[85] In H. Grassmann’s Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda, twice. One cannot indict a whole sex for inebriety on the strength of a single passage, but fish, despite matsya being masculine in Sanskrit, are always feminine according to the Avesta (vol. v. p. 61, of Sacred Books of the East, Pahlavi Texts): “Water, Earth, Plants, and Fish are female, and never otherwise.”
[86] For help and guidance as to India I am greatly in debt to my old Oxford friend, Dr. A. Macdonell, Boden Professor of Sanskrit, and to his two books, History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 143, and Macdonell and Keith, Vedic Index of Names and Subjects (London, 1912), vol. ii. p. 173.
[87] The Story of the Flood in the Catapatha Brāhmana.
[88] Sacred Books of the East, xx. 252. Cf. x. 41.
[89] Ibid., xvi. 7. Cf. xxiii. 239, and v. 65.
[90] De Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology (London, 1872), vol. ii. 331, f.
[91] De Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology (London, 1872), vol. ii. 331, f.
[92] The Pancatantra, I., Story 17.
[93] A Group of Hindoo Stories, by an Aryan (really F. F. Arbuthnot) (London, 1881), p. 35.
[94] Book I., Story 12 and 15. Book XI., Story 4. Here the fisherman, when asked by the king the sex of a fish, saves the situation and collars 2000 dinar by ejaculating the blessed word, not Mesopotamia, but “Hermaphrodite,” which he had once overheard two students casually employ.
[95] Sir William Jones holds that this collection of Fables “comprises all the wisdom of Eastern nations, and was surpassed in esteem and popularity by few works of Oriental literature.”
[96] No Quatrain of Omar Khayam sings of the craft.
[97] See Idyll XX. of Theocritus, postea 135, note 1, for another example.
[98] Modern Turkish contains (according to Dr. Tisdall) two genuine old Turkish words for fish-hook, (1) Ôltah, (2) Zôngah. This is of great interest, for it goes far to show that the Turks, even before leaving Central Asia, were familiar with Angling.
[99] To him, a high authority on Persia, not only from the many years spent there but also from his great linguistic accomplishments, I am greatly in debt for much of the foregoing.
[100] Mr. Harold Parlett, our Consul at Dairen and an authority on Japan, writes, “I know of no books in Japanese dealing with the history of fishing, and I think it improbable that any exist, unless in MS. It is a subject, which as far as I know, has not yet been studied. I should advise you to dismiss ancient Japanese methods in as few words as possible.” I follow his advice.
[101] On consulting a great Sinologist, he rapped out, “The only thing I know or want to know of Japan is that every art, every craft, it possesses came from China.”
[102] W. J. Turrell, Ancient Angling Authors (London, 1910), p. xi. Ancient, in this most researchful work, might, I venture to suggest, be qualified by British, for six pages (in the Preface) suffice for all fishing before the tenth century.
[103] Angling Literature (London, 1856), p. 33.
[104] There is in existence a Byzantine MS. entitled Ψαρολόγος (lit. “Fishbook,” i.e. anecdotes of fish), which K. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur, 3rd ed. (München, 1897), p. 884, states should be published.
[105] The result of the work done during the last twenty years by German writers, such as W. Christ, Geschichte des griechischen Litteratur, ed. 3 (München, 1898), p. 664 f.; E. Oder, in Pauly-Winowa Real Enc. (Stuttgart, 1910), VII., 1221-1225; and F. Lübker, Reallexikon des klassischen Altertums (Leipzig, 1914), p. 409, seems to show that our Geoponika is a reduction, c. 950 a.d., by an unknown hand of an older compilation made in the sixth century by Cassianus Bassus. Behind him in turn are older works of the fourth century, viz. the συναγωγὴ γεωργικῶν of Vindanius Anatolius in twelve books, and the γεωργικά of the younger Didymos of Alexandreia in fifteen books. Ultimately we get back to Cassius Dionysius of Utica, who translated the Carthaginian Mazo’s work on agriculture (88 b.c.).
[106] See infra, p. 291.
[107] The date of 1492 is suggested by Mr. Alfred Denison, who translated and issued privately twenty-five copies of Dit Boecxken leert hoe men mach voghelen vanghen metten handen. Ende oeck andersins. From the press of Mathys Van der Goes. The marriage of Madame Van der Goes to Godfridus Bach, whose printer’s mark also appears in the book, seems to point to 1492. See, however, M. F. A. G. Campbell, Annales de la Typographie Neerlandaise au xve siècle (La Haye, 1874), p. 80, and Bibl. Pisc., pp. 35, 36.
[108] The Angler’s Note-Book, 1st series (1880), p. 76.
