Verses 825-830 and 1197-1202 describe his condition while living as a poor man, stripped of his paternal farms, in Megara. The voice of the harvest-bird brings him sorrow, for he knows that other men will reap his fields. How can he pipe or sing, when from the market-place he sees his own land made the prey of revellers? The same sense of the _res angusta domi_ is expressed in the welcome to Clearistus. We gather from another elegy (261-266) that Theognis had lost not only his land, but also a girl to whom he was betrothed. Her parents gave her in marriage to a man less noble and less worthy than himself. Nor do we fail to get some insight into his domestic circumstances. Mr. Frere explains one fragment (271-278), full of Lear's indignation, by conjecturing that Theognis had left a wife and children behind him at Megara during his wanderings, and had returned to find them estranged and thankless. He translates the fragment thus: One single evil, more severe and rude Than age or sickness or decrepitude, Is dealt unequally, for him that rears A thankless offspring; in his latter years, Ungratefully requited for his pains, A parsimonious life and thrifty gains, With toil and care acquired for their behoof; And no return! but insolent reproof; Such as might scare a beggar from the gate, A wretch unknown, poor and importunate! To be reviled, avoided, hated, curst; This is the last of evils, and the worst! The same kind of ingenious conjecture supplies us with a plausible explanation of some obscure couplets (1211-1216), in which it appears that Theognis, having been taunted by a female slave, replied by making most sarcastic remarks on the servile physiognomy, and by boasting that among all his miseries he had remained a free man and a noble-minded gentleman. He often bids his soul be strong and bear bad fortune, like Ulysses when he cried, #tetlathi dê kradiê kai kynteron allo pot' etlês#.[63] Nor does he fail to ease his heart by praying for vengeance, and indulging the hope that he may live to drink the blood of his foes (349), and to divide their property among his friends (562). That he was kindly entertained in the various states he visited, he tells us; and it is thought that he received the citizenship of Hyblæan Megara. Sicily, Euboea, and Sparta (783-788) are specially mentioned by him as his homes in exile. Wherever he went he carried with him fame, and found a welcome. "Yet," says the poet, "no joy of those fair lands entered my soul, so far was anything from seeming dearer than my native land." Among the elegies of general interest attributed to Theognis, none is more beautiful than the following hymn to the goddesses of Song and Beauty, which has been very elegantly rendered into English verse: