But within the circle of Hellenic country life^[1777] there was a kind of parenthetical existence, a remnant of the old nomadic habits, once common, perhaps, to the whole race,—I mean the pastoral life, of which we obtain so many glimpses through the leafy glades and grassy avenues of Greek poetry. No doubt, the fancy of imaginative men, thirsting for a degree of simplicity and happiness greater than they find around them in cities or villages, is apt to kindle and shed too glorious a light on approaching the tranquil solitudes, the pine forests, the mountain glens, the hidden lakes, the umbrageous streams that leap and frolic down the wild rocks of a country so rife with beauty as Greece. Nevertheless, adhering strictly to truth and reality, there is, in such regions, much about the pastoral life to delight the mind. In the first place, the occupations of an ancient shepherd left him great leisure, and he was generally, by habit no less than by inclination, led to prize that “dolce far niente” which, in all southern climates, constitutes the chief enjoyment of existence.

And indeed all the world over, repose, both of mind and body, is sweet. But not entire repose. Accordingly the Grecian shepherd, whose flocks fed tranquilly, whose condition, assured, and pinched by no necessities, left him at liberty to consult his own tastes in his recreations, took refuge from idleness in music and song.^[1778] At first, and perhaps always, their lays were rude; but nature, their only teacher, infused into them originality and passion, such as we find in the only poet of antiquity, save Homer, in whose verses the fragrance of the woods still breathes. Whether like Paris and Anchises they kept their own flocks or undertook the care for others, they were still on the mountains perfectly free. Their education was peculiar. Abroad much after dark,^[1779] in a climate where the summer nights are soft and balmy beyond expression, and where the stars seem lovingly to crowd closer about the earth, they necessarily grew romantic and superstitious.^[1780] Events occurring early in their own lives or handed down to them by tradition, long meditated on, were in the end invested with supernatural attributes. Under similar circumstances their national religion had probably been first formed. They in the same way, in every canton, created a local religion.^[1781] Their very creed was poetry. Tree, rock, mountain, spring, every thing was instinct with divinity, not mystically, as in certain philosophical systems, but literally; and, as they believed, the immortal race, their invisible companions at all hours, could when they pleased put on visibility, or rather remove from their eyes the film which prevented their habitually beholding them.

It is well known that, in the present day, among the nomadic nations of Asia, the sons of the chiefs still follow their flocks in the wilderness. And this in the heroic ages was likewise the case in Greece,^[1782] where youths of the noblest families watched over their fathers’ sheep and cattle. Thus Bucolion, son of Laomedon, led to pasture the flocks of his sire, and, in the solitudes of the Phrygian mountains, was met and loved by a nymph.^[1783] Two sons also of Priam pursued the same occupation;^[1784] and thus among the Hebrews, David, the son of Jesse, passes his youth in the sheepfold, and his manhood on a throne. In this secluded and solitary life the sights and sounds of nature became familiar to them, the voice of sudden torrents rushing from the mountains,^[1785] the roar of lions springing on their folds, or the sweet moonlight silvering both mountain and valley. It is with the shepherd’s life that Homer connects that noble description of the night which Chapman has thus translated:

The glimpses of pastoral life, albeit too few, are still frequent in Homer, who loves, whenever possible, to illustrate his subject by bringing before our minds the image of a shepherd. Thus Hector, lifting a large rock, is compared to a shepherd bearing a ram’s fleece.^[1788]

Again, the Trojan forces following their leader, Æneas, suggest to his mind the idea of innumerable flocks bounding after a ram to drink.^[1789]

Elsewhere, he describes a troop of hungry wolves attacking the flocks on the mountains:—^[1790]

But, in another place, they are represented contending with a lion by night for the body of one of their flock.^[1791]

Where the number of the flock required the care of several men a chief shepherd ἐπιποιμὴν was appointed to overlook the rest.^[1792] Among the ancients twenty sheep were thought to require the attention of a man and a boy;^[1793] but, in modern times, three men and a boy, with four or five dogs, are sometimes entrusted with a flock of five hundred, of which two-thirds are ewes.^[1794] The proportion of rams to ewes is at present as four to a hundred.

