The poems of Hesiod certainly do not appear so adapted to recital as perusal.

Yet, by the most plausible chronology, they were only composed about one hundred years after those of Homer! [176] The Aones, Hyantes, and other tribes, which I consider part of the great Pelasgic family, were expelled from Boeotia by Thracian hordes.

[They afterward returned in the time of the Dorian emigration.] Some of the population must, however, have remained--the peasantry of the land; and in Hesiod we probably possess the national poetry, and arrive at the national religion, of the old Pelasgi.
[177] Welcker.
[178] The deadly signs which are traced by Praetus on the tablets of which Bellerophon was the bearer, and which are referred to in the Iliad, are generally supposed by the learned to have been pictorial, and, as it were, hieroglyphical figures; my own belief, and the easiest interpretation of the passage, is, that they were alphabetical characters--in a word, writing, not painting.
[179] Pausanias, lib.i., c.

27, speaks of a wooden statue in the Temple of Pohas, in Athens, said to have been the gift of Cecrops; and, with far more claim to belief, in the previous chapter he tells us that the most holy of all the images was a statue of Minerva, which, by the common consent of all the towns before incorporated in one city, was dedicated in the citadel, or polis.

Tradition, therefore, carried the date of this statue beyond the time of Theseus.
Plutarch also informs us that Theseus himself, when he ordained divine honours to be paid to Ariadne, ordered two little statues to be made of her--one of silver and one of brass.
[180] All that Homer calls the work of Vulcan, such as the dogs in the palace of Alcinous, etc., we may suppose to be the work of foreigners.