men.(285) A further detail is added by Augustine. He says that Isis made the discovery of barley at the moment when she was sacrificing to the common ancestors of her husband and herself, all of whom had been kings, and that she showed the newly discovered ears of barley to Osiris and his councillor Thoth or Mercury, as Roman writers called him. That is why, adds Augustine, they identify Isis with Ceres.(286) Further, at harvest-time, when the Egyptian reapers had cut the first stalks, they laid them down and beat their breasts, wailing and calling upon Isis.(287) The custom has been already explained as a lament for the corn-spirit slain under the sickle.(288) Amongst the epithets by which Isis is designated in the inscriptions are “Creatress of green things,” “Green goddess, whose green colour is like unto the greenness of the earth,” “Lady of Bread,” “Lady of Beer,” “Lady of Abundance.”(289) According to Brugsch she is “not only the creatress of the fresh verdure of vegetation which covers the earth, but is actually the green corn-field itself, which is personified as a goddess.”(290) This is confirmed by her epithet _Sochit_ or _Sochet_, meaning “a corn-field,” a sense which the word still retains in Coptic.(291) The Greeks conceived of Isis as a corn-goddess, for they identified her with Demeter.(292) In a Greek epigram she is described as “she who has given birth to the fruits of the earth,” and “the mother of the ears of corn”;(293) and in a hymn composed in her honour she speaks of herself as “queen of the wheat-field,” and is described as “charged with the care of the fruitful furrow’s wheat-rich path.”(294) Accordingly, Greek or Roman artists often represented her with ears of corn on her head or in her hand.(295)