Thus the night-watching shepherds strive, but vainly, to repel
The angry lion, whom the stings of want and rage impel,
Upon the carcase fastens he: his heart no fear can quell.
Where the number of the flock required the care of several men a chief shepherd ἐπιποιμὴν was appointed to overlook the rest.[[1792]] Among the ancients twenty sheep were thought to require the attention of a man and a boy;[[1793]] but, in modern times, three men and a boy, with four or five dogs, are sometimes entrusted with a flock of five hundred, of which two-thirds are ewes.[[1794]] The proportion of rams to ewes is at present as four to a hundred.
From very remote ages shepherds had learned to avail themselves of the aid of dogs,[[1795]] which in farms were usually furnished with wooden collars.[[1796]] The breed generally employed in this service, in later ages at least, was the Molossian,[[1797]] which, though exceedingly powerful and fierce towards strangers, was by its masters found sufficiently gentle and tractable. The shepherd’s pipe,[[1798]] frequently made of the donax, or common river-reed,[[1799]] likewise used in thatching cottages, formed a no less necessary accompaniment. Another of their instruments of music was the flute crooked at the top, finely polished and rubbed with bees’ wax.[[1800]]
As the Arcadians, descendants of the Pelasgians, derived one of their principal delights from music,[[1801]] it is reasonable to infer that the ancestral nation, preëminently pastoral, was likewise addicted to this science. The feeding of herds and flocks constituted the principal occupation of the Proselenoi,[[1802]] who were little devoted to agriculture, as may be inferred from their acorn-eating habits; for no nation ever continued to feed on mast after they could obtain bread. A report prevailed in the ancient world that the Arcadians were of a poetical temperament, to which Virgil alludes in the well-known verses—
Arcades ambo,
Et cantare pares et respondere parati.
And as improvisatori they may possibly have excelled, though Greece knew nothing of an Arcadian literature. However, chiefly after the example of Virgil, the poets of modern times have always delighted to convert Arcadia into a kind of pastoral Utopia, which is done by Sannazaro, Tasso, Guarini, Sir Philip Sydney, Daniel, and many others. Palmerius à Grentmesnil[[1803]] discovers something like the descendants of the Arcadians among the Irish, whose pastoral taste for music he conceives to be commemorated by the triangular harp in the national insignia.
Their usual clothing consisted of diptheræ, or dressed sheepskins,[[1804]] just as at the present day among the Nubian shepherds, whom one may see thus clad, roaming through the sandy hollows of the Lybian desert. On the inside of these skins the traitor Hermion wrote the letters which betrayed the designs of his countrymen to the enemy in Laconia.[[1805]] Others wore goatskin cloaks, which they likewise used as a coverlet at night.[[1806]] Euripides introduces his chorus of satyrs complaining of this miserable costume.[[1807]]