Their shining heads what time unto the stone
You lay your sickle's edge--

and that is your time for harvesting. But you must work hard; for the
law of the plains, of the seaboard, and of the upland dales is the
same:

You who Demeter's gifts will win good cheap
Strip you to plow and sow, and strip to reap--

and if you in particular, Perses, will do that, perhaps you won't need
to go begging at other men's houses as you have begged at Hesiod's.
But he gives you warning that you will get no more out of him--than
advice.

The Pleiades, however, don't set till November, and before that there
is October to be considered, the season of the rains. Get you into
the woods in October and cut for your needs. And what might these
be? Well, a mortar to pound your grain in, and a pestle to pound it
withal; an axle for your wain, a beetle to break the clods. Then, for
your plows, look out for a plow-tree of holm-oak: that is the best
wood for them. Make two plows in case of accident, one all of a piece
([Greek: autogyon]), one jointed and dowelled. The pole should be
of laurel or elm; the share must be oak. The [Greek: gues] is the
plow-tree, and it is not always easy to find one ready-made--but get
one if you can.

Two oxen then, each one a nine year bull,
Whose strength is not yet spent, the best to pull,
Which will not fight i' the furrow, break the plow
And leave your work undone. To drive them now
Get a smart man of forty, fed to rights
With a four-quartered loaf of eight full bites:
That's one to work, and drive the furrow plim,
Too old to gape at mates, or mates at him.

That precise loaf, with just that much bitage, is the staple in
Boeotia to-day; but the [Greek: aizeos] 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, aft