From very remote ages shepherds had learned to avail themselves of the aid of dogs,^[1795] which in farms were usually furnished with wooden collars.^[1796] The breed generally employed in this service, in later ages at least, was the Molossian,^[1797] which, though exceedingly powerful and fierce towards strangers, was by its masters found sufficiently gentle and tractable. The shepherd’s pipe,^[1798] frequently made of the donax, or common river-reed,^[1799] likewise used in thatching cottages, formed a no less necessary accompaniment. Another of their instruments of music was the flute crooked at the top, finely polished and rubbed with bees’ wax.^[1800]

As the Arcadians, descendants of the Pelasgians, derived one of their principal delights from music,^[1801] it is reasonable to infer that the ancestral nation, preëminently pastoral, was likewise addicted to this science. The feeding of herds and flocks constituted the principal occupation of the Proselenoi,^[1802] who were little devoted to agriculture, as may be inferred from their acorn-eating habits; for no nation ever continued to feed on mast after they could obtain bread. A report prevailed in the ancient world that the Arcadians were of a poetical temperament, to which Virgil alludes in the well-known verses—

And as improvisatori they may possibly have excelled, though Greece knew nothing of an Arcadian literature. However, chiefly after the example of Virgil, the poets of modern times have always delighted to convert Arcadia into a kind of pastoral Utopia, which is done by Sannazaro, Tasso, Guarini, Sir Philip Sydney, Daniel, and many others. Palmerius à Grentmesnil^[1803] discovers something like the descendants of the Arcadians among the Irish, whose pastoral taste for music he conceives to be commemorated by the triangular harp in the national insignia.

Their usual clothing consisted of diptheræ, or dressed sheepskins,^[1804] just as at the present day among the Nubian shepherds, whom one may see thus clad, roaming through the sandy hollows of the Lybian desert. On the inside of these skins the traitor Hermion wrote the letters which betrayed the designs of his countrymen to the enemy in Laconia.^[1805] Others wore goatskin cloaks, which they likewise used as a coverlet at night.^[1806] Euripides introduces his chorus of satyrs complaining of this miserable costume.^[1807]

And thus simple was ever their appearance in the East. But, as I have hinted above, their very great leisure,^[1808] the accidents of their occupation, and the grand and regular march of natural phenomena in those countries, often ripened their intellects beyond what the condition of a modern heath-trotter renders credible. Thus, in the mountains of Chaldæa, astronomy and all its parasitical sciences took birth among the shepherd race. From temperament and circumstances, the inhabitants of thinly-peopled tracts, if unvexed by wars, are profoundly meditative. What they behold in serene indistraction gradually rouses their thoughts, and presenting itself again and again, attended always, as the phenomena of the heavens are, by the same accidents, compels them to study.^[1809]

But solitude is less surely the nurse of science than of superstition. The leaven, which in populous cities scarcely swells visibly in the breast, ferments unrestrainedly in the depths of woods, in the high-piled recesses of mountains, in the gloom of caverns, where nature invests itself with attributes which address themselves powerfully to the heart, and appears almost to hold communion with its offspring. Hence the wild mythologies of Nomadic races, which are not loose-hanging creeds, to be put off and on like a cloak, but a belief inwrought into their souls, a part of themselves, and perhaps the best part, since it is from this that springs the whole dignity and poetry of their lives. In all countries fables rise in the fields, to flow into and be lost in the cities. Observe the wild picture which Plato, in his Academic Dream, presents to us of a group of Lydian shepherds. It has all the poetical elements of an Arabian tale.

Tradition, he says, represented Gyges the ancestor of Crœsus as a hired shepherd, who with many others guarded the imperial flocks in the remoter districts of the country. At this time happened a great earthquake, attended by floods of rain, which, in the parts where they were, opened up a vast chasm in the earth. Gyges arriving alone at the mouth of the gap stood amazed at its depth and magnitude, but observing a practicable descent went down, and roamed through its subterraneous passages. Many marvellous things, according to the mythos, did he there see, and among the rest a hollow brazen horse, with doors in its side, through which looking in, he beheld a colossal naked corpse, with a jewelled ring on its hand. Transferring this to his own finger Gyges departed.

