maxim deeply involved in
language:

When 'tis a god's high feast let not your knife
Cut off the withered from the quick with life,
Upon the five-brancht stock--

or, in other words, never cut your finger-nails on a holy day.

Hesiod, by birth an AEolian, was by settlement a Boeotian. He lived and
farmed his own land on the slopes of Helikon, under the governance of
the lords of Thespiae, whoever they were. I have been to Thespiae, and
certify that there are no lords there now. I saw little but fleas and
dogs of incredible savagery, where once were the precinct and shrine
of Eros with a famous statue of the god by Praxiteles. It is not far
from the Valley of the Muses, where or whereabouts those fair ladies
met with Hesiod, and, as we are told in the Theogony, plucked him a
rod of olive, a thing of wonder,

And breath'd in me a voice divine and clear
To sing the things that shall be, are, and were.

Also they told him to sing of the blessed gods,

But ever of themselves both first and last,

and he obeyed them. When he won a tripod at Chalkis, in a singing
contest, he dedicated it to his patronesses,

There where they first instilled clear song in me.

So he was a grateful poet, which is very unusual.

In _Works and Days_ he sang of what he knew best, the country round,
and sang it as a poet should who was also a shrewd farmer and thrifty
husbandman. It is full of the love of earth and of the ways of them
who lie closest in her bosom; but it is full of the wisdom, too,
which such men win from their mother, and are not at all unwilling to
impart. There is a good deal of Polonius in Hesiod, who addresses his
_Works and Days_ to his brother Perses, a bad lot. Perses in fact had
diddled him out of his patrimony, or part of it, by bribing the
judges at Thespiae; and the poet, who doesn't mince matters, loses
no opportunity of telling him what he thinks of him. Indeed, one of
Hesiod's reasons for instructing him in good farming was that thereby
he might perhaps prevent him from spunging on his relations. So
the injured bard got a sad, exalted pleasure out of his griefs, and
something back, too, in his quiet way.

After a glance at the golden and other past ages he gets to work with
a charming passage:

Whenas the Pleiads, Atlas' daughters, rise
Begin your harvest; when they hide their eyes,
Then plow. For forty nights and forty days
They are shrouded; then, as the year rounds, they raise