under the dim
name of Hesiod. It is impossible to date these earliest didactic poems,
which nevertheless set the fashion of form which has been preserved ever
since. The _Works and Days_, which passes as the direct masterpiece of
Hesiod (q.v.), is the type of all the poetry which has had education as
its aim. Hesiod is supposed to have been a tiller of the ground in a
Boeotian village, who determined to enrich his neighbours' minds by
putting his own ripe stores of useful information into sonorous metre.
Historically examined, the legend of Hesiod becomes a shadow, but the
substance of the poems attributed to him remains. The genuine parts of
the _Works and Days_, which Professor Gilbert Murray has called "a slow,
lowly, simple poem," deal with rules for agriculture. The _Theogony_ is
an annotated catalogue of the gods. Other poems attributed to Hesiod,
but now lost, were on astronomy, on auguries by birds, on the character
of the physical world; still others seem to have been genealogies of
famous women. All this mass of Boeotian verse was composed for
educational purposes, in an age when even preposterous information was
better than no knowledge at all. In slightly later times, as the Greek
nation became better supplied with intellectual appliances, the stream
of didactic poetry flowed more and more closely in one, and that a
theological, channel. The great poem of Parmenides _On Nature_ and those
of Empedocles exist only in fragments, but enough remains to show that
these poets carried on the didactic method in mythology. Cleostratus of
Tenedos wrote an astronomical poem in the 6th century, and Periander a
medical one in the 4th, but didactic poetry did not flourish again in
Greece until the 3rd century, when Aratus, in the Alexandrian age, wrote
his famous _Phenomena_, a poem about things seen in the heavens. Other
later Greek didactic poets were Nicander, and perhaps Euphorion.

It was from the hands of these Alexandrian writers that the genius of
didactic poetry passed over to Rome, since, although it is possible that
some of the lost works of the early republic, and in particular those of
Ennius, may have possessed an educational character, the first and by
far the greatest didactic Latin poet known to us is Lucretius. A highly
finished translation by Cicero into Latin hexameters of the principal
works of Aratus is believed to have drawn the attention of Lucretius to
this school of Greek poetry, and it was not wit