Читать книгу Primitive Time-reckoning. A study in the origins and first development of the art of counting time among the primitive and early culture peoples онлайн

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The classical instance is afforded by the peasants’ maxims of Hesiod. The cry of the migrating cranes shews the time of ploughing and sowing[199]. If one sows too late, the crop may still thrive if Zeus sends rain upon it on the third day after the cuckoo has called for the first time in the leaves of the oak (486). Before the appearance of the swallow, the messenger of spring, the vines should be pruned (568). But when the snail climbs up the plants there should be no more digging in the vineyards (571). When the thistle blossoms and the shrill note of the cicada is to be heard, summer has come, the goats are at their fattest, and the wine is at its best (582). The sea can be navigated when the fig-tree shews at the end of its branches leaves which are as big as the foot-prints of the crow (679). Especially well-known and beloved as a sign that the hard winter was over was the swallow: evidence is afforded by the famous procession of the Rhodian swallow-youths[200], and by a vase-decoration clearly expressing the delight felt at the appearance of the herald of Spring[201]. The observation of the birds of passage was very useful for this kind of time-determination: Homer already knows it, ‘when the cranes flee the winter’, he says[202], so also Theognis: “I hear, son of Polypais, the voice of the shrill-crying crane, even her who to mortals comes as harbinger of the season for ploughing”[203]. Aristophanes makes his birds boast of it:—