88 HOMER AND HESIOD— HOMER'S DEATH 



To which they made answer, 



" ' What caught we, we left ; what caught we not, we carry,' ^ 



Homer, however, caught not on, until he was told that the key 

 of ' what ' was not fish, but lice. 2 



" Remembering him of the oracle that the end of hfe was 

 upon him, he makes the epitaph for his own tomb. Arising 

 thence, he shpped in the mud, falling on his rib, and on the third 

 day, so men say, died. And he was buried in los." 



This is the epitaph — 



*Evddde t\]V Uprjv Ke(f>a\y]v KaTo. yaia KaXvirrei, 

 'AvSpup ripuiwv Koafi'fjTopa, Qelov "Ofxripou. 



or 



" Here Earth has hid that holy head of thine, 

 Marshal of heroes. Homer the divine." 3 



The story of Hesiod after his victory over Homer as set 

 forth in The Contest repays telling. 



He journeyed at once to Delphi to give the first fruits of 

 his victory as a votive offering to the Oracle — and here let us 

 note how in early times, certainly down to the time of Xenophon, 

 the Greeks at important events in their Uves resorted to some 

 such fane for guidance. ■* 



1 From' Anth. Pal., IX. 448. 



'Epdrrjcrts 'Ofiripov, 

 ''AvSpes utt' *ApKa5i7?s aKi-^ropes, ^ ^'e;^oyU6i' ti ; 



'AvraTrSKpiffis 'Ap/caSojf. 

 "Otrcr' fXofjLev, Knr6ix«rQ\ iiaff' ovx eKo/xfU, (pfpSjxiffOa, 



which may perhaps be rendered in rhyme, 



" Fishers from Arcady, have we aught ? 

 Our catch, we left ; we bear, what we ne'er caught ! " 



* It suggests itself to me that in the answer to the riddle there is just 

 possibly a play within a play, or a double latent meaning, for the word (pdt\p 

 denotes not only a louse, but also a fish of the Remora kind. Perhaps this 

 humour is too subtle even for a class so noted for " calliditas," or shrewd wit, 

 as Greek fishermen are reputed to have been. 



3 Anth. Pal., VII. 3. Koffjx-fiTopa 1 prefer to translate " marshal," its 

 first meaning, rather than " adorner " adopted by Coleridge, as being far 

 stronger, and more fitting for a poet who had " marshalled " on his stage of 

 the Iliad so many heroes. Herodotus states that the people of los (not Homer) 

 wrote the epitaph at a subsequent date. 



* It was on the advice of Socrates that Xenophon consulted the oracle 

 at Delphi, before he set forth for the campaign in Asia, which forms the story 

 of his Anabasis. Tablets discovered in Epirus in 1877 by C. Carapanos {see 

 Dodone ct ses Ruines, Paris, 1878) give examples of questions addressed to the 



