[Greek: En Delo tote prôton ego xai Homeros aoidoi Melpomen, en nearois úmnois rapsantes aoidê.]
'Then, first of all,' says Hesiod, 'did I and Homer chant as bards in Delos, laying the nexus of our poetic composition in proæmial hymns.' We understand him to mean this: There were many singers and harpers who sang or accompanied the words of others; perhaps ancient words--at all events, not their own. Naturally he was anxious to have it understood that he and Homer had higher pretensions. They killed their own mutton. They composed the words as well as sang them. Where both functions were so often united in one man's person, it became difficult to distinguish them. Our own word _bard_ or _minstrel_ stood in the same ambiguity. You could not tell in many cases whether the word pointed to the man's poetic or musical faculty. Anticipating that doubt, Hesiod says that they sang as original poets. For it is a remark of Suidas, which he deduces laboriously, that poetry, being uniformly sung in the elder Greece, acquired the name of [Greek: aoidê]. This term became technically appropriated to the poetry, or substance of whatever was sung, in contradistinction to the musical accompaniment. And the poet was called [Greek: aoidos] So far Hesiod twice over secures the dignity of their office from misinterpretation. And there, by the word [Greek: raphantes] he indicates the sort of poetry which they cultivated, viz., that which was expanded into long heroic narratives, and naturally connected itself both internally amongst its own parts, and externally with other poems of the same class. Thus, having separated Homer and himself from the mere musicians, next he separates them even as poets from those who simply composed hymns to the Gods. These heroic legends were known to require much more elaborate study and art. Yet, because a critical reviewer might take occasion to tax his piety in thus composing human legends in neglect of the Gods, Hesiod, forestalling him, replies: 'You're out there, my friend; we were both pious, and we put our piety into hymns addressed to the Gods, which, with cabinetmakers' skill, we used also as interludes of transition from one legend to another.' For it is noticed frequently and especially by a Scholiast on Aristophanes (Pac. 826), that generally speaking the _proæmia_ to the different parts of narrative-poems were entirely detached, [Greek: kai ouden pros to pragma dêlon], and explain nothing at all that concerns the business.