but if you make it eight feet long, you can cut a beetleA mallet for breaking clods after ploughing. from it as well. Cut a felloe three spans across for a wagon of ten palms' width. Hew also many bent timbers, and bring home a plough-tree when you have found it, and look out on the mountain or in the field for one of holm-oak;for this is the strongest for oxen to plough with when one of Athena's handmen has fixed in the share-beam and fastened it to the pole with dowels. Get two ploughs ready and work on them at home, one all of a piece, and the other jointed. It is far better to do this, for if you should break one of them, you can put the oxen to the other.Poles of laurel or elm are most free from worms, and a share-beam of oak and a plough-tree of holm-oak. Get two oxen, bulls of nine years; for their strength is unspent and they are in the prime of their age: they are best for work. They will not fight in the furrow and break the ploughand then leave the work undone. Let a brisk fellow of forty years follow them, with a loaf of four quartersThe loaf is a flattish cake with two intersecting lines scored on its upper surface which divide it into four equal parts. and eight slicesThe meaning is obscure. A scholiast renders “giving eight mouthfuls”; but the elder Philostratus uses the word in contrast to “leavened.” for his dinner, one who will attend to his work and drive a straight furrow and is past the age for gaping after his fellows,but will keep his mind on his work. No younger man will be better than he at scattering the seed and avoiding double-sowing; for a man less staid gets disturbed, hankering after his fellows.
Mark, when you hear the voice of the craneAbout the middle of November. who cries year by year from the clouds above,for she gives the signal for ploughing and shows the season of rainy winter; but she vexes the heart of the man who has no oxen. Then is the time to feed up your horned oxen in the byre; for it is easy to say: “Give me a yoke of oxen and a wagon,” and it is easy to refuse: “I have work for my oxen.”The man who is rich in fancy thinks his wagon as good as built already—the fool! he does not know that there are a hundred timbers to a wagon. Take care to lay these up beforehand at home.
So soon as the time for ploughing is proclaimed to men, then make haste, you and your slaves alike,in wet and in dry, to plough in the season for ploughing, and bestir yourself early in the morning so that your fields may be full. Plough in the spring; but fallow broken up in the summer will not belie your hopes. Sow fallow land when the soil is still getting light: fallow land is a defender from harm and a soother of children.