It is difficult to define accurately or trace separately the Lure or the Lore of these two nations, for their methods of fishing were practically the same or dove-tailed one into the other. Since our authors in both languages frequently synchronise, or as in the case of Pliny and Ælian the younger tongue antedates the elder by a century or more, and since this book is based on no zoological system, I shall deal with them for the most part in chronological order.

The opposite page reproduces the figures of the four fishermen from the famous Fishermen’s Vase of Phylakopi discovered in Melos some twenty years ago.[123] If the period assigned to this, viz. c. 1500 b.c., be accurate, it seems to be the oldest Greek representation, at any rate in the Ægean area, depicting anything connected with fishing, and antedates the earliest Greek author by four to nine hundred years, in accordance with the varying ages allotted to the Homeric poems.[124]

It is to Homer, whether written by half a dozen different authors or in half a dozen different centuries,[125] as the oldest Greek writer extant that we naturally turn for information about fishermen and fishing. His evidence is not only the earliest, but also the most trustworthy, according to Athenæus. “Homer treats of the art of fishing with greater accuracy than professional writers on the subject such as Cæcilius, Oppian, etc.”[126] —an endorsement from the piscatorial side of the Theocritean ἅλις πάντεσσιν Ὅμηρος.

Neither fishermen nor traders in the Iliad and Odyssey possess any real status. While farmers, more especially pastoral farmers, occupy an acknowledged and—next to the chiefs and warriors—the highest position, no fisherman or trader is regarded as a representative unit of the body, politic or social, or as a contributor to the wealth of the tribe or state, a condition with which that of the fisherfolk in ancient Egypt [127] and in China, both in early times and in the present day, is elsewhere compared and contrasted.[128]

“For trader Homer knows no word.”[129] As traders he represents no Greeks, although the Taphians approximate closely (Od., I. 186). For this three reasons have been assigned:—

First, the Greeks of Homer’s time with the exception of the Phæacians, “who care not for bow or quiver, but for masts, and oars of ships, and gallant barques, wherein rejoicing, they cross the grey sea” (Od., VI. 270), hardly impress us, despite Dr. Leaf’s “The whole attitude of both the Poems is one of maritime daring,”[130] as adventurous sailors.

They disliked long sea voyages; they shrank from spending the night on the water; they would go thrice the distance, if they could but keep in touch with land—and naturally enough, when we remember that for the Homeric boat the Ægean was safe for only a few months of the year.

Their food supply made the sea a hateful necessity. “As much as a mother is sweeter than a stepmother, so much is earth dearer than the grey sea” might have been written as appropriately by Homer as by Antipater centuries later.[131]

Whatever trading existed was in the hands not of the Phæacians, but of the Phœnicians, to whose great port Sidon Homer makes reference more than once.[132] Boldness of navigation, plus guile and gainfulness, characterised the nation; their “tricky trading” (cf. the Levantines of our day)[133] found frequent comment.

A comparison of them with the seamen of Elizabeth’s time shows common traits. Both were “the first that ever burst into the silent seas,” both committed acts of piracy, both kidnapped and enslaved freely. Lest it be objected that the evidence of Od., XIV. 297 and 340 occurs in a fictitious account by Odysseus of himself and so is itself fictitious, let us call as witness the Hebrew prophet Joel[134]: “What have ye to do with Me, O Tyre and Zidon? The children, also, of Judah, and the children of Jerusalem, have ye sold unto the sons of the Grecians.”

The second reason lies in the fact that each Homeric house or each hamlet, although perhaps not each town, apparently supplied nearly all its own wants and was practically self-supporting.

The chief crafts existed, as Hesiod shows, but only in a rudimentary stage; workers there were in gold, silver, bronze, wood, leather, pottery, carpentry. Although they were not “adscripti glebæ,” the proper pride or narrow jealousy of each settlement was strongly averse from calling in craftsmen from outside. Only apparently those “workers for the people,” such as “a prophet, or a healer of ills, or a shipwright, or a godlike minstrel who can delight all by his song,” were free to come and go, as they willed, sure of a welcome: “These are the men who are welcome over all the wide earth.”[135]

The third reason was due to nearly all ordinary trade being effected by barter. Payment was in kine, kind, or service. The ox, probably because all round the most important of possessions, constituted the ordinary measure of value: thus a female slave skilled in embroidery fetches four oxen. Laertes gives twenty for Eurycleia, while much-wooed maidens by gifts from their successful suitors “multiply oxen” for their fathers.

