68 HOMER— POSITION OF FISHERMEN 



all praise and admiration. In this our Fish and so our Fisher- 

 men have attained some, if small, constituent status. 



The period of such attainment cannot be dated, but how 

 and why the status arrived I now try to trace. 



Authorities differ widely as to whether the (so-called) 

 Greeks, on leaving Central Asia or whatever their Urheimat, 

 established their first lodgements in Europe or Asia, in Greece 

 Proper or Asia Minor. E. Curtius maintained that the lonians 

 at any rate, if not all the Greeks, founded their earliest settle- 

 ments on the coast of Asia Minor, and only later crossed to 

 Greece. 



This view finds little favour among most Homeric scholars 

 of the present day,i who reverse the theory. They place the 

 first settlement of the immigrant Greeks in European Greece, 

 whence by peaceable permeation or otherwise they subsequently 

 colonised the coasts of Asia Minor and the Islands. 



According to Professor K. Schneider 2 the Greeks, when 

 swarming from their original Aryan hive and establishing 

 themselves on the coast of Asia Minor and in the Islands of 

 the iEgean Sea, carried with them and for a long time closely pre- 

 served their original habits of life and Hvelihood. Descended from 

 generations of inland dwellers, eaters of the flesh of wild animals, 

 of sheep, etc., they were ignorant of marine fish as a food. Only 

 when the population increased more rapidly than the crops, 

 did they, profiting by their contact with the Phoenicians, to 

 whom in seamanship "^ and, according to some writers, in art * 



^ See, however, Hogarth's Ionia and the East, pp. 8, 120. A fish, the Eel, 

 plays an important part in the attempt to determine the original home of the 

 Indo-European family. See S. Feist, Kultur, Ausbreitung unci Herkimft der 

 Indogermanen (Berlin, 1913), pp. 187, 525. 



' Der Fischer in der antiken Littera'ur (Aachen, 1892). 



* While the early Greeks learned much with regard to navigation from the 

 Phoenicians, none of the Homeric nautical terms have been traced to a 

 Phoenician source, as might have been expected in view of the large number 

 of such terms which the English language has borrowed from the Dutch, such 

 as ahoy, boom, skipper, sloop, etc. The French has taken from the English, 

 beauprd, cabine, paqueboi, etc. Seymour, p. 322. 



* " The choice of the subjects (in The Shield of Achilles), especially the 

 absence of mythological subjects, the arrangement of the scenes in concentric 

 bands, and the peculiar technique, all point to oriental, i.e. in the main to 

 Phoenician and Assyrian influence. In these respects the earliest actual 

 Greek work known to us by description, viz. The Chest of Cypselus [c. 700 

 B.C.), consisting of cedar wood, ivory, and gold, and richly adorned (according 



