Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/54

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HESIOD.

on the farm came on instead. To quote Elton's version:—

"When Atlas-born .the Pleiad stars ariseBefore the sun above the dawning skies,'Tis time to reap; and when they sink belowThe morn-illumined west, 'tis time to sow.Know too, they set, immerged into the sun,While forty days entire their circle run;And with the lapse of the revolving year,When sharpened is the sickle, reappear.Law of the fields, and known to every swainWho turns the laboured soil beside the main;Or who, remote from billowy ocean's gales,Fills the rich glebe of inland-winding vales."—E. 525-536.

With Hesiod, therefore, as with us, ploughing and sowing began, for early crops, in late autumn; and to be even with the world around him, and not dependent on his neighbours, a man must (he tells his ne'er-do-well brother) "strip to plough, strip to sow, and strip to reap,"—advice which Virgil has repeated in his first Georgic. He seems to imply, too, in v. 398, that it is a man's own fault if he does not avail himself of the times and the seasons which the Gods have assigned and ordained, and of which the stars are meant to admonish him. If he neglect to do so, he and his wife and children cannot reasonably complain if friends get tired of repeated applications for relief. But suppose the better course of industrious labour resolved upon. The first thing the farmer has to do is to take a house, and get an unmarried female slave, and an ox to plough with, and then the farming im-

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