[Footnote A:  Flaxman’s Illustrations of “Works and Days," Plate I.]

But we dismiss Hesiod, the first of the heathen farm-writers, with a loving thought of his pretty Pandora, whom the goddesses so bedecked, whom Jove looks on (in Flaxman’s picture) with such sharp approval, and whose attributes the poet has compacted into one resonant line, daintily rendered by Cooke,—­

     “Thus the sex began
  A lovely mischief to the soul of man.”

I next beg to pull from his place on the shelf, and to present to the reader, my friend General Xenophon, a most graceful writer, a capital huntsman, an able strategist, an experienced farmer, and, if we may believe Laertius, “handsome beyond expression.”

It is refreshing to find such qualities united in one man at any time, and doubly refreshing to find them in a person so far removed from the charities of today that the malcontents cannot pull his character in pieces.  To be sure, he was guilty of a few acts of pillage in the course of his Persian campaign; but he tells the story of it in his “Anabasis” with a brave front:  his purse was low, and needed replenishment; there is no cover put up, of disorderly sutlers or camp-followers.

The farming reputation of the General rests upon his “Economics” and his horse-treatise ([Greek:  Hippikae]).

Economy has come to have a contorted meaning in our day, as if it were only—­saving.  Its true gist is better expressed by the word management; and in that old-fashioned sense it forms a significant title for Xenophon’s book:  management of the household, management of flocks, of servants, of land, of property in general.

At the very outset we find this bit of practical wisdom, which is put into the mouth of Socrates, who is replying to Critobulus:—­“Those things should be called goods that are beneficial to the master.  Neither can those lands be called goods which by a man’s unskilful management put him to more expense than he receives profit by them; nor may those lands be called goods which do not bring a good farmer such a profit as may give him a good living.”

Thereafter (sec. vii.) he introduces the good Ischomachus, who, it appears, has a thrifty wife at home, and from that source flow in a great many capital hints upon domestic management.  The apartments, the exposure, the cleanliness, the order, are all considered in such an admirably practical, common-sense way as would make the old Greek a good lecturer to the sewing-circles of our time.  And when the wife of the wise Ischomachus, in an unfortunate moment, puts on rouge and cosmetics, the grave husband meets her with this complimentary rebuke:—­“Can there be anything in Nature more complete than yourself?”

“The science of husbandry,” he says, and it might be said of the science in most times, “is extremely profitable to those who understand it; but it brings the greatest trouble and misery upon those farmers who undertake it without knowledge.” (sec. xv.)