These Muses once taught beautiful singing to Hesiod as he was pasturing his lambs at the
foot of holy Helicon. The goddesses first addressed me with these
words: “Shepherds whose home is in the wilds, you miserable disgraces to
your trade, all belly and no hands, we
know how to tell many
falsehoods that seem real: but we also know how to speak
truth when we wish to.”
This is what the
eloquent daughters of mighty Zeus said; they also gave me a staff, a branch of
evergreen laurel which they trimmed with marvelous skill. They breathed into me their divine voice, so
that I might tell of things
to come and things past, and ordered me to sing of the race of the
blessed gods who live forever, and always to place the Muses themselves both at the beginning and
at the end of my song.
But enough of this gossiping.
Hesiod, Theogony (I), trans. Norman O . Brown, The Library of the Liberal Arts, 1953
No comments:
Post a Comment