all things delectable in the rural life:

'Sweet are the voices of the calves, and sweet the heifers' lowing;
sweet plays the shepherd on the shepherd's pipe, and sweet is the
echo.'

Even in courtly poems, and in the artificial hymns of which we are to
speak in their place, the memory of the joyful country life comes
over him. He praises Hiero, because Hiero is to restore peace to
Syracuse, and when peace returns, then 'thousands of sheep fattened
in the meadows will bleat along the plain, and the kine, as they
flock in crowds to the stalls, will make the belated traveller hasten
on his way.' The words evoke a memory of a narrow country lane in
the summer evening, when light is dying out of the sky, and the
fragrance of wild roses by the roadside is mingled with the perfumed
breath of cattle that hurry past on their homeward road. There was
scarcely a form of the life he saw that did not seem to him worthy of
song, though it might be but the gossip of two rude hinds, or the
drinking bout of the Thessalian horse-jobber, and the false girl
Cynisca and her wild lover AEschines. But it is the sweet country
that he loves best to behold and to remember. In his youth Sicily
and Syracuse were disturbed by civil and foreign wars, wars of
citizens against citizens, of Greeks against Carthaginians, and
against the fierce 'men of Mars,' the banded mercenaries who
possessed themselves of Messana. But this was not matter for his
joyous Muse -


[Greek]