Hesiod has been called the poet of helots, and is thought to have
preserved some of the traditions of those earlier inhabitants of
Greece who had become a kind of serfs; and in a certain shadowiness
in his conceptions of the gods, contrasting with the concrete and
heroic forms of the gods of Homer, we may perhaps trace something of
the quiet unspoken brooding of a subdued people--of that silently
dreaming temper to which the story of Persephone properly belongs.
However this may be, it is in Hesiod that the two images,
unassociated in Homer--the goddess of summer and the goddess of
death, Kore and Persephone--are identified with much significance;
and that strange, dual being makes her first appearance, whose latent
capabilities the poets afterwards developed; among the rest, a
peculiar blending of those two contrasted aspects, full of purpose
for the duly chastened intelligence; death, resurrection,
rejuvenescence.--Awake, and sing, ye that dwell in the dust!
[96] Modern science explains the changes of the natural world by the
hypothesis of certain unconscious forces; and the sum of these
forces, in their combined action, constitutes the scientific
conception of nature.
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