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 Ionians 
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,! 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? the Greeks, when 
swarming from their original Aryan hive and establishing 
themselves on the coast of Asia Minor and in the Islands of 
the Aigean Sea, carried with them and for a long time closely pre- 
served their original habitsof lifeandlivelihood. Descended from 
generations of inland dwellers, eaters of the flesh of wild animals, 
of sheep, etc., they were ignorant of marine fish asa food. Only 
when the population increased more rapidly than the crops, 
did they, profiting by their contact with the Phcenicians, to 
whom in seamanship 3 and, according to some writers, in art 4 
1 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 und Herkunft der 
Indogermanen (Berlin, 1913), pp. 187, 525. 
2 Dey Fischer in dey antiken Litteratuy (Aachen, 1892). 
3 While the early Greeks learned much with regard to navigation from the 
Phoenicians, none of the Homeric nautical terms have been traced to a 
Pheenician 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, 
beaupré, cabine, paquebot, etc. Seymour, p. 322. 
4 “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 
