A conversation with Hesiod (1-5)

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.

So you must be assuredly liable to one of these three charges: either you were lying, to put it

Who but you yourself could tell us this, Hesiod? As the gods are “givers of goods”, [*] so it is proper for you poets, their friends and disciples, to expound in all sincerity the knowledge you have and free us from our perplexity.

My fine friend, there is an easy answer to it all. I could say that nothing that I composed belonged to me personally, but to the Muses, and you should have asked them for an account of what was put in and what left out. But for what I knew for myself—tending, herding, driving, milking, and the other practices and lore of shepherds—I would be rightly accountable; but the goddesses give their gifts to whom they will and for as long as they think it proper.

Nevertheless I shall not fail to defend my poetry against you. It is not, I think, proper to examine poetry in minute detail, nor to demand complete perfection down to every syllable of what is said, nor again to criticise bitterly any unconscious oversight in the flow of the composition. No, you must realise that we include much for the sake of both metre and euphony, and often the verse itself has somehow let in some things, they fit so smoothly. But you are robbing us of our greatest possession—I mean freedom and poetic licence. You are blind to the other beauties of poetry, and pick out a few splinters and thorns and seek out handles for captious criticism. You are not alone in this, nor am I the only victim. Many others pick the poetry of my fellow-craftsman Homer utterly to pieces, pointing out similar niggling details, the merest trifles.