The tenth woman was made out of a bee: happy the man who gets her! On her alone no breath of scandal lights, but she brings a life of happiness and prosperity. Husband and wife grow old together in love, and fair and glorious are her children. Famous among all women is she, and a grace divine encompasses her about. She takes no delight in sitting with other women when they are telling bawdy tales. Such women as she are the best and wisest given by God to men: all the other kinds are a bane to men, and by God’s decree a bane they always will be. And so the fragment ends. All this is pure misogyny; but it is interesting to notice the especial faults which our poet imputes to womankind. They are chiefly the two vices which a surly master will always find in his servants, gluttony and idleness; they work too little and eat too much. We are far removed in this world from our ‘Feed the brute,’ and it must be remembered that in a Greek household the work was hard, monotonous, and continual. There were no labour-saving appliances, for the hard work was chiefly done by women. Every mouthful of bread or porridge eaten in a Greek home had come into the house as a sack of dirty grain. First it was winnowed, and cleaned by hand; then the grain was put into a small hand-mill, and by a laborious process of pestle and mortar it was ground into flour; the flour was then made into dough, kneaded and baked; every process being attended with the maximum of manual labour and general inconvenience, borne by the women of the house, while the master strolled about the city. So also with the clothes and household fabrics: every operation in their manufacture was done at home by the women. The master contented himself with buying the sheep-skins—and, as Theocritus lets us see, often did that very badly—which he then handed to his wife. First, the skins had to be washed and dried; then the wool was cut off and carded; then by a laborious process of spinning the wool was turned into yarn, and finally on a hand-loom the yarn was woven into cloth: the same piece of stuff, so excellent was the workmanship, often serving for coat, blanket and shroud. It is obvious, then, that an idle wife—if such a thing existed—or a wife who ate more than her share of the laboriously prepared bread, would be a great grief to her lord and master, who was himself too busy with the higher work of politics to attend to such things, and that the machinery of the household would be put very much out of gear. It may well be that Simonides was unfortunate in his choice of a helpmate, for as Hipponax, the third of this company, mournfully complains, ‘_It is hard to get a wife who will both bring you a good dowry and then do all the work_.’ Hipponax, if we may judge him by some forty short fragments, was a thoroughly disagreeable person; he is always asking and being refused; he varies complaints with abuse or downright threats.