wholesome hope that accompanies a need man who lolls at ease
while he has no sure livelihood.

(ll. 502-503) While it is yet midsummer command your slaves: `It
will not always be summer, build barns.'

(ll. 504-535) Avoid the month Lenaeon (21), wretched days, all of
them fit to skin an ox, and the frosts which are cruel when
Boreas blows over the earth. He blows across horse-breeding
Thrace upon the wide sea and stirs it up, while earth and the
forest howl. On many a high-leafed oak and thick pine he falls
and brings them to the bounteous earth in mountain glens: then
all the immense wood roars and the beasts shudder and put their
tails between their legs, even those whose hide is covered with
fur; for with his bitter blast he blows even through them
although they are shaggy-breasted. He goes even through an ox's
hide; it does not stop him. Also he blows through the goat's
fine hair. But through the fleeces of sheep, because their wool
is abundant, the keen wind Boreas pierces not at all; but it
makes the old man curved as a wheel. And it does not blow
through the tender maiden who stays indoors with her dear mother,
unlearned as yet in the works of golden Aphrodite, and who washes
her soft body and anoints herself with oil and lies down in an
inner room within the house, on a winter's day when the Boneless
One (22) gnaws his foot in his fireless house and wretched home;
for the sun shows him no pastures to make for, but goes to and
fro over the land and city of dusky men (23), and shines more
sluggishly upon the whole race of the Hellenes. Then the horned
and unhorned denizens of the wood, with teeth chattering
pitifully, flee through the copses and glades, and all, as they