Shortly afterwards, still wearing the signet, he went to the assembly of shepherds, which met monthly, for the purpose of selecting a person to bear the usual report of the flocks to the king. Sitting down among the rest he happened to turn the beavil of his ring towards himself, upon which he became invisible to his companions,^[1810] as he clearly discovered from their discourse, which proceeded as if about an absent man. Smitten with much wonder he returned the gem to its former position and again became visible. He made the experiment over and over and always with success; upon which, like another Macbeth, a vast scheme of ambition darkly shadowed itself upon his mind, and a crown tinged slightly with blood swam before him. It does not, however, appear that like the Thane of Cawdor he was perplexed with scruples. He does not say,—

Gyges, with the ruthless resolution of an Oriental, forms his plan at once, and coolly works it out. He procures himself to be elected one of the mission to the king, and on arriving at the capital, dishonours the queen, murders his master, and ascends the throne.^[1811]

This may be regarded as a specimen of the shepherds’ tales.^[1812] But they moved for the most part in an atmosphere of superstition, had ceremonies of their own, a mythology of their own, and of the whole the pervading spirit was love. In communities highly civilised, this passion commonly degenerates into a plaything, despised when weak, and mischievous when strong. It is otherwise in the early stages of society. There, in proportion to their freedom from the aspirations and anxieties of ambition, men seek happiness in the cultivation of the affections. The society of women is to them all in all. And the evils that infest them, disturb their quiet, and engender crime, spring, too, from the same bitter-sweet fountain, which flows with honey or gall according to the temper of those who drink of it. Consequently, in contemplating the pastoral life of Greece, we must beware not to overlook the shepherdesses,^[1813] those heroines of Bucolic poetry, whose freshness and nature still survive in Theocritus, and other fragments of antiquity, and may operate as an antidote to that insipid spawn whose loves and lamentations affect us like ipecacuanha in modern pastorals.

In these latitudes of society, at least, women enjoyed their freedom, and the glimpses presented to us of them as they there existed may be regarded among the chief charms of Greek poetry. Only, for example, observe the picture which Chæremon the Flower Poet, has delineated of a bevy of beautiful virgins sporting by moonlight:

In the ordinary bucolic poets women to be sure are sketched with a rude pencil, though coquettish as queens, of which we have an exemplification in the picture on the shepherd’s cup:^[1815]

There is here no straining after the ideal. Like Titian’s beauties, these shepherdesses are all creatures of this earth, filled with robust health, dark-eyed, warm, impassioned, and somewhat deficient in reserve. They understand well how to act their part in a dialogue. For every bolt shot at them they can return another as keen. Each bower and bosky bourne seems redolent of their smiles; their laughter awakens the echoes; their ruddy lips and pearly teeth hang like a vision over every bubbling spring and love-hiding thicket which they were wont to frequent. Hence the charm of Theocritus. And a still stronger charm perhaps would have belonged to the pages of him who should have painted the shepherd’s life of a remoter age,^[1817] when none were above such an occupation, which therefore united at once all the dignity of lofty independence with the careless freedom of manners and unapprehensive enjoyment in which consists the secret source of all the pleasure which rustic pictures afford. Most of his creations, though not all, are in this respect wanting. Ideas of penury^[1818] slip in, and, in the midst of rich poetry, check the developement of pleasurable feelings. For the musical swains, though apparently ambitious of nought but the reputation of song, permit us to discover, that they are but hirelings tending flocks not their own. The contrast between persons of this class and those who are owners of the sheep they tend, is forcibly pointed out in the sacred language of Christ: “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling and not the shepherd and whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep and fleeth, and the wolf catcheth them and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth because he is a hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd and know my sheep and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me even so know I the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.”^[1819] The same affectionate tenderness is attributed to shepherds in the prophetic writings: “he shall feed his flocks like a shepherd, he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.”^[1820]

