Hesiod is currently reckoned one of the oldest farm-writers; but there is not enough in his homely poem ("Works and Days”) out of which to conjure a farm-system.  He gives good advice, indeed, about the weather, about ploughing when the ground is not too wet, about the proper timber to put to a plough-beam, about building a house, and taking a bride.  But, on the other hand, he gives very bad advice, where, as in Book II., (line 244,) he recommends to stint the oxen in winter, and (line 285) to put three parts of water to the Biblian wine.

Mr. Gladstone notes the fact that Homer talks only in a grandiose way of rural life and employments, as if there were no small landholders in his day; but Hesiod, who must have lived within a century of Homer, with his modest homeliness, does not confirm this view.  He tells us a farmer should keep two ploughs, and be cautious how he lends either of them.  His household stipulations, too, are most moderate, whether on the score of the bride, the maid, or the “forty-year-old” ploughman; and for guardianship of the premises the proprietor is recommended to keep “a sharp-toothed cur.”

This reminds us how Ulysses, on his return from voyaging, found seated round his good bailiff Eumaeus four savage watch-dogs, who straightway (and here Homer must have nodded) attack their old master, and are driven off only by a good pelting of stones.

This Eumaeus, by the way, may be regarded as the Homeric representative farmer, as well as bailiff and swineherd,—­the great original of Gurth, who might have prepared a supper for Cedric the Saxon very much as Eumaeus extemporized one upon his Greek farm for Ulysses.  Pope shall tell of this bit of cookery in rhyme that has a ring of the Rappahannock:—­

  “His vest succinct then girding round his waist,
  Forth rushed the swain with hospitable haste,
  Straight to the lodgements of his herd he run,
  Where the fat porkers slept beneath the sun;
  Of two his cutlass launched the spouting blood;
  These quartered, singed, and fixed on forks of wood,
  All hasty on the hissing coals he threw;
  And, smoking, back the tasteful viands drew,
  Broachers, and all.”

This is roast pig:  nothing more elegant or digestible.  For the credit of Greek farmers, I am sorry that Eumaeus has nothing better to offer his landlord,—­the most abominable dish, Charles Lamb and his pleasant fable to the contrary notwithstanding, that was ever set before a Christian.

To return to Hesiod, we suspect that he was only a small farmer—­if he had ever farmed at all—­in the foggy latitude of Boeotia, and knew nothing of the sunny wealth in the south of the peninsula, or of such princely estates as Eumaeus managed in the Ionian seas.  Flaxman has certainly not given him the look of a large proprietor in his outlines:  his toilet is severely scant, and the old gentleman appears to have lost two of his fingers in a chaff-cutter.  As for Perses, who is represented as listening to the sage,[A] his dress is in the extreme of classic scantiness,—­being, in fact, a mere night-shirt, and a tight fit at that.