Ascra itself, in Hesiod’s peevish opinion, was a miserable village, bad in winter, abominable in summer, good at no time. He could, however, when a boy, tend his sheep on the slopes of Helicon and see the Muses in his dreams. At some time he had a lawsuit with his brother about his inheritance, and became embittered by disappointment. This and the difficulties of his life as a husbandman led him to see the world in the hard colours of uncorrected realism. Only a few enthusiasts pretend to find in his “Works and Days” the beauty of the “Georgics,” in which Virgil was his avowed imitator. The Roman poet combined with a delicate temperament the education of his age, and tried to show to his countrymen, the already weary masters of the world, the victims of an over-luxurious civilization, that in farming lay a potent charm and a remedial grace. But Hesiod lived in the eighth century B. C. and farmed for his living. To us, grown more democratic than the later Greeks and Romans, his chief appeal is that of the “mouthpiece of obscure handworkers in the earliest centuries of Greek history, the poet of their daily labours, sufferings and wrongs, the singer of their doubts and infantine reflections on the world in which they had to toil.” As agricultural life is concerned with certain permanent factors in human experience and is also proverbially conservative, Hesiod’s picture of it is probably true, in its broad outlines, of after centuries and of many another place than Bœotia. Later Greek writers were not attracted by the homely subject, and the “Works and Days” is the sole specimen in Greece of a kind of literature which is practically born out of the soil and out of nature’s varied processes.