Worker and Idler 19 



protects, to be roughly shewn the door: he is alSolos a\tjTr)<f\ and trades 

 on the reverence felt for one who appeals as stranger to hospitable 

 custom. Thus he picks up a living 2 from the scraps and offals of great 

 houses. But he is despised, and, what concerns us here, despised 3 not 

 only for his abject poverty but for his aversion to honest work. That 

 the poet admires industry is clear, and is curiously illustrated by his 

 contrasted pictures of civilization and barbarism. In Phaeacia are the 

 fenced-in gardens 4 that supply Alcinous and his people with never- 

 failing fruits : the excellence of their naval craftsmen is expressed in 

 the 'yarn' of ships that navigate themselves. In the land of the 

 Cyclopes, nature provides 5 them with corn and wine, but they neither 

 sow nor plough. They have flocks of sheep and goats. They have no 

 ships or men to build them. They live in caves, isolated savages with 

 no rudiments of civil life. It is not too much to say that the poet is a 

 believer in work and a cont;emner of idleness: the presence of slaves 

 does not suggest that the free man is to be lazy. Odysseus boasts of 

 his activities (Sprjcrrocrvvr)) 6 . He is ready to split wood and lay a fire, 

 to prepare and serve a meal, and in short to wait on the insolent suitors 

 as inferiors do on nobles. Of course he is still the unknown wanderer: 

 but the contrast 7 between him and the genuine beggar Irus is an effec- 

 tive piece of by-play in the poem. 



Turning to agriculture, we may note that it fills no small place. 

 Wheat and barley, pounded or ground to meal, seem to furnish the 

 basis of civilized diet. The Cyclops 8 does not look like a 'bread-eating 

 man,' and wine completely upsets him to his ruin. Evidently the 

 bounty of nature has been wasted on such a savage. But the cultivation 

 of cereal crops is rather assumed than emphasized in the pictures of 

 Greek life. We hear of tilled lands (epya) 9 , and farm-labour (epyov) 10 is 

 mentioned as too wearisome for a high-spirited warrior noble. The tired 

 and hungry plowman 11 appears in a simile. But the favourite culture 

 is that of the vine and olive and other fruits in orchards carefully fenced 

 and tended. One of the suitors makes a jesting offer 12 to the unknown 

 Odysseus * Stranger, would you be willing to serve for hire (67)reve^ev\ 

 if I took you on, in an outlying field you shall have a sufficient wage 

 gathering stuff for fences and planting tall trees? I would see that 

 you were regularly fed clothed and shod. No, you are a ne'er-do-weel 

 (epya /cd/c lyLt/xa^e?) and will not do farm- work (epyov): you prefer to go 

 round cringing for food to fill your insatiate belly.' This scornful pro- 

 posal sets the noble's contempt for wage-earning labour in a clear light. 



1 xvii 578. a xvii 18-9, 226-8. 3 xvni 403. 



* vn 112 foil, vni 557-63. ix 109-11, 125 foil. 6 xv 319 foil. 



7 xvin 1-116. 8 ix 191. 9 n 22, iv 318, xiv 344, xvi 139-45. 



10 xiv 222-3. u xiii 31-4. 12 xvni 357-64. 



2 2 



