David Beach

Agriculture 14

The plough is routinely praised as a key
invention but the whole point of a plough
is that it is hauled through the soil, and
enabling the time’s great engine, the ox,
to be set to this task, was the yoke. ‘Strong
as an ox’ — the yoke is the reason we
say so, the phrase still knocking about,
poetry from before there were poems. And in
a sense the yoke does grant a person the
strength of an ox, indeed two, Ox Men the
first superheroes — ones moreover who’d
have to be acknowledged of particular
distinction since, rather than merely
saving civilisation, they began it.