Here is an interesting point telling us of the state of knowledge, at that time; crops are sown, tended and harvested by the wheel of the stars. Slaves (Work and Days) cut corn at the rising of the Pleiades (May) and plow when the Pleiades set (November). This means plowing and sowing for early crops began in Autumn, and it is in this connection that Hesiod reminds us (as did Virgil, 1,080 years later) that the plowman who hopes to thrive "must strip to plow, strip to sow, and strip to reap.

On his rocky farm Hesiod starts pruning vines by the time of the rising of Arcturus after the winter solstice (middle of February), and quits when he sees the fat snails leave the ground and tediously climb the trees to shelter themselves from the influence of the Pleiades. He explains how he dries the grapes in the sun for ten days; then to prevent fermentation, dries them in the shade for five more; and finally he tells of treading the wine-press. What he says of curing grapes, is the method still in use to this day.

As the labor is hard, we are told it is good policy to give the laborer (slave) double rations ("the foursquared loaf in double portions fed"). And a plowman 40 years old is to be preferred to a stripling, for the young fellow is careless and may throw seeds twice in one furrow ("while wistful stray his longing thoughts to comrades far away").

Hesiod has a horror of debt. He urges you not to go a-borrowing. Instead

Work up thyself a wagon of thine own,

For to the foolish borrower is not known

That each wain asks a hundred joints of wood:

These things ask forecast, and thou shouldst make good

At home, before thy need so instant stood.

It is in Hesiod that the story (already old in his remote time), is told in picturesque lines: The fable of the Golden Age on which Plato, the Latin poets, Rousseau and others subsequently tried to work out an authorization of a modern political Social Contract. In Hesiod's report we are introduced to a very extraordinary world indeed. Here is no worry about food or

clothing and after our ancestors spend many years in ease and happiness, death is represented as coming without the sad accompaniment of disease; men live to patriarchal age, never wear out, and in the end fall into a light and dreamless sleep, translated to a higher sphere without suffering or unrest. Or, as Hesiod reminds us:

When gods alike and mortals rose to birth
A golden race the immortals formed on earth
Of many-languaged men: they lived of old
When Saturn reigned, in heaven, an Age of Gold.
Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind
Free from the toils and anguish of our kind.
Nor e'er decrepit age misshaped their frame.
The hand's the foot's proportion still the same.
Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by:
Wealthy in flocks; dear to the blessed on high:
Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die.
Theirs was each good; the life-sustaining soil
Yielded its copious fruits, unbribed by toil.
They with abundant goods midst quiet lands
All willing shared the gathering of their hands.

This idea was afterwards used by Latin poets, somewhat in this strain:

Strangers to ill they nature's banquets proved
Rich in earth's fruits and of the blest beloved,
They sank in death, as opiate slumber stole,
Soft o'er the sense and whelmed the willing soul.
Theirs was each good-the green-exuberant soil
Poured its full harvest, uncompelled by toil:
The virtuous many dwelt in common blest

And all, unenvying, shared what all in peace possessed.

Hesiod's instructions for making a wain, a plow, and other farm tools were copied by Virgil. "The time to cut," says Hesiod, "is when in the Autumn the dog-star Sirius gets more night and less day." Timber cut in cool weather will not soon be worm-eaten. The poet gives minute directions for an axle-tree, and adds that while the timber should be seven feet long, it is just as well to cut a stick eight, the piece left over being formed into a mallet-head for driving stakes. Hesiod speaks also of making a plow in one or of two ways, either forked-bow, or plow of three pieces put together with

nails. The soundest poles are elm, share-beams, oak, plow-tails, ilex-wood (a suggestion repeated by Virgil). Hesiod recommends a plow-team of nine-year oxen: "For being past the mischievous age they are not likely to break the pole and leave the plowing in the middle." The poet advises that on the whole it is better to have two plows, for in case of accident to one, no time will be lost.

Virgil, frankly following Hesiod, tells a similar tale, though with more poetic art. The identical theme (Georgics) repeats the idea of fruits grown without labor, on communal lands:

The world was common, and the willing land
More frankly gave, with no one to demand.