Mentes sails to Temesa with a cargo of “shining iron” to exchange for copper.[136] Then again in Il., VII. 472 ff., “the flowing-haired Achæans bought them wine thence, some for bronze and some for gleaming iron, and some with hides, and some with whole kine, and some with captives.” Among the fishermen of the Indian Ocean, fish-hooks, on the same principle of importance of possession, “the most important to them of all implements, passed as currency and in time became a true money larin, just as did the hoe in China.”[137]

“The talents of gold,”[138] probably Babylonian shekels, whether Hultsch’s heavy or W. Ridgeway’s light one, implied, according to some, a money standard of value. But wrongly, because neither gold nor silver came to coinage in Greece or anywhere else till long after Homer’s day.

Fishermen seem slowly to have acquired some sort of status. Ἁλιεύς, at first meaning a seaman or one connected with the sea, in time denoted also a fisherman. Od., XIX. iii, characterises the well-ordered realm of a “blameless king” as one, in which “the black earth bears wheat and barley, and trees are laden with fruit, and sheep bring forth and fail not, and the sea gives store of fish.”

Any objection that such a kingdom had no actual existence, but was only invented to heighten the hyperbole of laudation of Penelope’s fame, “which goes up to the wide heaven, as doth the fame of a blameless king,” concerns us not at all, for the kingdom whether actual or imaginary is held up as worthy of all praise and admiration. In this our Fish and so our Fishermen have attained some, if small, constituent status.

The period of such attainment cannot be dated, but how and why the status arrived I now try to trace.

Authorities differ widely as to whether the (so-called) Greeks, on leaving Central Asia or whatever their Urheimat, established their first lodgements in Europe or Asia, in Greece Proper or Asia Minor. E. Curtius maintained that the Ionians at any rate, if not all the Greeks, founded their earliest settlements on the coast of Asia Minor, and only later crossed to Greece.

This view finds little favour among most Homeric scholars of the present day,[139] who reverse the theory. They place the first settlement of the immigrant Greeks in European Greece, whence by peaceable permeation or otherwise they subsequently colonised the coasts of Asia Minor and the Islands.

According to Professor K. Schneider[140] the Greeks, when swarming from their original Aryan hive and establishing themselves on the coast of Asia Minor and in the Islands of the Ægean Sea, carried with them and for a long time closely preserved their original habits of life and livelihood. Descended from generations of inland dwellers, eaters of the flesh of wild animals, of sheep, etc., they were ignorant of marine fish as a food. Only when the population increased more rapidly than the crops, did they, profiting by their contact with the Phœnicians, to whom in seamanship[141] and, according to some writers, in art[142] they owed much, begin to realise and utilise the wealth of the harvest to be won from the adjacent seas.[143]

Fishing, followed at first mainly by the very poor to procure a food in low esteem, gradually found itself.

In the Iliad and Odyssey no fish appear at banquets or in the houses of the well-to-do: only in connection with the poorest or starving do they obtain mention.

Meleager of Gadara accounted for this fact—previously noted by Aristotle—by the suggestion that Homer represented his characters as abstaining from fish, because as a Syrian by descent he himself was a total abstainer. The curious omission of fish has been held to indicate that Homer either lived before the adoption of fish as food, or, if not, that the social conditions and habits of diet which he delineates are those of generations before such transition.[144]

The decision, if one be possible, lies for Homeric scholars, and not for a mere seeker after piscatoriana. Even to such an one, however, two alternatives seem clear.

First, if Homer did live after the transition occurred, his descriptions of ancient times and customs unconsciously included habits and conditions of a more modern society.[145]

Second, if he lived before such transition—a supposition, which scarcely consists with the presence in Palæolithic débris of copious remains of fish—passages such as Od., XIX. 109-114, which ranks “a sea-given store of fish” a constituent of a well-ordered realm, and Il., XVI. 746, where “This man would satisfy many by searching (or diving) for oysters,” are interpolations by later writers.

It is difficult otherwise to reconcile or explain conflicting passages. How, for instance, can the dictum, that “Fish as a food was in the Poems only used by the very poor or starving,” be made to harmonise with Il., XVI. 746, just quoted?[146] If it be confined solely to the Odyssey, a more plausible case may possibly be presented.

