trawling-nets and eel-baskets.[26]

In revulsion from the immense accumulation of material wealth in this
period, a certain refined simplicity was then the ideal of the best
minds, as it was afterwards in the early Roman Empire, as it is in our
own day. The charm of the country was, perhaps for the first time,
fully realised; the life of gardens became a passion, and hardly less
so the life of the opener air, of the hill and meadow, of the shepherd
and hunter, the farmer and fisherman. The rules of art, like the
demands of heaven, were best satisfied with small and simple
offerings. "The least of a little"[27] was sufficient to lay before
gods who had no need of riches; and as the art of the epigrammatist
grew more refined, the poet took pride in working with the slightest
materials. The husbandman lays a handful of corn-ears before Demeter,
the gardener a basket of ripe fruit at the feet of Priapus; the
implements of their craft are dedicated by the carpenter and the
goldsmith; the young girl and the aged woman offer their even slighter
gift, the spindle and distaff, the reel of wool, and the rush-woven
basket.[28] A staff of wild-olive cut in the coppice is accepted by
the lord of the myriad-boughed forest; the Muses are pleased with
their bunch of roses wet with morning dew.[29] The boy Daphnis offers
his fawnskin and scrip of apples to the great divinity of Pan;[30] the
young herdsman and his newly-married wife, still with the rose-garland
on her hair, make prayer and thanksgiving with a cream cheese and a
piece of honeycomb to the mistress of a hundred cities, Aphrodite with
her house of gold.[31] The hard and laborious life of the small farmer
was touched with something of the natural magic that saturates the
Georgics; "rich with fair fleeces, and fair wine, and fair fruit of
corn," and blessed by the gracious Seasons whose feet pass over the
furrows.[32] On the green slope Pan himself makes solitary music to