64 HOMER—POSITION OF FISHERMEN 
accordance with the varying ages allotted to the Homeric 
poems.! 
It is to Homer, whether written by half a dozen different 
authors or in half a dozen different centuries,? as the oldest 
Greek writer extant that we naturally turn for information 
about fishermen and fishing. His evidence is not only the 
earliest, but also the most trustworthy, according to Athenzus. 
“Homer treats of the art of fishing with greater accuracy 
than professional writers on the subject such as Cecilius, 
Oppian, etc.’”’3—an endorsement from the piscatorial side 
of the Theocritean adic mavrecow “Ounpoc. 
Neither fishermen nor traders in the Iliad and Odyssey 
possess any real status. While farmers, more especially 
pastoral farmers, occupy an acknowledged and—next to the 
chiefs and warriors—the highest position, no fisherman or trader 
is regarded as a representative unit of the body, politic or 
social, or as a contributor to the wealth of the tribe or state, 
a condition with which that of the fisherfolk in ancient Egypt 4 
and in China, both in early times and in the present day, is 
elsewhere compared and contrasted.5 
1 Equally famous, perhaps even more so, is the representation of a fish 
found in 1882 near Vettersfelde in Lower Lausitz, but now in Berlin. It is 
the shield-sign of a Scythian chief, made in gold repoussé work early in the 
fifth century B.c. See the publications of A. Furtwangler, Der Goldfund von 
Vettersfelde (Berlin, 1883), (=id. Kleine Schriften (Munchen, 1912), I. 469 ff. 
pl. 18); cf. E. H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks (Cambridge, 1913), p. 236 ff. 
fig. 146. Furtwdngler thinks that the fish may have been meant for the 
Thymus alalonga. 
2 Homer, according to Sir A. Evans, “is at most sub-Mycenzan, his age 
is more recent than the latest stage of anything that can be called Minoan or 
Mycenzan,” Jour. Hellenic Studies, xxxii, (1912) 287. This would seem to 
place Homer about the twelfth century, 
8 Deipnosophiste, I. ch. 22. 
4 Herodotus (II. 164) describing the different grades of Egyptian society 
begins with the priests and ends with the boatmen, among whom he appar- 
ently includes the fishermen. Their humble position is confirmed by other 
evidence; see postea 333. In Laconia fishing was confined to the Helots 
and Tlepfoixo:. 
5 “With the division of the people of the Empire into four distinct 
classes—scholars, agriculturists, artisans, and merchants—the men and women 
who followed the trade of fishing for a livelihood were placed in an anomalous 
position from not being included in any of the four classes. Thus socially 
ostracised to a certain extent, they clung to themselves, forming groups or 
colonies of their own along the coasts or on isolated islands. They lived ina 
world of their own, knowing nothing of the affairs of their country and caring 
less. To this day they do not come into direct contact with their countrymen 
