rs regarded the
sedentary occupations of the town as waste of time from their habitual
rural pursuits: and in consequence they so divided their time that
they might have to devote only one day of the week to their affairs in
town, reserving the remaining seven for country life.[105]

So long as they persisted in this practice they accomplished two
things both that their farms were fertile through good cultivation and
that they themselves enjoyed the best of health: they felt no need of
those Greek gymnasia which now every one of us must have in his town
house, nor did they deem that in order to enjoy a house in the country
one must give sounding Greek names to all its apartments, such as
[Greek: prokoiton] (antechamber) [Greek: palaistra] (exercising room)
[Greek: apodutaerion] (dressing room) [Greek: peristulon] (arcade)
[Greek: ornithon] or (poultry house) [Greek: peristereon] (dove cote)
[Greek: oporothaekae] (fruitery) and the like.

Since now forsooth most of our gentry crowd into town, abandoning
the sickle and the plough and prefer to exercise their hands in the
theatre and the circus rather than in the corn field and the vineyard,
it has resulted that we must fain buy the very corn that fills our
bellies and have it hauled in for us, yea, out of Africa and Sardinia,
while we bring home the vintage in ships from the islands of Cos and
Chios!

And so it has happened that those lands which the shepherds who
founded the city taught their children to cultivate are now, by their
later descendants, converted again from corn fields back to pastures,
thus in their greed of gain violating even the law, since they fail to
distinguish the difference between agriculture and grazing.[106] For a
shepherd is one thing and a ploughman another, nor for all that he may
feed his stock on farm land is a drover the same as a teamster: herded
cattle, indeed, do nothing to create what grows in the land, but
destroy it with their teeth, while the yoked ox on the contrary
conduces to the maturity of grain in the corn fields and forage in the
fallow land. The practice and the art of the farmer is one thing, I
say; that of the shepherd another; the farmer's object being that what
ever may be produced by cultivating the land should yield a profit;
that of the shepherd to make his profit from the increase of his
flock; and yet the relation between them is intimate because it is
much more desirable for a farmer to feed his forage on the la