When the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, are rising (May), begin your harvest, and your ploughing when they are going to set (November) ... First of all, get a house, and a woman and an ox for the plough -- a slave woman and not a wife, to follow the oxen as well ...

But when the artichoke flowers, and the chirping grass-hopper sits in a tree and pours down his shrill song continually from under his wings in the season of wearisome heat, then goats are plumpest and wine sweetest; women are most wanton, but men are feeblest, because Sirius parches head and knees and the skin is dry through heat. But at that time let me have a shady rock and wine of Biblis.. Hesiod Works and Days