In the matter of virtues and vices, the shepherds of antiquity were very much, no doubt, like other men. Their habits were such as grew naturally out of their position. Towards whatever their feelings led them they proceeded vehemently, and with that singleness of purpose which belongs to men of simple and decided character.^[1821] They were too commonly creatures of mere impulse. From the peculiar form of their communion with nature, which, like the masses of Egyptian architecture, was continued and monotonous, they acquired a peculiarity of mental temperament, warm, as it were, in parts, and cold in parts. Every circumstance around them tended to rouse, pique, and inflame the passion of desire and its concomitants; the pairing of their flocks, of the birds, of the very wild beasts whose courage or ferocity they dreaded; their own leisure combined with the excess of health, the influence of climate, the solicitations of opportunity, impelled them into excess; and, accordingly, their morals in this respect sank to a low standard, and rendered them any thing but models of the golden age. The intellect of course was comparatively little cultivated; and there being no other check upon the feelings, suicides, murders of jealousy, and other evidences of ill-regulated passion would often occur.^[1822]

But, in proportion as we pierce further back into antiquity, these tragical incidents become fewer: not merely because our knowledge of those ages is more scanty, but that in ruder times morality is comparatively lax, and men’s taste less fastidious. The rigid laws of marriage were then little observed. Women passed from husband to husband without losing character or caste; and when they produced illegitimate offspring attributed the paternity to some god, and scarcely considered the circumstance a misfortune. Half the princes of the Homeric age were illegitimate; for this is what is always meant by saying they were descended from the gods. Æneas was the son of some young woman whom Anchises met on the mountains, where he pastured his father’s flocks and pretended to have been loved by Aphrodite.^[1823] Persons so circumstanced were, doubtless, capable of much romance. Nymphs and goddesses peopled their imagination, and their imagination let loose its brood upon the woods. Poets afterwards, able to infuse a soul into these rustic traditions, gave a local habitation and a name to every beautiful legend they could collect. Hence that sunny picture, the interview of Aphrodite and Anchises amid the lofty recesses, the grassy slopes, the sparkling leaping brooks, and old umbrageous forests of Mount Ida. Already, however, the force of dress was known, which Montaigne afterwards celebrated; for the Homeric bard, about to record an interview between the goddess and her shepherd-lover, instead of supposing her to have been

describes all the arts of a luxurious toilette.

The picture, however, of pastoral life which he suggests rather than describes, is worked out with strokes of great simplicity. All the other herdsmen disperse in the execution of their several duties, leaving Anchises alone in the cattle-sheds,^[1824] spacious in dimensions, and tastefully erected, where he amuses his solitary leisure with the music of the cithara. While thus engaged he beholds the approach of the goddess,^[1825] and is at once struck with her beauty and the splendour of her raiment. At the unearthly vision his love is kindled; but the poet, skilled in the mysteries of the heart, chastens his passion by overmastering feelings of reverence, such as necessarily belong to unsophisticated youth. Anchises constitutes, indeed, the beau idéal of an heroic shepherd, simple, high-minded, ingenuous, venturous and fearless in contests with man or beast, but in his intercourse with woman gentle, reverent,

In fact, the gallant knights of romance seem rather to have been modelled after the heroic warriors of Greece, than from any realities supplied by the chivalrous ages. The author of the Hymn is careful in describing the shepherd’s couch, to insinuate with how great strength and courage he was endowed. He reclines, we are told, on skins of bears and lions slain by his own hand, though over these there were cast, for show, garments of the softest texture.^[1826]

Throughout this work it has been seen how the influence of climate and position concurred in the formation of the Greek character. We may ourselves put the doctrine to the proof by observing the effect upon our minds of those reflections of landscapes which appear in language; rude Boreal scenes exciting the spirit of contention and energy; while the soft valleys, groves, and odoriferous gardens of the South produce a calm upon our thoughts favourable to the more benevolent emotions. Hellenic shepherds, therefore, no other causes preventing, may upon the whole be supposed to have been humane.

Indeed, the very curious adventures of a sophist,^[1827] in the mountains of Eubœa, preserved among the literary wrecks of antiquity, open up to our view a picture of pastoral life which, in spite of much rudeness and indigence, exhibits the Greek character in its original roughness and simplicity, full of kindness, full of gentleness, full of hospitable propensities, which would do honour to the noblest Arab Sheikh. And the material scene itself, in every feature Grecian, harmonises exactly with the moral landscape.