In the description of making the plow, Virgil copies Hesiod accurately, even slavishly. Nor does Virgil fail to include the sharp-toothed Iberian dogs that guard the sheep. He catches other little hints, including the episode of bird-scarer (slave) who in time of plowing follows to break the clods and to frighten away birds that hover near to eat newly-scattered grains in the furrow.

*

On the whole the best part of Hesiod has to do with his wise sayings and homely saws: He is a sort of whetstone, not too coarse, rather fine instead, on which other men sharpen their wits. In Hesiod not only does the potter turn his wheel, the beggars throng, the shepherd watch the flocks, the smith pound the anvil, but also the bard sings of happy days. The panorama of Greek rural life is found in Hesiod's poems; for example in “Work and Days," he tells of the idle fellow, and adds this:

Famine evermore

Is the natural consort of the idle boor.

Hesiod urges thrift, economy, discipline, and avows that little added to little in time makes for independence, if not indeed for a great possession.

There is a faded color to Hesiod's ancient homely tapestry, but here and there tiny golden threads gleam as on the first day, 3,000 years ago when (disputed by some

authorities) Hesiod, contemporary of the blind Homer,
walked this earth and made verses about the plow,
fruits, trees, husbandry, sister, summer nights, and
mowed and reaped by the Pleiades and by Sirius the dog-
star. As for reward, he tossed it lightly aside.

Learning and wealth the wise and wealthy find
Inadequate to satisfy the mind

A craving eagerness remains behind:

Some thing is left for which we cannot rest

And at the last some thing is always missed

Some thing unknown, some thing still unpossessed.

As for the end:

Envy not these sumptuous obsequies,
The stately car the purple canopies;
Much better pleased am I, remaining here,
With cheaper equipage and better cheer.
A couch of thorns or an embroidered bed,
Are matters of indifference to the dead.

And without bitterness he adds:

Fame is a jest; favor sought and sold;
No power on earth is like the power of gold.

To open our discussion of the Greek contribution to the cause of the Common Man by telling about Hesiod, poet of the working classes, seems important to the present writer. Hesiod, "labor's first friend," has stored up all manner of homely wisdom, throwing light on primitive times. Homer (his contemporary?) was myth-maker on a larger scale, but on the contrary Hesiod who was day-laborer first and poet next, did not deal especially in myths but instead emphasized the homespun prose of Greek rural life. On his famous fable of the Golden Age, of which we have already spoken in the opening pages of this book, we shall dwell in the future in connection with agitations preceding the French Revolution; then, 18th Century skeptics endeavored to determine once and for all just what is meant by the term "Natural rights," as applied to politics and society.

CHAPTER XI

PARADOXES OF GREEK CHARACTER

Intense individualism of Greek racial
traits; puzzling oppositions of Greek char-
acter and ambitions; pig-dealers and phil-
osophers, side by side.

When modern writers speak of Greece, the obvious geographical reference is to the southeastern part of Europe, or Greece proper; but in Ancient days the entire west coast of Asia Minor was also known as Greece and was inhabited by Greeks. For that matter, Greeks never called themselves Greeks, instead were Hellenes; and wherever Greeks lived, whether in Asia, Africa or in Europe, that district was named Hellenes; identical with what we today regard as the Mother Country, or Greece proper.

This brings us sharply to the main point: that Greece was not one but many states, and each settlement of Hellenes, either at home or abroad, had independent local government, even though the nearest neighbors were also called Hellenes.

Now while this adventurous people were always shifting and fighting, yet Greek brawls with kinsmen exceeded in brutality any other type of Greek social hatred. As a racial characteristic, not only did Greeks have high tempers, but joined with this was an ardent passion for political intrigue, as a means to power; till it is not too much to say that the instinct for unrestrained individualism inevitably led to racial as well as national discord at times degenerating into violence. Thus Greece remained to the end (148 B. C. Roman conquest) a picturesque region of petty tribes each city, town, hill-top or valley intent on paltry localism, regardless of kith or kin. The little local kings were also sacrifice-men or high priests; and one of the first steps toward widening Greek ideas of "the State," has to do with brawls associated with at