Another suggestion, not quite similar, yet not repugnant, is Seymour’s. “The Poet represented the life which was familiar to himself and his hearers. Each action, each event might be given by tradition, or might be the product of the poet’s imagination, but the details which show the customs of the age, and which furnish the colours of the picture, are taken from the life of the poet’s time. His interest is centred in the action of the story, and the introduction of unusual manners and standard of life would only distract the attention of his hearers.”

Mackail, perhaps, concludes the whole matter. “The Homeric world is a world imagined by Homer: it is placed in a time, evidently thought of as far distant, though there are no exact marks of chronology any more than there are in the Morte d’Arthur.”[147]

Homer’s close knowledge of the many devices for the capture of fish, and his lively interest in the habits of fish quite apart from actual fishing seem inconsistent with Schneider’s contention of Greek ichthyic ignorance.

Fish, as we have seen, came gradually to be considered as much a part of natural wealth as the fruits of the ground or herds of cattle. And yet in all the pictures with which Hephæstus adorns the Shield of Achilles, pictures of common ever-present objects, first of the great phenomena of Nature—Earth, Sea, Sun, Moon, and Stars—and then of the various events and occupations that make up the round of human life—in all these pictures, which as a series of illustrations of early life and manners are obviously a document of first-rate importance, no form of sea-faring has any place. Ships of war, maritime commerce, and fishing are alike unrepresented.[148]

No satisfactory explanation of this omission has as yet seen the light. The design of The Shield, say some, came from an inland country, such as Assyria. Others that Homer described some foreign work of art fabricated by people who knew not the sea, but Helbig points out that the omission consists with the references to ships and sea-faring elsewhere in Homer. No commerce or occupation, which could be placed side by side with farming in a picture of Greek life, then existed. If Mr. Lang’s view—which possesses the pleasant property of incapacity of either proof or disproof—that The Shield was simply an ideal work of art had been more generally borne in mind, we should have been spared endless comment.

In his ascription of The Shield to Assyrian or Phœnician influence Monro finds himself at variance with Sir Arthur Evans. Even if his statement, “the recent progress of archæology has thrown so much light on the condition of Homeric art,” be accurate and the deductions from such recent progress be justifiable, the still more recent progress in the same science (according to Evans) ousts the Assyrian or Phœnician in favour of a Cretan parentage.

“It is clear that some vanguard of the Aryan Greek immigrants came into contact with this Minoan culture at a time when it was still in its flourishing condition. The evidence of Homer is conclusive. Arms and armour described in the poems are those of the Minoan prime; the fabled Shield of Achilles, like that of Herakles described by Hesiod, with its elaborate scenes and variegated metal work, reflects the masterpieces of the Minoan craftsmen in the full vigour of their art. Even the lyre to which the minstrel sang was a Minoan invention.”[149]

The suggestion that both authorities are really in agreement and that the influence at work may be traced back ultimately to the early Assyrian, i.e. Sumerian, culture, even if Evans holds “that the first quickening impulse came to Crete from Egypt and not from the Oriental side,” seems, on present data, untenable.

Till twenty years ago it was generally accepted that no character of Homer ever sailed for recreation, or fished for sport. They were far too near the primitive life to find any joy in such pursuits. Men scarcely ever hunted or fished for mere pleasure. These occupations were not pastimes; they were counted as hard labour. Hunting, fishing, and laying snares for birds in Homer and even in the classical periods had but one aim, food.[150]

The Poet expressly mentions the hardships (ἂλγεα, Od., IX. 121) of hunters in traversing forest and mountains. Nowhere does he give any indication of sport in hunting or fishing, except perhaps in the case of the wild boar and in the delight of Artemis “taking her pastime in the chase of boars and swift deer,”[151] where the word, παίζουσιν, would seem surely to indicate pleasure in sport.

But the recent discovery at Tiryns of a fresco where two ladies are depicted standing in a car at a boar-hunt[152] —perhaps “in at the death”—certainly makes for considerable qualification, and, if succeeded by similar finds, for complete reversal of the non-sporting theory.

On Circe’s Island, Odysseus strikes down “a tall antlered stag” as “he was coming down from his pasture in the woodland to the river, for verily the might of the Sun was sore upon him.” He bears the “huge beast” across his neck to the black ship of his companions, who soon devour it. This is the only mention of venison in Homer (Od., X. 158 ff.).