Note 1508 — Appendix A (to p. 37). The supposed Agricultural and Northern Diakria.

Xen. de Vect. I. 5; cp. Strabo IX. 400, “far the best honey comes from the mining district.” The passage from the de Vect. is misunderstood by Grundy, Thuc. and his Age, p. 151, n. 2, who says, “the reference is certainly to a widespread system of market-gardening and perhaps also to the purchasing power of the product of vine cultivation.” Grundy gives no evidence that cabbages or other vegetables or even wine were many times as valuable as corn; he plainly takes ὀρυττομένη as though it were σκαπτομένη, and appears to think that the sentence refers to Attica at large, a view that is rendered most unlikely both by the language (ἔστι δὲ καὶ γῆ ἡ σπειρομένη οὐ φέρει καρπόν, not καὶ σπειρομένη μὲν ἡ γῆ οὐ φέρει καρπόν), and the context (the crops of Attica are finished with in I. 4, and the sentence just quoted follows a statement about the Attic quarries and precedes the declaration that the mines are the gift of God).