"If there never has been a natural explanation of anything, everything is, naturally enough, the supernatural"-Fort, Books, p655.

FT190:8 reports female rice farmers in India and Nepal ploughing in the nude to persuade rain god Indra to accelerate the monsoon - it worked.

This bare fact (a Greek expression - Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Art of Rhetoric, ch lO para6) both enhances and is enhanced by a couple of ancient poets. Hesiod (Works & Days, w391-2) deposes: "Strip to sow, strip to plough, strip to reap," Latinised by Virgil, Georgic 1, v299.

Hesiod's adjective is 'gymnos' (whence 'gymnasium'), Virgil's 'nudus'. At school, we were solemnly assured that they did not really mean 'nude', but 'wearing a single garment'.Yeah, right.

A 'Victorian value', obviously, insisted upon by (e.g.) JEB Mayor (1881) in his note on Juvenal, Satire 4, v49. But, his contemporary TE Page (1898), writing on the Virgil passage, scorns the notion, emphasising the word must be taken literally. True, Mayor produced a single ancient Virgil commentator who gave 'nudus' the toned-down sense. However, Suetonius (Life of Virgil, ch44) mentions a Roman wag who capped his advice with the verse-ending 'habebis frigore febrem' - "You'll catch your death of cold." As Page remarks, "the story has no point if 'nudus' means what editors desire."

Given all the protrusions from ancient ploughs, fully described by our two poets, I'd not fancy working one en deshabille-its dangly bits might meet mine, with unfortunate consequences.

The bowdlerisers ignore other ancient evidence, artistic and literary. Illustrations in ASF Gow's 'The Ancient Plough,' Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol34,1914,pp49-75, show naked ploughmen. A character in Aristophanes, Lysistrata, v1173, proclaims "I want to undress and get back naked to my farming." When called from his plough to save Rome, Cincinnatus (Pliny, Natural History, bkl8 ch 4 para20) is 'nudus' and told 'vela corpus'- "Cover up your body." Plutarch (Life of the Elder Cato, ch 1) asserts that this most Roman of Romans farmed 'gymnos' in summer.


One ancient commentator on Hesiod had a practical explanation: "Work without your cloak so that it will not tangle you up." However, despite Arthur Fallowfield in Round The Horne, the answer may lie not in the soil, but higher up. The best modern writer, KD White, Roman Farming (Thames & Hudson, London,1970, p471n2), whilst ignoring our topic, stresses the preponderance of magical formula in ancient agricultural writers: "They reflect the farmer's reliance on supernatural aid in an operation where success or failure seemed to occur through the working of arbitrary forces."

Hesiod's most distinguished editor, ML West (Oxford, 1978, p258) thinks "perhaps originally there was a religious basis to the mile.," Hesiod and Virgil both issue their bare instructions in the name context of Ceres/Demeter, the goddess of fertility who (Homeric Hymn 2,w273-4 & 470-82) demands both cultural and agricultural rituals in her service. Hesiod's father was a peasant immigrant from Acid Minor; he might well have imported native religious notions. Athen,&vs (Learned Men at Dinner, bkl4 para631d) alludes to boys dancing naked to encourage a grape-laden vintage. Petronius (Satyricon, ch 44 paral8) tells how women went barefoot into the fields to pray to Jupiter for rain - "It did so in bucketfuls, they came home soaked." Finally Pliny (bki8 ch35 para3l) says the best turnips occur when their seed is ploughed in between the festivals of Neptune and Vulcan by a farmer who goes 'nudus' with the prayer "I sow for myself and my neighbours" - Quite a turnip for the book.

Largely for fun, I Googled 'Nude Farming' and was given 225,000 sites - I couldn't be (bare)arsed to plough trough them, but(t)...