THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES 71 



no exact marks of chronology any more than there are in the 

 Morte d' Arthur." 1 



Homer's close knowledge of the many devices for the capture 

 of fish, and his Uvely interest in the habits of fish quite apart 

 from actual fishing seem inconsistent with Schneider's con- 

 tention 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 

 Hephaestus 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 unrepre- 

 sented. 2 



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 Phoenician 

 influence Monro finds himself at variance with Sir Arthur 

 Evans. Even if his statement, " the recent progress of archaeo- 

 logy has thrown so much Ught 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 



^ J. W. Mackail, Lectures on Greek Poetry (London, 1910), p. 47. 

 » Monro's Note on Iliad, XVIII. 468-608. 



