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


 


harshly, when you said that the Muses promised you power to foretell the future; or they kept their promise, but out of spite you are keeping their gift hidden in your pocket and not sharing it with those who ask; or you have written a great deal on the subject, but not yet given it to the outside world, preserving its use for some or other special occasion. I wouldn’t dare say this, that the Muses promised you two things and gave you one, breaking half their promise—knowledge of the future I mean—especially when they promised this first in your verse.
 Cf. Hesiod, Theogony , 32. 
 Who but you yourself could tell us this, Hesiod? As the gods are “givers of goods”,
 Homer, Od . viii, 325. 
 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. HESIOD 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.