GREEK AND PHCENICIAN SAILORS 65 



" For trader Homer knows no word." ^ As traders he 

 represents no Greeks, although the Taphians approximate 

 closely {Od., I, 186). For this three reasons have been 

 assigned : — 



First, the Greeks of Homer's time with the exception of 

 the Phaeacians, " who care not for bow or quiver, but for 

 masts, and oars of ships, and gallant barques, wherein rejoicing, 

 they cross the grey sea " {Od., VI. 270), hardly impress us, 

 despite Dr. Leaf's " The whole attitude of both the Poems is 

 one of maritime daring," 2 as adventurous sailors. 



They disliked long sea voyages ; they shrank from spending 

 the night on the water ; they would go thrice the distance, if 

 they could but keep in touch with land — and naturally enough, 

 when we remember that for the Homeric boat the iEgean was 

 safe for only a few months of the year. 



Their food supply made the sea a hateful necessity. " As 

 much as a mother is sweeter than a stepmother, so much is 

 earth dearer than the grey sea " might have been written as 

 appropriately by Homer as by Antipater centuries later. 3 



Whatever trading existed was in the hands not of the 

 Phaeacians, but of the Phoenicians, to whose great port Sidon 



on the mainland." Wei-Chung W. Yen : Fourth International Fishing 

 Congress at Washington, 1908. Bulletin of Bureau of Fisheries, No. 664, 

 P- 376. 



* Professor T. D. Seymour, Life in the Homeric Age (London, 1907), p. 284, 

 who might have added that Homer knows no general word either for trade ; 

 to traders, iTpT)KT9)pis {Od., VIII. 162) come nearest probably. From 

 Seymour's work, which sheds much valuable light on Homeric pursuits, I 

 quote and borrow frequently. 



* See Class. Joiirn. ; Chicago, XIII. (1917), "The Leaf-Ramsay Theory of 

 the Trojan War," where he uses these words in reply to Maury, who holds that 

 the view expounded in Leaf's Troy that the War was an economic struggle 

 by the Greeks for trade expansion to the fertile lands of the Euxine and for 

 the extinction of the tolls exacted by the Trojans is untenable, because (inter 

 alia) of their want of nautical enterprise. In favour of Leaf there are, how- 

 ever, mentions (i) of a voyage from Crete to Egypt in five days, and (2) the 

 big V7]vs (poprls eiipua twice mentioned. 



* Cf. however, Geikie, Love of Nature among the Romans, p. 300, " Sub- 

 divided by the waters of the iEgean into innumerable islands, where the 

 scattered communities could only keep in touch by boat or ship, Greece 

 naturally became a nursery of seamen. The descriptive and musical epithets 

 applied to the deep in Greek poetry show how much its endless variety of surface 

 and colour, its beauty and its majesty, appealed to the Hellenic imagination. 

 S. H. Butcher, Harvard Lectures (London, 1904), p. 49, speaks of the Greeks 

 as " born sailors and traders, who from the dawn of history looked upon the 

 sea as their natural highway." Contrast with this Plato, Laws, iv. 705A, 

 aKixvphv Kol viKphv yetT6yr}ixa, "a bitter and brackish neighbour." 



