Edward S. Forster, Isocrates Cyprian Orations

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Ἡσιόδου: Hesiod of Ascra in Boeotia is the earliest Greek poet except Homer whose works have come down to us. He probably lived in the second half of the ninth century B.C. His chief poem was the Works and Days, a didactic poem on agriculture which contains a number of pithy sayings and criticisms of life. He also wrote a Theogony, an account of the origin of the world; the Shield of Heracles, an imitation of the Homeric account of the Shield of Achilles is also, probably wrongly, attributed to him.

Θεόγνιδος: Theognis, who flourished in the middle of the sixth century B.C., was a noble of Megara who put into elegiac verse the orthodox doctrines of the Dorian aristocracy, which he desired to instil into the mind of his young friend Cyrnus. About 1,400 lines have come down to us bearing his name; but the text is much confused by additions made when he was used as a standard author in the schools of Athens, where the respectability of his views made his poem a favourite textbook.

Φωκυλίδου: Phocylides of Miletus, who also flourished in the middle of the sixth century B.C., was another elegiac moralist, of whom very few fragments have survived, mainly in the form of elegiac couplets introduced by the words καὶ τόδε Φωκυλίδου. A hexameter poem in 230 verses which has come down to us under his name was probably the work of an Alexandrian Jew of the first century A.D.

γεγενῆσθαι: the force of the perfect is, ‘have proved themselves.’

συνδιατρίβειν ταῖς ἀλλήλων ἀνοίαις, ‘spend their time over one another's follies,’ i.e. in listening to each other's foolish talk. For συνδιατρίβειν see note on E. 76.

ὑποθήκας: see note on § 3.