Winter in Ancient Greece

Boreas blows across horse-breeding Thrace upon the wide sea and stirs it up while earth and the forest howl. On many a high-leafed oak, a thick pine he falls and brings them to the bounteous earth in mountain glens. Then all the immense wood roars and the beasts shudder and put their tails between their legs, even those whose hide is covered with fur. For with his bitter blast he blows even through them, shaggy-breasted though they are. He goes even through an ox's hide, it does not stop him. He blows through the goat's fine hair, but through the fleeces of sheep, because their wool is abundant, the keen-winged Boreas pierces not at all, but it makes the old man all curved over. And it does not blow through who stays indoors with her dear mother, unlearned as yet in the works of golden Aphrodite, and who washes her soft body and anoints herself with oil and lies down in an inner room within the house, on a winter's day when the boneless one gnaws his foot in his fireless house and wretched home. For the sun shows him no pastures to make for, but it comes and goes over the land and city of dark-skinned men and shines more sluggishly upon the whole race of the Hellenes. Then the creatures of the forest, horned and unhorned alike, gnash their teeth pitifully as they flee through the woods of the glens, as they seek shelter of this one care to gain thick covers or some hollow rock. Then, like the three-legged one whose back is broken and whose head looks down upon the ground, like him they wander to escape the white snow. Then put on, as I bid you, a soft coat and a tunic to the feet to shield your body, and you should weave thick wolf on thin warp, and this clothe yourself so that your hair may keep still and not bristle and stand upon end all over your body. Lace on your feet tight-fitting boots of the hide of a slaughtered ox, thickly lined with felt inside. And when the season of frost comes on, stitch together skins of goats with oxenew to put over your back and to keep off the rain. On your head above, wear a shaped cap of felt to keep your ears from getting wet, for the dawn is chill when Boreas has once made his onslaught. And at dawn, a fruitful mist is spread over the earth from starry heaven upon the fields of blessed man. It is drawn from the ever-flowing rivers and it is raised high above the earth by windstorm, and sometimes it turns to rain towards evening and other times to wind when Thracian Boreas huddles the thick clouds. Observe all this until the year is ended and you have nights and days of equal length, and earth, the mother of all, bears again her various fruit. When Zeus has finished sixty wintry days after the solstice, then the star Arcturus leaves the holy stream of ocean and first rises brilliant at dusk. After him rises the daughter of Pandion, the swallow, the one whose call sounds at dawn. She comes back to the light for humankind as springtime begins anew.