchion, and uttering a thousand anathemas, he strode down to the scene of combat with some such thundering strides as Jupiter is said by Hesiod to have taken when he strode down the spheres to hurl his thunder-bolts at the Titans. "When the rival heroes came face to face, each made a prodigious start in the style of a veteran stage-champion.
Some straight imagined that I intended to produce some old musty stories, like the funeral solemnities of Oeolycus the Thessalian or of Amphidamas the Chalcidean, in which they say Homer and Hesiod contended for the prize.
And yet I admire how your landlord, when he went to perform the great purification for the Delians not long since, could overlook the monuments and patterns of the first aliment which the people brought into the temple, and, among other cheap fruits such as grow of themselves, the mallows and the asphodel; the usefulness and innocency whereof Hesiod seemed in his work to magnify.
No more, he replied, than making or working are the same; thus much I have learned from Hesiod, who says that 'work is no disgrace. Now do you imagine that if he had meant by working and doing such things as you were describing, he would have said that there was no disgrace in them for example, in the manufacture of shoes, or in selling pickles, or sitting for hire in a house of ill-fame?
I was perhaps the first who discovered the extent of his abilities, and esteemed them as they deserved. He on his part seemed satisfied with me, and, whilst shut up in my chamber in the Rue Jean Saint Denis, near the opera-house, I composed my act of Hesiod, he sometimes came to dine with me tete-a-tete. We sent for our dinner, and paid share and share alike.
I close these papers, with my eye resting upon the same stretch of fields, the wooded border of a river, the twinkling roofs and spires flanked by hills and sea, where my eye rested when I began this story of the old masters with Hesiod and the bean-patches of Ithaca.
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