About the meaning[187] of the word Thargelia there is happily not the slightest doubt. Athenaeus[188] quotes a statement made by Krates, a writer of about the middle of the 2nd century A.D., in his book on the Attic dialect as follows: ‘The _thargelos_ is the first loaf made after the carrying home of the harvest.’ Now a loaf of bread is _not_ a very primitive affair, but happily Hesychius[189] records an earlier or at least more rudimentary form of nourishment: ‘Thargelos,’ he says, ‘is a pot full of seeds.’ From Athenaeus[190] again we learn that the cake called _thargelos_ was sometimes also called _thalusios_. The Thalusia, the festival of the first-fruits of Demeter, is familiar to us from the lovely picture in the Seventh Idyll of Theocritus[191]. The friends meet Lycidas the goatherd and say to him: ‘The road on which our feet are set it is a harvest way, For to fair-robed Demeter our comrades bring to-day The first-fruits of their harvesting. She on the threshing place Great store of barley grain outpoured, for guerdon of her grace.’ Homer[192] tells how the plague of the Calydonian boar came to waste the land of the Aetolians, because Oineus their king forgot to celebrate the Thalusia, and Eustathius, commenting on the passage, says: ‘The first-fruits are the _thalusia_.’ He adds that some of the rhetoricians call the _thalusia_ ‘feasts of the Harvest-Home.’ It is then abundantly clear that the festival of the Thargelia is in the main a festival of the offering of first-fruits on the occasion of harvest, and the month Thargelion the month of harvest rites. Of one of these harvest rites, the carrying of the _Eiresione_[193], we have unusually full particulars. In the _Knights_ of Aristophanes[194], Cleon and the Sausage-Seller are clamouring at the door of Demos. Demos comes out and asks angrily: ‘Who’s bawling there? do let the door alone, You’ve torn my Eiresione all to bits.’