[109] Cf. Turrell, op. cit., 4. In “and with angle hookys” in Piers, Mr. Marston, op. cit., 2, sees “probably the earliest known reference to angling in English.”
[110] Cf. M. G. Watkins, Introduction to the Treatyse, etc. (London, 1880), p. xi.
[111] It enumerates 3158 distinct editions of 2148 different fishing works published before 1883. The Supplement issued by Mr. R. B. Marston in 1901 gives 1200 more. Mr. Eric Parker’s delightsome and pocket-companionable An Angler’s Garland, London, 1920, gives many happy extracts from the fifteen hundred, and present-day writers.
[112] In Bede, “Et divina se innante gratia.”
[113] 76, 12. τῶν γὰρ ἰχθύων, ἀπείρων και ἁπλέτων ὒντων, οὐ γεύονται.
[114] James Logan, The Scottish Gael (Inverness, 1876), vol. ii. p. 130 f.
[115] Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gælica (Edinburgh, 1900), vol. i. p. 325.
[116] S. Bochart, Hierozoicon (Leipzig, 1796), p. 868, telling of a fish whose right ear bore the words, There is no God, but God, and left, Apostle of God, and neck, Mahomet, concludes with a parody of Virgil, Buc., iii. 104.
A magnus Apollo to graduate the claims of the different potentates would indeed be a boon. The capture of a fish some two years ago near Zanzibar with Arabic inscriptions—legible only by the faithful—caused immense excitement, as possibly foretelling the speedy end of the world.
[117] Angler’s Note-Book, ii. p. 116.
[118] Angler’s Note-Book, i. 44.
[119] Dougal Graham, Ancient and Modern Hist. of Buckhaven (Glasgow, 1883), vol. ii. p. 235.
[120] John F. Mann, “Notes on the Aborigines of Australia,” Proc. Geograph. Soc. of Australia, i. p. 204.
[121] J. G. Frazer, op. cit., iii. 206-7.
[122] For several reasons I have anachronously placed this section first instead of last.
[123] The representation, reproduced by the kind permission of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, consists of four men carrying in each hand a fish by the tail. The absence of boots and ornaments is in keeping with their occupation. The fishes with one exception have heads like dolphins, similar to the representation of Poseidon with a tiny dolphin in his hand. The painting is executed in the “black and red” style upon the usual white slip. The figures are drawn firmly and boldly according to the conventional scheme, shoulders to front and legs in profile; the slim proportions of the bodies are common to many Mycenæan works. The most barbaric features of the drawing are the absence of hands, and the monstrous eye in the middle of the cheek. Cf. No. 80 in the British Museum Cat. of Gems, which shows a man clad with the characteristic Mycenæan loin cloth carrying a fish by a short line attached to its gullet. Excavations at Phylakopi in Melos (London, 1904), p. 123, pl. xxii.
[124] Equally famous, perhaps even more so, is the representation of a fish found in 1882 near Vettersfelde in Lower Lausitz, but now in Berlin. It is the shield-sign of a Scythian chief, made in gold repoussé work early in the fifth century b.c. See the publications of A. Furtwängler, Der Goldfund von Vettersfelde (Berlin, 1883), (= id. Kleine Schriften (München, 1912), I. 469 ff. pl. 18); cf. E. H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks (Cambridge, 1913), p. 236 ff. fig. 146. Furtwängler thinks that the fish may have been meant for the Thymus alalonga.
[125] Homer, according to Sir A. Evans, “is at most sub-Mycenæan, his age is more recent than the latest stage of anything that can be called Minoan or Mycenæan,” Jour. Hellenic Studies, xxxii. (1912) 287. This would seem to place Homer about the twelfth century.
[126] Deipnosophistæ, I. ch. 22.
[127] Herodotus (II. 164) describing the different grades of Egyptian society begins with the priests and ends with the boatmen, among whom he apparently includes the fishermen. Their humble position is confirmed by other evidence; see postea 333. In Laconia fishing was confined to the Helots and Περίοικοι.
[128] “With the division of the people of the Empire into four distinct classes—scholars, agriculturists, artisans, and merchants—the men and women who followed the trade of fishing for a livelihood were placed in an anomalous position from not being included in any of the four classes. Thus socially ostracised to a certain extent, they clung to themselves, forming groups or colonies of their own along the coasts or on isolated islands. They lived in a world of their own, knowing nothing of the affairs of their country and caring less. To this day they do not come into direct contact with their countrymen on the mainland.” Wei-Chung W. Yen: Fourth International Fishing Congress at Washington, 1908. Bulletin of Bureau of Fisheries, No. 664, p. 376.
