GREEK AND ROMAN FISHING/ 



CHAPTER I 



HOMER — THE POSITION OF FISHERMEN 



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 ^lian 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. 2 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 ^gean 

 area, depicting anything connected with fishing, and antedates 

 the earliest Greek author by four to nine hundred years, in 



^ For several reasons I have anachronously placed this section first instead 

 of last. 



2 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 shp. The figures are drawn firmly and boldly according to the 

 conventional scheme, shoulders to front and legs in profile ; the slim pro- 

 portions of the bodies are common to many Mycenoean 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 Mycensean loin cloth 

 carrying a fish by a short line attached to its gullet. Excavations at Phylakopi 

 in Melos (London, 1904), p. 123, pi. xxii. 



63 