The eastern shores of the island of Negropont, beetled over by Mount Caphareus,^[1828] and indented by no creeks or harbours, were in antiquity infamous for shipwrecks, notwithstanding that they formed the principal station of the purple fishers.^[1829] Cast away on this coast, the sophist Dion, for his eloquence surnamed of the golden-mouth, fell in with a pastoral hunter who, entertaining him generously, furnished at the same time a complete idea of the rude herdsman, who preserved in the vicinity of the highest civilisation known to the old world the simplicity of the Homeric Abantes.^[1830] Nay, this wild sportsman, pursuing with his huge dogs a stag along the cliffs, powerful in limb, hale in colour, and with long hair streaming over his shoulders, appeared to be the natural descendant of those Heroic warriors.^[1831] Armed with his hunting-knife, he flays and cuts up the stag upon the spot, and taking along with him the skin and choicest pieces of venison abandons the remainder on the beach. As they go along he displays the knowledge wherewith experience stores the rustic mind. He understands the signs of the weather, and from the clouds which cap the summits of Caphareus foretells how long the sea will continue unnavigable.^[1832]

Rude as an American backwoodsman, he was precipitated, by the rare luck of meeting with a stranger, into equal inquisitiveness and garrulity. He put questions without waiting for an answer. He gossipped of his own concerns; explained without being asked the whole economy of his life; and exhibited all that enthusiasm of beneficence which belongs to human nature when uncorrupted by the thirst of gold. There is a rare truth in the description; far too much ever to have graced a sophist’s tale, unless nature had supplied the model.

“There are two of us,” says he, “who inhabit together the same rude nook, having married sisters, by whom we have both sons and daughters. We derive our subsistence principally from the chase, paying but little attention to agriculture, since we have no land of our own. Nor were our fathers better off in this respect than ourselves; for, though freeborn citizens, they were poor, and by their condition constrained to tend the herds of another, a man of great property, owning vast droves of cattle, numerous horses and sheep, several beautiful estates, with many other possessions, and all these mountains as far as you can see. This opulence, however, became his ruin. For the emperor, casting a covetous eye upon his domains, put him to death, that he might have a pretext for seizing on them. Our few beasts went along with our master’s, and the wages due to us there was no one to pay.

“Here, therefore, of necessity we remained^[1833] where two or three huts were left us, with a slight wooden shed in which the calves had been housed in the summer nights.^[1834] For, during winter, we had been used to descend for pasture to the plains where, in the proper season, stores of hay were also laid up; but with the re-appearance of summer we returned again to the mountains. The spot which had formed our principal station now became our fixed dwelling. Branching off on either hand is a deep and shady valley, having in the middle a rivulet so shallow as to be easily traversed, both by cattle and their young. This stream, flowing from a spring hard by, is pure and perennial and cooled by the summer wind blowing perpetually up the ravine. The encircling forests of oak stretch forth their boughs far above, over a carpet of soft verdure, which descends with a gentle slope into the stream, giving birth to a few gad-flies,^[1835] or any other insect hurtful to herds. Extending around are numerous lovely meadows, dotted with lofty trees, where the grass is green and luxuriant throughout the year.”

The eloquence of this description, I mean in the original, is not unworthy to be compared with that in the Phædrus^[1836] which has given eternal bloom to the platane-tree and agnus castus on the banks of the Ilissos.

The conversion of these herdsmen into hunters is narrated by Dion with a patient simplicity worthy of Defoe. An air of solitude, snatched from Robinson Crusoe’s island, seems to breathe at his bidding over Eubœa. The same education operates strange changes both in man and dog; and bringing them into hostile contact with wolves, wild boars, stags, and other large animals, gives the latter a taste for blood, and renders him fierce and destructive. Subsisting by the chase, they pursued it summer and winter, following both hares and fallow-deer by their tracks in the snow. In their intervals of leisure they strengthened and beautified their dwellings, saw their children intermarry and grow up to succeed them, without even once approaching any city or even village.

