342 FISHING WITH THE HAIR OF THE DEAD 



I subjoin a translation : — 



" And so hastening over the rugged ground he came unto 

 the unsightly shores, and there seated on a rock tied the rod 

 with dead hair, and taking bait and feeding with little morsels, 

 drew the hook along (or up and down) in the deep pool. But 

 as naught was caught," and as awrrj fxlv rj fxr^pivOog ovhtv 

 £'(T7ra<Tff,i both in its literal and proverbial sense held true, he 

 returned to the place whence he came, the place of corpses. 



The Editors' introduction to the Papyrus runs : " The 

 matter of the poem is hardly less remarkable than the manner 

 in which it was written down. The subject is the adventures 

 of a man whose name is not given. After some talk, the hero 

 proceeds to a place which is full of corpses being devoured by 

 dogs. He then makes his way to the sea-coast and proceeds 

 to sit down on a rock, and fish with Rod and Line. He did 

 not, however, succeed in catching anything : we then revert to 

 the corpses, the gruesome picture of which is further elaborated. 

 The language and style of the composition, the literary qualities 

 of which are poor enough, clearly show its late date, not pos- 

 terior to the second century." 



I am indebted to Professor Grenfell for further information. 

 " The Papyrus," he writes me, " is certainly a poem describing 

 the descent of some one to the under-world. An Austrian, 

 A. Swoboda,2 wrote an article to show that it belonged to a 

 Naassene^ psalm describing the descent of Christ to Hades. 

 The beginning of a poem on this subject, in the same metre 

 as the Papyrus, is known from Hippolytus, Refutatio Hereti- 

 corum. The second column of the Papyrus seems to be an 

 address to a Deity, and would fit in with Swoboda's theory. 



"The composition being, in any case of a mystical and 

 imaginative character, I do not think the description of the 

 fishing incident is to be regarded as in any way real, and, 

 from the fisher's point of view, it is not to be taken literally. 

 No parallel for the use of dead mens hair in fishing has ever been 

 suggested. In none of the Papyri are there any details about 



1 Aristophanes, Thesm., 928. Cf. also Wasps, 174-6. 



- Wiener Studien, XXVII. (1905), pp. 299, ff. 



3 Or early Gnostics, also called Ophites, who honoured serpents. 



