That you are the best of poets, Hesiod, and that Muses gave you this honour along with the laurel, you yourself prove from your poetry, where all is inspired and stately, and we believe it’s true. But one thing puzzles us. You claim on your own behalf that you had received that divine song from heaven so that you might sing the praises of the past and prophesy the future. Now the one task you accomplished fully enough in your account of the birth of the gods up to those primeval beings Chaos, Earth, Heaven, and Love; again you told of virtuous women and gave advice to farmers—what the Pleiades mean, the right times for ploughing, reaping, sailing, and all the rest. But your second intention, far more useful to life and more akin to divine gifts—prophecy of the future I mean—,you did not even begin. No, you let the whole subject be forgotten and nowhere in your poetry have you followed the example of Calchas or Telemus or Polyidus or even Phineus, who did not even receive this gift from Muses but prophesied all the same and never hesitated to give oracles to those who asked.

So you must be assuredly liable to one of these three charges: either you were lying, to put it harshly, when you said that the Muses promised you power to foretell the future; or they kept their promise, but out of spite you are keeping their gift hidden in your pocket and not sharing it with those who ask; or you have written a great deal on the subject, but not yet given it to the outside world, preserving its use for some or other special occasion. I wouldn’t dare say this, that the Muses promised you two things and gave you one, breaking half their promise—knowledge of the future I mean—especially when they promised this first in your verse. Cf. Hesiod, Theogony, 32.

Who but you yourself could tell us this, Hesiod? As the gods are “givers of goods”, Homer, Od. viii, 325. so it is proper for you poets, their friends and disciples, to expound in all sincerity the knowledge you have and free us from our perplexity.

My fine friend, there is an easy answer to it all. I could say that nothing that I composed belonged to me personally, but to the Muses, and you should have asked them for an account of what was put in and what left out. But for what I knew for myself—tending, herding, driving, milking, and the other practices and lore of shepherds—I would be rightly accountable; but the goddesses give their gifts to whom they will and for as long as they think it proper.

Nevertheless I shall not fail to defend my poetry against you. It is not, I think, proper to examine poetry in minute detail, nor to demand complete perfection down to every syllable of what is said, nor again to criticise bitterly any unconscious oversight in the flow of the composition. No, you must realise that we include much for the sake of both metre and euphony, and often the verse itself has somehow let in some things, they fit so smoothly. But you are robbing us of our greatest possession—I mean freedom and poetic licence. You are blind to the other beauties of poetry, and pick out a few splinters and thorns and seek out handles for captious criticism. You are not alone in this, nor am I the only victim. Many others pick the poetry of my fellow-craftsman Homer utterly to pieces, pointing out similar niggling details, the merest trifles.

Well, if I have to come to grips with the charge, and make a clear-cut defence, read my Works and Days, my man. You will see how much, like a real seer and prophet, I foretold in that poem, predicting the outcome of right and timely action and the penalties of neglect. Remember my“you will carry it in a basket, and few there’ll beto admire” Works and Days, 482; i.e., “your harvest will be poor.” and again the blessings that follow right farming—this should be thought a prophecy most useful for living.

In that, my admirable Hesiod, there speaks the true shepherd; Cf. Hesiod, Theogony, 26. you seem to be justifying the story that the Muses inspired you, since you cannot even defend your poetry as your own. But this is not the prophecy we expected from you and the Muses. In that sort of thing the farmers are much better prophets than you poets. They can foretell such things excellently to us: for instance, that after rain the crops will flourish, while in the time of drought when the fields are thirsty, you can do nothing to prevent famine following their thirst; that you must not plough in the middle of summer; that it is no good scattering seed at random or cutting the corn when it is still green, or you will find the ear empty. Nor is there any need whatever to prophesy this, that unless you cover up the seed and your man pulls soil over with a hoe, down will fly the birds and eat up all your summer’s hope in advance.

One could not go wrong in giving such precepts and admonitions, but they seem to me very far from prophecy. Prophecy’s task is to know in advance what is unknown and altogether beyond perception—for example, to foretell to Minos that his son Glaucus. See Loeb Apollodorus (Fraser), i. 311. will be smothered in the jar of honey, and forewarn the Achaeans of the reason for Apollo’s anger and that Troy will be captured in the tenth year. That is prophecy. If such things as you mention are to be ascribed to it, I too must be called a prophet without a moment’s delay. Even without Castalia and the laurel and the Delphic tripod, I will foretell and predict that if a man walks about naked in time of frost, with rain and hail falling as well, he will catch a chill and not a slight one, and, what is even more prophetic, a fever will in all probability follow; and so on—it would be ridiculous to mention all that I could foretell.

Then away with such pleas and prophecies! But that point you made at the beginning, perhaps that can be admitted, that you knew nothing of what you said; it was some divine inspiration filled you with your verses, and not so very reliable at that, or it would not have kept part of what it promised and left the rest unfulfilled.