[129] Professor T. D. Seymour, Life in the Homeric Age (London, 1907), p. 284, who might have added that Homer knows no general word either for trade; to traders, πρηκτῆρες (Od., VIII. 162) come nearest probably. From Seymour’s work, which sheds much valuable light on Homeric pursuits, I quote and borrow frequently.
[130] See Class. Journ.; Chicago, XIII. (1917), “The Leaf-Ramsay Theory of the Trojan War,” where he uses these words in reply to Maury, who holds that the view expounded in Leaf’s Troy that the War was an economic struggle by the Greeks for trade expansion to the fertile lands of the Euxine and for the extinction of the tolls exacted by the Trojans is untenable, because (inter alia) of their want of nautical enterprise. In favour of Leaf there are, however, mentions (1) of a voyage from Crete to Egypt in five days, and (2) the big νηῦς φορτὶς εὐρεῖα twice mentioned.
[131] Cf. however, Geikie, Love of Nature among the Romans, p. 300. Subdivided by the waters of the Ægean into innumerable islands, where the scattered communities could only keep in touch by boat or ship, Greece naturally became a nursery of seamen. The descriptive and musical epithets applied to the deep in Greek poetry show how much its endless variety of surface and colour, its beauty and its majesty, appealed to the Hellenic imagination. S. H. Butcher, Harvard Lectures (London, 1904), p. 49, speaks of the Greeks as “born sailors and traders, who from the dawn of history looked upon the sea as their natural highway.” Contrast with this Plato, Laws, iv. 705 a, ἁλμυρὸν καὶ πικρὸν γειτόνημα, “a bitter and brackish neighbour.”
[132] He never mentions Tyre, the later port. Evans (Scripta Minoa, pp. 56, 80) and other archæologists nowadays hold that Homer’s Φοίνικες, or “red men,” are really the “Minoans,” and are to be distinguished from the Σιδόνιοι or Phœnicians. At what date the latter appeared in the West Mediterranean is still a matter of controversy, but the present trend of opinion is that they only succeeded to the “Minoan” heritage.
[133] Cf., however, Isaiah xxiii. 8, “whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth.” In spite of this, Butcher, op. cit., p. 45, writes: “but in Bacon’s words, the end and purpose of their life was ‘the sabbathless pursuit of fortune.’”
[134] Chap. iii. 4-6.
[135] Od., XVII. 386.
[136] Od., I. 182 ff.
[137] W. Ridgeway, The Origin of Metallic Currency (Cambridge, 1892), 27 ff.
[138] Il., XXIII. 269.
[139] See, however, Hogarth’s Ionia and the East, pp. 8, 120. A fish, the Eel, plays an important part in the attempt to determine the original home of the Indo-European family. See S. Feist, Kultur, Ausbreitung und Herkunft der Indogermanen (Berlin, 1913), pp. 187, 525.
[140] Der Fischer in der antiken Litteratur (Aachen, 1892).
[141] While the early Greeks learned much with regard to navigation from the Phœnicians, none of the Homeric nautical terms have been traced to a Phœnician source, as might have been expected in view of the large number of such terms which the English language has borrowed from the Dutch, such as ahoy, boom, skipper, sloop, etc. The French has taken from the English, beaupré, cabine, paquebot, etc. Seymour, p. 322.
[142] “The choice of the subjects (in The Shield of Achilles), especially the absence of mythological subjects, the arrangement of the scenes in concentric bands, and the peculiar technique, all point to oriental, i.e. in the main to Phœnician and Assyrian influence. In these respects the earliest actual Greek work known to us by description, viz. The Chest of Cypselus (c. 700 b.c.), consisting of cedar wood, ivory, and gold, and richly adorned (according to Pausanias, V. 17) with figures in relief, holds an intermediate place between The Shield of Achilles and the art of the classic period. Hence we infer that the Shield belongs to the earlier time, when (as we also learn from Homer) the Phœnicians were the great carriers between the Mediterranean countries and the East” (Monro, Il., XVIII). Professor Jebb (Homer, p. 66) ranks, in the earlier period, Phœnician lower than Phrygian influence, but the latest writer on the subject—F. Poulsen, Der Orient und die frühgriechische Kunst, Leipzig-Berlin, 1912—makes large claims for the influence of the Phœnicians in art.
[143] Under ‘Piscator’ in Dict. des Antiquités Daremberg and Saglio write: “The configuration of the country generally would naturally induce a large part of the population to seek their livelihood in fishing and fish.”
