GREEK AND PHNICIAN 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 Pheacians, “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 Aigean 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. 
Whatever trading existed was in the hands not of the 
Pheacians, 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, 
Pp. 376. 
1 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, mpyxripes (Od., VIII. 162) come nearest probably. From 
Seymour’s work, which sheds much valuable light on Homeric pursuits, I 
quote and borrow frequently. 
2 See Class. Journ. ; 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 Tyoy 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 (1) of a voyage from Crete to Egypt in five days, and (2) the 
big vnis popris edpeta twice mentioned. 
3 Cf. however, Geikie, Love of Nature among the Romans, p. 300, “‘ Sub- 
divided by the waters of the Aigean 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, 
GApupdy kal mpdy yerrovnua, ‘a bitter and brackish neighbour.” 
