Note 65 — THE WORKS AND DAYS.
George Chapman translation
The sweat that bathes the brow.] Spenser has imitated this parable in his description of Honour:
In woods, in waves, in wars she wonts to dwell, And will be found with peril and with pain: Ne can the man that moulds in idle cell Unto her happy mansion attain. Before her gate high God did sweat ordain, And wakeful watches ever to abide: But easy is the way and passage plain To Pleasure’s palace: it may soon be spied, And day and night her doors to all stand open wide.
This allegory of Hesiod seems the basis of the apologue of Hercules, Virtue and Vice, which Xenophon in his “Memorabilia,” 2, 21, quotes by memory from Prodicus’s “History of Hercules.”