The style of hospitality prevalent among such men in antiquity differs very little from that which one would now find in the hut of a good-natured Albanian.^[1837] Their industry rendered them independent, and their independence rendered them generous. By degrees their rustic cottages were surrounded by a garden and fruit-trees, their court was walled in, and luxuriant vines hung their foliage and purple fruit over windows and porch. On the arrival of a stranger, the wife takes her station at table beside her husband. Their marriageable daughter, in the bloom and beauty of youth, aids her brothers in waiting at table, where host and guest recline on highly raised divans of leaves covered with the skins of beasts. The young maiden, like a rustic Hebe, pours out the wine, dark and fragrant, while the youths served up the dishes and then laid out a table for themselves and dined together. And the sophist, versed in the courts of satraps and kings, conceived these rude hunters of the mountains the happiest and most enviable of mankind.

But a pastoral picture is incomplete without love. The youthful beauty of Caphareus, hidden, like another Nouronihar^[1838] from the world, is accordingly beloved by her cousin, an adventurous hunter like her sire, who joins the family circle in the evening, accompanied by his father, bringing in his hand a hare as a present to his mistress. The old man salutes the guest, the youth offers his present with a kiss, and immediately undertakes the office of the girl, who thereupon resumes her place beside her mother.

Observing this arrangement, the stranger inquires whether she is not soon to be married to some wealthy peasant, who might benefit the family, upon which the youth and maiden blush, and her father replies,

“Nay, but she will take a husband, humble in rank, and like ourselves a hunter,” glancing at the same time at the lover.

“How is it then that you wait?” inquired the stranger. “Do you expect him from the village?”

“No,” answered the father, “he is not far off; and so soon as we can fix upon a fortunate day the nuptials will be celebrated.”

“And by what do you judge of a fortunate day?”

“The moon must be approaching the full, the weather fair, and the atmosphere transparent.”

“And is the youth in reality an able hunter?”

“I am,” said the young man, answering for himself, “in the chase of the stag or boar, as you yourself, if you please, shall judge to-morrow.”to-morrow.”

“And did you take this hare, my friend?”

“I did,” replied he with a smile, “having set a gin for him by night;^[1839] the weather being surpassing beautiful, and the moon larger than it ever was before.”

Upon this both the old men laughed, and the lover abashed held his peace.

“But,” observed the father of the maiden, “it is no fault of mine that the solemnity is deferred; we only wait at your father’s desire, till a victim can be purchased; for a sacrifice must be offered to the gods.”

“With respect to the victim,” interposed the maiden’s younger brother, “he has long provided one, and a noble one too, which is now feeding behind the cottage.”

“And is it truly so?” demanded the old man.

“It is,” replied the lad.

“And where,” addressing the youth, “did you procure it?” inquired they.

“When we took the wild sow,^[1840] which was followed by her litter,” answered he, “and the greater number, swifter than hares, made their escape; I hit one with a stone, and my companions coming up threw a skin over him. This I secured, and exchanged in the village for a young domestic pig which has been fatted in a sty behind the house.”

“I now understand,” exclaimed the father, “the cause of your mother’s mirth when I would wonder what that grunting could be, and how the barley was disappearing so fast.”

“Nevertheless,” observed the young man, “to be properly fatted our Eubœan swine require acorns.^[1841] However, if you will just step this way I will show her to you.”

Upon which off they went, the boys quite at a run, and in vast glee.

In the meantime, the maiden going into the other cottage, brought forth a quantity of split service-berries,^[1842] medlars,^[1843] and winter apples, and bunches of superb grapes, bursting ripe,^[1844] and, brushing down the table, she spread them out there upon a layer of clean fern. Next moment the lads returned bringing in the pig, with much joking and shouts of laughter. Then came, too, the young man’s mother, with two of his little brothers, and they brought along with them nice white loaves, with boiled eggs in wooden salvers, with a quantity of parched peas. Having embraced her brother, with his wife and daughter, she sat down beside her husband, and said,

“Behold the victim, which my son has long fed for his marriage, and the other things also are ready; both the barley-meal and the flour. A little wine, perhaps, may be wanting, but even this we can easily procure from the village.”