[144] The explanation of Athenæus (Bk. I. 16, 22 and 46) is ingenious. Homer never represents fish or birds, or vegetables, or fruit “as being put on the table to eat, lest to mention them would seem like praising gluttony, thinking besides there would be a want of decorum in dwelling on the preparation of such things, which he considered beneath the dignity of Gods and Heroes.” The latest explanation—by Professor J. A. Scott, Class. Journ.; Chicago, 1916-17, p. 329—that “Homer looked upon fish with great disfavour, because as a native of Asia Minor he had been trained to regard fish as an unhealthful and distasteful food to be eaten only as a last resort,” would attain nearer “what seems the solution of this vexed question” (Scott’s words), if he produced (1) data establishing Homer’s country of birth, and (2) evidence far stronger than “Tips to Archæological Travellers” (even though these be written by Sir Wm. Ramsay) as regards the general “unhealthfulness” of the fish of Asia Minor.
[145] Schrader, Reallexikon (Strassburg, 1901), p. 244, states that in neither the Avesta nor the Rig-Veda is there any mention of fishing, nor in the Aryan period were there any common names for fish, and that throughout the Homeric age, which generally knows fishing as an existent occupation, there still seems to be a recollection of a time when the Greek hero ate fish just as little as he rode, wrote, or cooked soup!
[146] It is but fair, however, to add that the Scholiast notes this passage as the only one in the Iliad where fish is mentioned as a food, while Monro makes the ingenious comment that these oysters, or shell fish, are to be regarded not as luxuries, but as a way of satisfying the hunger of a crew at sea. Of oysters this is the only mention in the Homeric Poems. As oyster shells and even unopened oyster shells were found by Dr. Schliemann at Mycenæ, the liking for oysters is not likely to have been lost between the Mycenæan and the Homeric times. The remains of the Homeric (sixth) city at Troy yielded very many cockle shells, but of cockles there seems no mention in the poems.
Numerous representations of fishes are found on Mycenæan and Cretan works of art.
[147] J. W. Mackail, Lectures on Greek Poetry (London, 1910), p. 47.
[148] Monro’s Note on Iliad, XVIII. 468-608.
[149] Presidential Address to the British Association, 1916.
[150] Eustathius (on Il., V. 487) after stating that by the Homeric heroes fishing and fowling were very rarely employed, continues Οὐκ ἠσαν ὑδροθῆραι παρ’ αὐτοῖς εἰ μὴ ἄρα ἐν λιμῷ.
[151] Od., VI. 102 ff. W. W. Merry ad loc. well compares Soph. El., 566 ff.
[152] G. Rodenwaldt in Tiryns (Athens, 1912), II. 96 ff. pls. 12 f.
[153] Lectures on Greek Poetry, 67 ff. There are nearly three hundred comparisons in Homer’s poems; but of detailed similes only some two hundred and twenty, of which the Odyssey contains but forty. Miss Clerke (Familiar Studies in Homer, p. 182 ff.) shows that angling is mentioned chiefly in similes, which may, perhaps, indicate that the poet knew that this particular method was not practised in the days in which his poem is placed.
[154] Among the arguments elaborated by Payne Knight and others to prove that the Iliad and Odyssey were written by different authors and dealt with far different times, one is based on the fact that certain methods of fowling and fishing are only found in the Odyssey. If this argument be pushed to its logical end, it should be easy to prove that the ages of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, which overlapped, were really far apart, because, while the latter mentions the familiar use of tobacco, the former never once alludes to it.
[155] The translations from the Odyssey are by Butcher and Lang (London, 1881), and those from the Iliad by Lang, Leaf, and Myers (London, 1883).
[156] So too the Egyptians likened the men slain at the battle of Megiddo: “Their champions lay stretched out like fishes on the ground.” See J. H. Breasted, Records of Egypt (London, 1906), vol. ii. par. 431.
[157] Alike, and yet unlike, is
[158] See Eustathius ad loc. The spear with which Telegonos wounded Odysseus was tipped with the κέντρον of a Roach, according to A. G. Pearson, Fragments of Sophocles (Cambridge, 1917), vol. ii. p. 105 ff., à propos of the lost Ὀδυσσεὺς ἀκανθοπλήξ. Van Leeuwen (Odyssey, 2nd ed., Leyden, 1917), in his note on xi. 134-7, makes the fish the sting-ray (radio raiæ pastinacæ), which from its deadly character (cf. Pliny, N. H., ix. 67) is to my mind much more probable, despite Liddell and Scott’s translation of τρυγὼν as ‘roach,’ the absolutely harmless Roach! Cf. Epicharmus, Frag. 66 Kaibel, τρυγὁνες τ’ ὀπισθόκεντροι, and Aristotle, N. H., ix. 48. Whatever the fish were, it is good to know that it too came to an untimely death at the hands of Phorcys, because of its cannibal propensities. See Eustathius, Od., p. 1676, 45, commenting on xi. 133. In The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, vi. 32, Philostratos says Odysseus was wounded by the αἰχμὴ τῆς τρυγόνος. Van Leeuwen instances among some old armour preserved at Bergum the weapon of an Indian pirate, “which is made of the tail of the ray.”
