Thus ends the first part of the _Works and Days_. The second half of the poem consists of rules for husbandry. Hesiod goes through the seasons of the year, detailing the operations of the several months, and adorning his homely subject with sober but graceful poetry. It is an elegant farmer's calendar, upon which Virgil founded his _Georgics_, translating into Augustan Latin the rude phrases of the bard of Ascra, and turning all he touched to gold. Scattered among precepts relating to the proper seasons and successions of agricultural labor are descriptive passages and moral reflections. One picture of winter is so long and elaborate as to justify the notion that it is a separate interpolated poem. The episode upon procrastination (line 408) and the rules for the choice of a wife (line 693) might be selected as offering special topics for comment. The latter passage deserves particular attention; since, if the condition of the working-man was wretched in this early age of Greece, far more miserable, may we argue, was that of his helpmate. A man, according to Hesiod, ought to be about thirty when he marries, and his wife about nineteen. He should be very careful in choosing her, to insure that she will not bring him into contempt among his neighbors; and he must remember that if a good wife be a prize, it is not possible to get a worse plague than a bad one. What his general notion about women was, we gather from the long invective against the female sex in the _Theogony_.[43] Pandora was the greatest curse imaginable to the human race, for from her sprang women; and now, if a man refrains from marriage, he must endure a wretched old age, and leave his money to indifferent kindred; or if he marries and gets a good wife, curses and blessings are mingled in his lot; if his wife be of the bad sort, his whole life is ruined. So utterly impossible is it to avoid the misery devised for the human race by Zeus.