HESIOD: THE WORKS AND DAYS, THE-OGONY, THE SHIELD OF HERAKLES.

Translated by Richmond Lattimore '26.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,'959- 241 pp. $3.95

Professor Lattimore's Hesiod will add to the merited renown of Hesiod and his translator; both are dynamic poets. Such poetic marriages are often poetically fruitful, to be sure, but in this case new forces are at work. (Outer space? I know only that last week on my first transcontinental jet flight I chose Hesiod (Ninth Century B.C. friend) and Lattimore (friend Of later date) as companions and found them beguiling and helpful in jet travel. Home at last, I can still recommend both these friends and jets.)

Hesiod gives help for daily life with his pithy, farmer wisdom: "Do not let any sweet talking woman beguile your good sense with the fascinations of her shape. It's your barn she's after." Hesiod's mind "cries out against the wicked purpose of men, so that the people must pay for the profligacy of their rulers." Hesiod's heart tells him "look, badness is easy to have, you can take it by handfuls... but between us and virtue the immortals have put what will make us sweat." Hesiod learned, too, that one should "drink deep ... when the bottle has just been opened, and when it's giving out: be sparing when it's half full} but it's useless to spare the fag end."

Lattimore's introduction is written with enviable - i.e., Hellenic - clarity. The reader learns that Hesiod in Boiotia, like Homer in lonia, inherited a well-developed tradition of epic poetry, which forbids the assumption that either poet is "primitive." Furthermore, Hesiod's Boiotian school of epic is shown to be parallel to, rather than derivative from, Homer's lonian school. The question of the relative merits of these two schools of epic is, quite properly, avoided, but a perspicacious reader , might be led at this point to review his own rules for distinguishing a major from a minor poet - a wholesome hobby for any reader.

The book includes ingeniously contrived genealogical tables and a glossary of personal names. It is adorned with drawings by Richard Wilt which are in keeping with the spirit of the book.

This reader (at an elevation of 30,000 feet for. the first time) found it pleasant to feel that Hesiod and he were nostalgic for, proud of, and amused after all by, the same old trifles, and we reached a tacit agreement that it is still helpful to keep as friends those

"...who possess the great and holy mountain of Helikon and dance there on soft feet by the dark bine water of the spring..."