Note 40 — Chapter II · ISLANDS OF THE BLEST TRANSLATION

Light and dark, i.e. good and bad, δαίμονες are acc. to Roth, Myth. v. d. Weltaltern (1860), pp. 16–17, distinguished in Hesiod’s daimones of the golden and silver age. Such a distinction, however, never appears in Hesiod; and it is hardly credible that the gods and spirits of ancient Greek popular belief (which never really admitted the categories good and bad) should in this primitive period have been actually classified in accordance with such categories. At any rate, Greek readers never found anything of the kind expressed in Hesiod: the conception of bad daimones is regularly supported by reference to the philosophers alone (e.g. Plut., D.O., 17, p. 419 A), and the conception is certainly no older than the earliest philosophic speculation.