Close by the field is the threshing floor.  More laborers—­not a few bustling country lasses among them—­are spreading out the sheaves with wooden forks, a little at a time, in thin layers over this circular space, which is paved with little cobblestones.  More oxen and a patient mule are being driven over it—­around and around—­until every kernel is trodden out by their hoofs.  Later will come the tossing and the winnowing; and, when the grain has been thoroughly cleaned, it will be stored in great earthen jars for the purpose of sale or against the winter.

176.  Grinding at the Mill.—­Nearer the farmhouses there rises a dull grinding noise.  It is the mill preparing the flour for the daily baking, for seldom—­at least in the country—­will a Greek grind flour long in advance of the time of use.  There the round upper millstone is being revolved upon an iron pivot against its lower mate and turned by a long wooden handle.  Two nearly naked slave boys are turning this wearily—­far pleasanter they consider the work of the harvesters, and very likely this task is set them as a punishment.  As the mill revolves a slave girl pours the grain into a hole in the center of the upper millstone.  As the hot, slow work goes on, the two toilers chant together a snatch from an old mill song, and we catch the monotonous strain:—­

Grind, mill, grind,
For Pittacus did grind—­
Who was king over great Mytilene.

It will be a long time before there is enough flour for the day.  The slaves can at least rejoice that they live on a large farm.  If Hybrias owned a smaller estate, they would probably be pounding up the grain with mortar and pestle—­more weary yet.

177.  The Olive Orchards.—­We, at least, can leave them to their work, and escape to the shade of the orchards and the vineyards.  Like every Athenian farmer, Hybrias has an olive orchard.  The olives are sturdy trees.  They will grow in any tolerable soil and thrive upon the mountain slopes up to as far as 1800 feet above sea level.  They are not large trees, and their trunks are often grotesquely gnarled, but there is always a certain fascination about the wonderful shimmer of their leaves, which flash from gray to silver-white in a sunny wind.  Hybrias has wisely planted his olives at wide intervals, and in the space between the ground has been plowed up for grain.  Olives need little care.  Their harvest comes late in the autumn, after all the other crops are out of the way.  They are among the most profitable products of the farm, and the owner will not mind the poor wheat harvest “if only the olives do well."[*]

[*]The great drawback to olive culture was the great length of time required to mature the trees—­sixteen years.  The destruction of the trees, e.g. in war by a ravaging invader, was an infinitely greater calamity than the burning of the standing grain or even of the farmhouses.  Probably it was the ruin of their olive trees which the Athenians mourned most during the ravaging of Attica in the Peloponnesian War.