How did the continental school of epic poetry arise? There is
little definite material for an answer to this question, but the
probability is that there were at least three contributory
causes. First, it is likely that before the rise of the Ionian
epos there existed in Boeotia a purely popular and indigenous
poetry of a crude form: it comprised, we may suppose, versified
proverbs and precepts relating to life in general, agricultural
maxims, weather-lore, and the like. In this sense the Boeotian
poetry may be taken to have its germ in maxims similar to our
English

`Till May be out, ne'er cast a clout,'

or

`A rainbow in the morning
Is the Shepherd's warning.'

Secondly and thirdly we may ascribe the rise of the new epic to
the nature of the Boeotian people and, as already remarked, to a
spirit of revolt against the old epic. The Boeotians, people of
the class of which Hesiod represents himself to be the type, were
essentially unromantic; their daily needs marked the general
limit of their ideals, and, as a class, they cared little for
works of fancy, for pathos, or for fine thought as such. To a
people of this nature the Homeric epos would be inacceptable, and
the post-Homeric epic, with its conventional atmosphere, its
trite and hackneyed diction, and its insincere sentiment, would
be anathema. We can imagine, therefore, that among such folk a
settler, of Aeolic origin like Hesiod, who clearly was well