And her son standing near her, fixed his eyes wistfully upon his father-in-law.

The latter smilingly observed,—

“All delay now is on the lover’s part, who, perhaps, is anxious to fatten his pig.”

“As to her,” said the youth, “she is bursting with fat.”

Upon this the sophist, willing to aid the lover, interposed, and remarked,—

“But you must take care lest while the pig is fattening he himself grow thin.”

“The stranger’s remark is just,” said his mother; “for already he is more meagre than he used to be; and I have of late observed him to be wakeful at night, and to go forth from the cottage.”

“Oh! that,” said he, “was when the dogs barked, and I stepped out to see what was the matter.”

“Not you!” said his mother,—“but went moping about. Let us, therefore,” continued she, “put him to no further trial.”

And throwing her arms about her sister, the maiden’s mother, she kissed her; whereupon the latter, addressing her husband, said,—

“Let us grant them their desire.”

To which he agreed; and it was resolved, that the marriage should be solemnized in three days, the stranger being invited to remain and witness it, which he did.

The above picture of an obscure herdsman’s life in its naked simplicity, void of all embellishment, will probably be thought more trustworthy than the elaborate descriptions of the poets, notwithstanding that, even in these, it is easy to separate the real from the fictitious.

In the estimation of the Greeks the herdsman^[1845] commonly ranked before the shepherd, and the latter before the goatherd,—for the dream of rank pursues mankind even amid the quiet of the fields,—and their manners are supposed to have corresponded. Pollux,^[1846] however, reckons the goatherd next after the herdsman, and again inverts the order. Varro, on the other hand, gives precedence to the shepherd as the most ancient, the sheep, in his opinion, having been the animal earliest tamed.

In point of utility the goat, in some parts of the ancient world, rivalled the sheep, producing fine hair which was shorn like wool.^[1847] I may remark, too, in passing, that the large-tailed sheep still common in Asia Minor, as well as at the Cape, were anciently plentiful in Syria, where, according to the great naturalist,^[1848] their tails attained a cubit in breadth. In some parts of Arabia another more curious breed was found, with tails three cubits in length, to carry which they were supplied by the ingenuity of the shepherds with wooden carriages.^[1849]

In most parts of Greece, as well as in the East, it was customary to bring home the sheep from pasture towards evening, and shut them up for the night in warm and roomy cotes, which were surrounded by wattled fences,^[1850] strong and high, both to prevent them from leaping over, and to exclude the wild beasts which, in remoter ages, abounded in the mountains. They were carefully roofed over, and every other precaution was taken to render them perfectly dry, the floor being usually pitched with stones, and slightly inclined. Their bedding^[1851] consisted of calaminth and asphodel and pennyroyal and polion (a sort of herb whose leaves appear white in the morning, of a purple colour at noon, and blue when the sun sets^[1852]) and fleabane and southernwood and origany,^[1853] all which repel vermin. The more completely to effect the same purpose, they were, likewise, in the habit of fumigating the cotes from time to time, by burning in them several locks of some shepherdess’s hair,^[1854] together with gum ammoniac, hartshorn, the hoofs or hair of goats, bitumen, cassia, fleabane, or calaminth, for the smell of which serpents were thought to have a peculiar aversion.^[1855] Their ordinary food, while in the folds, consisted of green clover and cytisus, fenugreek, oaten and barley straw, and vegetable stalks,^[1856] which were supposed to be improved if sprinkled on the threshing-floor with brine, figs blown down by the wind, and dry leaves.

