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Page 26
That precise loaf, with just that much bitage, is the staple in
Boeotia to-day; but the [Greek: aiz�os] of forty will not so readily
be found. Elsewhere in his poem Hesiod recommends something more in
accord with modern practice:
Your house, your ox, your woman you must have;
For she must drive the plow--not wife but slave.
The terms are synonymous in Greece to-day.
Plowing time is when you hear the crane in the clouds overhead. Be
beforehand with your cattle.
When year by year high in the clouds the crane
Calls in the plow-time and the month of rain,
Take care to feed your oxen in the byre;
For easy 'tis to beg, but hard to hire.
That is in Tusser's vein, and no doubt comes naturally to rustic
aphorists. A man may plow in the spring, too; and if Zeus should
happen to send rain on the third day, after the cuckoo's first call,
"As much as hides an ox-hoof, and no more," he may do as well as the
autumn-tiller. In any case don't forget your prayers when you begin
plowing:
You who in hand first the plow-handles feel,
Or on the ox's flank lay the first weal,
Pray Chthonian Zeus and chaste Demeter bless
The grain you sow with heart and heaviness.
Now for your vines. First, for the pruning, note this:
When, from the solstice sixty days being fled,
Arcturus leaves the holy Ocean's bed
And, shining, burns the twilight; when that shrill
Child of Pandion opens first her bill--
Before she twitters, prune your vines! 'Tis best.
No reasons at all: simply "[Greek: �s gar ameinon]." That is like
Homer. The stars continue their signals. Vintage time is when Orion
and Sirius are come to mid-heaven, and rosy-fingered Dawn sees
Arcturus. Then--
Cut your grape clusters off and bring to hive;
Show ten days to the sun, ten nights; for five
Cover them up; the sixth day draw all off--
That is the way of it, Perses, and much profit to you in my learning,
you scamp.
Scattered up and down these frosty but kindly old pages are scraps of
wisdom on all kinds of subjects--for life is Hesiod's theme as well
as agriculture. He will tell you under what star to go to sea, if
sail you must; but better not seafare at all. However, if you will go,
choose fifty days after the summer solstice. That is the right time,
the only pretty swim-time. If you must venture out in the spring, let
it be when you see leaves on the fig-tree top as large as the print of
a crow's foot--but even so the thing is desperate.
For me, I praise it not, nor like at all--
'Tis a snatcht thing--mischief is bound to fall.
Then there's marriage, certainly the greatest venture of all. Don't
think of it until you are rising thirty, anyhow. And as for _her_:
Let her be four years woman, and no more;
In her fifth year take her, and shut the door
Till she is yours, enured to your good laws.
Take her from near at hand and give no cause
That neighbours find your wedding stuff for mirth:
Than a good wife no better thing on earth;
Than a bad one, what worse? Pot of desire,
That roasts her husband up without a fire!
That would make her sixteen or thereabouts. Poor child! But neither
Homer, nor Hesiod, nor any Greek I ever read had any mercy on women.
Hesiod in more than one page lets you know what he thinks about them.
It comes hardly from one who in the _Eoioe_(if those apostrophes are
his) was to hymn the great women of history and myth; but there, I
think, spoke the courtier Hesiod, and not the husbandman.
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