[159] It is with something of a shock I find such careful translators as Butcher and Lang translating γναμπτοῖσιν ἀγκίστροισιν in Od., IV. 369, as “bent,” and in Od., XII. 332, as “barbed” hooks, without one word of explanation. These weapons differ in appearance, execution, and date of invention. To evolve the barbed from the bent hook required probably as many generations of men, and centuries of effort, as the development of the bent hook from the primitive gorge. See Introduction.
[160] There are of course limitations to the “pulley-hauley” of a hand-line; with a 700 lb. Tuna a Rod may be a very present help, a windlass even more so. The practice in vogue among the Spanish Tunny fishers is to throw aside the Rod at the moment of hooking and man-handle the fish with the Line.
[161] Idyll, XXI. 55.
[162] vii. 18-21.
[163] See S. Reinach, Cultes, Mythes, et Religions (Paris 1908), iii. 43 ff.
[164] Ælian, N. H., xiii. 26.
[165] Hesych. s.v. Κάβειροι.
[166] Compare its use four times (in the Iliad only) as applied to birds of prey and to dogs; also figuratively to Achilles as “savage.”
[167] Later on it is true we do find the Roman “burgher” becoming also an amateur angler, and gentlefolk, including ladies and children, taking freely to the sport. Piscator is generally used in reference to those who were fishermen by trade, whereas venator and auceps may be likewise applied to mere lovers of hunting and fowling (H. Blümner, Die römischen Privataltertümer, Munich, 1911).
[168] A gorge, almost identical with the Neolithic gorge, is used at the present day for catching ducks on the Untersee of Holland. See Introduction.
[169] Il., 24. 81, and Od., 12. 253.
[170] See Merry and Riddell on Od., XII. 251. Döderlein (Il., XXIV. 80), following the Scholiast, also gives this same explanation.
[171] T. K. Arnold, Iliad (1852), 20. 80. According to Dugas-Montbel, as quoted here, “To this little tube of horn they attached also a piece of lead to sink the bait, and the horn, being the colour of the sea, had also the advantage of deceiving the fish.”
[172] Plutarch, De Sol. Anim. 24.
[173] The Field, of January 2nd, 1904.
[174] Apollonius Sophista, Lexicon Homericum, (ed. Bekker, Berlin 1833), p. 52, was evidently aware of interpretation (1), and also, from his words ἔνιοι δὲ τὴν τρίχα κέρας, of (4). Cf. Plutarch de Sol. an. 24.
[175] “The remarks of the Scholiast here (Od., XII. 251) citing as authority Aristarchus perhaps illustrate fishing tackle as later known. The Homeric tackle was far simpler, a staff shod with a native horn” (Hayman).
[176] In The Confessions of a Beachcomber, pp. 266-8 (London, 1913), the illustrations of pearl-shell fish-hooks in various stages of completion tend to confirm this statement, while the author, Mr. Banfield, inclines to Mr. Minchin’s theory as regards the horn of an ox.
[177] Maspero, Egyptian Archæology, p. 270.
[178] “On Homeric Fishing Tackle,” Jour. of Philology, XIX., 1891.
[179] Described by Mr. Moseley, Notes by a Naturalist on the Challenger, p. 467.
[180] In Victor Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée (Paris, 1903), vol. ii. p. 64 ff. (a work, compact of knowledge and of both classical and modern research, which tracks characters and episodes in Homer to and compares them with Egyptian and Phœnician accounts), is found a very interesting dissertation on Proteus, the guardian of the seals of Poseidon and foreteller of the future (Od., IV.). Bérard holds that the name was simply a Greek form of the Egyptian word Prouiti, or Prouti, which was one of the ascriptions or titles of the kings of Egypt, as to whose knowledge of or association with magicians (who, like Proteus, were capable of transforming themselves or other objects) he cites alike Maspero and the Old Testament. See, however, for other possibilities, P. Weizsäcker in Roscher, Lex. Myth., iii. 3172-3178, who concludes that for us, as for Menelaos or Aristaios, Proteus the shape-shifter is still a very slippery customer.
[181] Otto Keller, Die Antike Tierwelt (Leipzig, 1913), ii. 357.
[182] See infra, p. 201.