GREEK AND ROMAN FISHING. 
CHAPTER I 
HOMER—THE POSITION OF FISHERMEN 
Ir is difficult to define accurately or trace separately the 
Lure or the Lore of these two nations, for their methods of 
fishing were practically the same or dove-tailed one into the 
other. Since our authors in both languages frequently 
synchronise, or as in the case of Pliny and Alian the younger 
tongue antedates the elder by a century or more, and since 
this book is based on no zoological system, I shall deal with 
them for the most part in chronological order. 
The opposite page reproduces the figures of the four 
fishermen from the famous Fishermen’s Vase of Phylakopi 
discovered in Melos some twenty years ago.? If the period 
assigned to this, viz. c. 1500 B.c., be accurate, it seems to be 
the oldest Greek representation, at any rate in the A‘gean 
area, depicting anything connected with fishing, and antedates 
the earliest Greek author by four to nine hundred years, in 
1 For several reasons I have anachronously placed this section first instead 
of last. 
2 The representation, reproduced by the kind permission of the Society 
for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, consists of four men carrying in each 
hand a fish by the tail. The absence of boots and ornaments is in keeping 
with their occupation. The fishes with one exception have heads like 
dolphins, similar to the representation of Poseidon with a tiny dolphin in his 
hand. The painting is executed in the ‘‘ black and red’”’ style upon the 
usual white slip. The figures are drawn firmly and boldly according to the 
conventional scheme, shoulders to front and legs in profile; the slim pro- 
portions of the bodies are common to many Mycenzan works. The most 
barbaric features of the drawing are the absence of hands, and the monstrous 
eye in the middle of the cheek. Cf. No. 80 in the British Museum Cat. of 
Gems, which shows a man clad with the characteristic Mycenzan loin cloth 
carrying a fish by a short line attached to its gullet. Excavations at Phylakopi 
in Melos (London, 1904), p. 123, pl. xxii. 
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