Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/130

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116
HESIOD.

all their counterparts in the directions for making this implement given by Hesiod;—and the learned author of 'Lectures on Roman Husbandry' considers that both the Bœotian and the Roman plough may be identified with the little improved Herault plough, still in use in the south of France.[1] The storm-piece of the earlier poet, again, is obviously present to the mind of the graphic improver of it in the Augustan age; though, in place of one point, the latter makes at least half-a-dozen, and works up out of his predecessor's hints a masterpiece of elaborate description. It need scarcely be remarked, for it must strike every reader of these poets, whether at first hand or second, that Virgil constructs his "natural calendar" upon the very model of Hesiod's. He catches the little hints of his model with reference to the bird-scarer who is to follow the plough-track; about the necessity of stripping to plough or sow; about timing ploughing and seed-time by the setting of the Pleiads; and about divers other matters of the same rural importance. To quit the first book of the Georgics, we see Hesiod's influence occasionally exerting itself in the third; for, à propos of the sharp-toothed dog which Hesiod prescribes in his 'Works and Days' (604, &c.), and would have the farmer feed well, as a protection from the night-prowling thief, we find a parallel in Virgil:[2]

"Nor last, nor least, the dogs must have their place!

With fattening whey support that honest race:
Swift Spartan whelps, Molossian mastiffs bold:—
With these patrolling, fear not for the fold,

  1. Rom. Husb., 100-102.
  2. Georg. iii. 403-408.