A conversation with Hesiod (1)

That you are the best of poets, Hesiod, and that Muses gave you this honour along with the laurel, you yourself prove from your poetry, where all is inspired and stately, and we believe it’s true. But one thing puzzles us. You claim on your own behalf that you had received that divine song from heaven so that you might sing the praises of the past and prophesy the future. Now the one task you accomplished fully enough in your account of the birth of the gods up to those primeval beings Chaos, Earth, Heaven, and Love; again you told of virtuous women and gave advice to farmers—what the Pleiades mean, the right times for ploughing, reaping, sailing, and all the rest. But your second intention, far more useful to life and more akin to divine gifts—prophecy of the future I mean—,you did not even begin. No, you let the whole subject be forgotten and nowhere in your poetry have you followed the example of Calchas or Telemus or Polyidus or even Phineus, who did not even receive this gift from Muses but prophesied all the same and never hesitated to give oracles to those who asked.