CHAPTER II 



HOMER — METHODS OF FISHING 



Whether Homer lived before or after the adoption of fish 

 as a food, we find in the Iliad and Odyssey several references 

 to fishing with the Spear, the Net, the Hand-line, and the Rod. 



It is a point of curious interest that nearly all the references, 

 where methods or weapons of fishing find mention, are made 

 for the purpose of or occur in a simile, which despite the so- 

 called Higher Criticism Mackail says, " In Homer reached 

 perfection." ^ A Homeric comparison, like the parable of the 

 New Testament in its very nature is intended to throw light 

 from the more familiar upon what is less famiHar. The poet 

 cannot intend to illustrate the moderately familiar by what 

 is whoUy strange. In modern writers the subjects of a simile, 

 apart from those drawn from nature, are sometimes modern 

 or new ; in the old they are almost invariably drawn from some 

 weU established custom. 



If so, it follows that to the Greeks of Homer's time (as was 

 the case with the Egyptians before them) fishing with Spear, 

 Net, Line, and Rod were old and famiUar devices. 2 Which 

 of the first three — Spear, Net, Line — ranks the oldest, has (as 



1 Lectures on Greek Poetry, 67 ff. There are nearly three hundred com- 

 parisons in Homer's poems ; but of detailed similes only some two hundred 

 and twenty, of which the Odyssey contains but forty. Miss Gierke {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. 



* 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 diflerent 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. 



74 



