e would give
him better clothes, and then he might beg his bread throughout the
country-side. Feasts, too, and almsgiving were nearly allied, and feasts
have always been one resource for the relief of the poor. Thus naturally
the beggars frequented feasts, and were apparently a recognized and yet
inevitable nuisance. They wore, as part of their dress, scrips or
wallets in which they carried away the food they received, as later
Roman clients carried away portions of food in baskets (_sportula_) from
their patron's dinner. Odysseus, when he dresses up as a beggar, puts on
a wallet as part of his costume. Thus we find a system of voluntary
relief in force based on a recognition of the duty of almsgiving as
complete and peremptory as that which we shall notice later among the
Jews and the early Christians. We are concerned with country districts,
and not with towns, and, as social conditions that are similar produce
similar methods of administration, so we find here a general plan of
relief similar to that which was in vogue in Scotland till the Scottish
Poor Law Act of 1845.

In Hesiod the fundamental conceptions of charity are more clearly
expressed. He has, if not his ten, at least his four commandments, for
disobedience to which Zeus will punish the offender. They are: Thou
shalt do no evil to suppliant or guest; thou shalt not dishonour any
woman of the family; thou shalt not sin against the orphan; thou shalt
not be unkind to aged parents.

The laws of social life are thus duty to one's guest and duty to one's
family; and chastity has its true place in that relation, as the later
Greeks, who so often quote Hesiod (cf. the so-called _Economics_ of
Aristotle), fully realized. Also the family charities due to the
orphan, whose lot is deplored in the _Iliad_ (xxii. 490), and to the
aged are now clearly enunciated. But there is also in Hesiod the duty
to one's neighbour, not according to the "perfection" of "Cristes
lore," but according to a law of honourable reciprocity in act and
intent. "Love him who loves thee, and cleave to him who cleaveth to
thee: to him who would have given, give; to him who would not have
given, give not." The groundwork of Hesiod's charity outside the
family is neighbourly help (such as formed no small part of old
Scottish charity in the country districts); and he put his argument
thus: Competition, which is a kind of strife, "lies in the roots of
the world and in