1 8 FISHERIES AND FISHERMEN 



CHAPTER III. 



THE TIMES OF THE CLASSIC WRITERS. 



All the old ones 

 He hath sent a fishing. 



Massi7iger. 



Many allusions to topics connected with fishing are con- 

 tained in classical works, though they do not frequently occur 

 in the earlier writers. Homer, for instance, merely dedicates 

 a short epigram, of no great merit, to some fisherboys who 

 had pleased him ; while Hesiod, so far as we remember, 

 except in a single line, is altogether silent. Thunnies, in 

 especial, afforded excellent sport with the people of ancient 

 Greece, and are a frequent subject of reference. Their 

 capture was effected by driving them in shoals into the 

 harbour, and then battering them to death with harpoons 

 and instruments of every kind, after the method still 

 practised in Sardinia, where lagoons seven miles in length 

 are divided by thick partitions of reeds, and the thunnies 

 are beaten to death within the enclosures. This barbarous 

 form of proceeding supplied ./Eschylus with a vivid image 

 of the destruction of the host of Xerxes, an image placed 

 withj^more poetic than dramatic aptness in the mouth of 

 the Persian messenger, who describes the scene to Atossa. 

 " But the Greeks kept striking," says the messenger, 

 "hacking us with the fragments of oars and splinters of 



