WORKS AND DAYS
eat out the heart on the fourth of the beginning and ending of the month; it is a day very fraught with fate.
On the fourth of the month bring home your bride, but choose the omens which are best for this business.
Avoid fifth days: they are unkindly and terrible. On a fifth, they say, the Erinyes assisted at the birth of Horcus (Oath) whom Eris (Strife) bare to trouble the forsworn.
Look about you very carefully and throw out Demeter's holy grain upon the well-rolled[1] threshing floor on the seventh of the mid-month. Let the woodman cut beams for house building and plenty of ships' timbers, such as are suitable for ships. On the fourth day begin to build narrow ships.
The ninth of the mid-month improves towards evening; but the first ninth of all is quite harmless for men. It is a good day on which to beget or to be born both for a male and a female: it is never an wholly evil day.
Again, few know that the twenty-seventh of the month is best for opening a wine-jar, and putting yokes on the necks of oxen and mules and swift-footed horses, and for hauling a swift ship of many thwarts down to the sparkling sea; few call it by its right name.
On the fourth day open a jar. The fourth of the mid-month is a day holy above all. And again, few men know that the fourth day after the twentieth is best while it is morning: towards evening it is less good.
- ↑ Such seems to be the meaning here, though the epithet is otherwise rendered "well-rounded." Corn was threshed by means of a sleigh with two runners having three or four rollers between them, like the modern Egyptian nurag.