In the short and sharp days of winter,^[1857] they were not led forth to pasture till both the dew and the hoar frost had disappeared; but in summer the shepherds were careful to be a-field with the dawn while the dew was still heavy on the grass. In Attica^[1858] and the environs of Miletus, where was produced the finest and costliest wool in the ancient world, the sheep^[1859] were protected from rain and dust and brambles and whatever else could damage their fleeces^[1860] by housings of purple leather.^[1861] The same practice prevailed also in the Megaris, where Diogenes beholding a flock of sheep^[1862] thus clad, while the children, like those of the Egyptian peasants were suffered to run about naked, said, “It is better to be a Megarean’s ram than his son.” Ælian^[1863] alludes to this saying for the purpose of noticing the ignorance and want of education prevalent among the Megareans. We find likewise in Plutarch^[1864] another version of the anecdote taxing these Dorians with avarice and meanness. Augustus imitated the saying of Diogenes and applied it to Herod, hearing of whose cruelty to his family, he said, “It were better to be Herod’s hog than his son.”^[1865] But if the Megareans lived poorly they built grandly: so that of them it was said, that they ate as if they were to die to-morrow, and built as if they were to live for ever.^[1866]

Sheep, as most persons familiar with the country will probably have observed, are wont in hot summer days to retire during the prevalence of the sun’s greatest heat beneath the shade of spreading trees,^[1867] at which time a green sweep of uplands dotted with antique oaks or beeches,^[1868] each with its stem encircled by some portion of the flock reposing upon their own fleeces, presents a picture of singular beauty and tranquillity. The picturesque features of the scene were in old times enhanced by the addition of several accompaniments now nowhere to be found, consisting of statues, altars, or chapels, erected in honour of the rural gods or nymphs.^[1869] Fountains, moreover, of limpid water^[1870] in many places gushed forth from beneath the trees, where there were usually a number of seats for the accommodation of the shepherds and shepherdesses. In these retreats they generally passed the sultry hours of the day, playing on the pastoral flute or the syrinx, chanting their wild lays, or amusing each other by the relation of those strange legends which inhabited the woods and lonely mountains of Greece.^[1871] There prevailed among them a superstition against disturbing by their music or otherwise that hushed stillness which most persons must have observed to characterise the summer noon. At this hour of the day the God Pan,^[1872] in the opinion of Greek shepherds, took his rest after the toils of the chase, reclining under a tree in the solitary forest;^[1873] and, as he was held to be of a hasty choleric disposition, they abstained at that time from piping through fear of provoking his anger. The other Gods likewise were believed to enjoy a short sleep at this time, as we find in the case of the nymph Aura, in the Dionysiacs.^[1874]

From a passage in St. John’s gospel it would appear, that the practice prevailed among the Oriental shepherds of distinguishing the several members of their flocks by separate names: “The sheep hear his voice, and he calleth his own sheep by name and leadeth them out. And when he putteth forth his own sheep he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.” We likewise find traces of the same custom in Sicily, Crete, and various other parts of Greece, where goats, and heifers, and sheep, enjoyed the privilege of a name, as Cynœtha, Amalthea, and others. In later times it was judged preferable, that the flock should follow their shepherds by the eye, for which reason they were accustomed to stuff their ears with wool.^[1875] To prevent rams from butting, they used to bore a hole^[1876] through their horns near the roots. Sheep were generally shorn^[1877] during the month of May, and after the wool had been clipped, they were commonly anointed with wine, oil, and the juice of bitter lupins.^[1878] In remoter ages the practice prevailed of plucking off the wool instead of shearing it; and this barbarous method, at once so painful to the sheep and so laborious to the shepherd, had not been entirely abandoned in the age of Pliny.^[1879] It was a rule among the pastoral tribes, that the number of their flocks should be uneven.^[1880] The shepherds of Greece bestowed the name of Sekitai,^[1881] (from σηκος an enclosure) upon lambs taken early from the ewes, and fed by hand. They were usually kept in a cote apart from the other sheep.

As flocks, in most parts of Greece, were exposed to the rapacity of the wolf,^[1882] the shepherds had recourse to an extraordinary contrivance, to destroy this fierce animal; kindling large charcoal fires in open spaces in the woods, they cast thereon the powder of certain diminutive fish, caught in great numbers along the grassy shores of Greece, together with small slices of lamb and kid. Attracted by the savour which they could snuff from a distance, the wolves flocked in great numbers towards the fires, round which they prowled with loud howlings, in expectation of sharing the prey, the odour of which had drawn them thither. Stupified at length by the fumes of the charcoal, they would drop upon the earth in a lethargic sleep, when the shepherds coming up knocked them on the head.^[1883]