With a four-quartered loaf of eight full bites:
That's one to work, and drive the furrow plim,
Too old to gape at mates, or mates at him.

That precise loaf, with just that much bitage, is the staple in
Boeotia to-day; but the [Greek: aizêos] of forty will not so readily
be found. Elsewhere in his poem Hesiod recommends something more in
accord with modern practice:

Your house, your ox, your woman you must have;
For she must drive the plow--not wife but slave.

The terms are synonymous in Greece to-day.

Plowing time is when you hear the crane in the clouds overhead. Be
beforehand with your cattle.

When year by year high in the clouds the crane
Calls in the plow-time and the month of rain,
Take care to feed your oxen in the byre;
For easy 'tis to beg, but hard to hire.

That is in Tusser's vein, and no doubt comes naturally to rustic
aphorists. A man may plow in the spring, too; and if Zeus should
happen to send rain on the third day, after the cuckoo's first call,
"As much as hides an ox-hoof, and no more," he may do as well as the
autumn-tiller. In any case don't forget your prayers when you begin
plowing:

You who in hand first the plow-handles feel,