THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES 7 
no exact marks of chronology any more than there are in the 
Morte d’Arthur.”’ ! 
Homer’s close knowledge of the many devices for the capture 
of fish, and his lively interest in the habits of fish quite apart 
from actual fishing seem inconsistent with Schneider’s con- 
tention of Greek ichthyic ignorance. 
Fish, as we have seen, came gradually to be considered as 
much a part of natural wealth as the fruits of the ground or 
herds of cattle. And yet in all the pictures with which 
Hephaestus adorns the Shield of Achilles, pictures of common 
ever-present objects, first of the great phenomena of Nature— 
Earth, Sea, Sun, Moon, and Stars—and then of the various 
events and occupations that make up the round of human life— 
in all these pictures, which as a series of illustrations of early 
life and manners are obviously a document of first-rate 
importance, no form of sea-faring has any place. Ships of 
war, maritime commerce, and fishing are alike unrepre- 
sented.? 
No satisfactory explanation of this omission has as yet seen 
the light. The design of The Shield, say some, came from an 
inland country, such as Assyria. Others that Homer described 
some foreign work of art fabricated by people who knew not 
the sea, but Helbig points out that the omission consists with 
the references to ships and sea-faring elsewhere in Homer. 
No commerce or occupation, which could be placed side by 
side with farming in a picture of Greek life, then existed. If 
Mr. Lang’s view—which possesses the pleasant property of 
incapacity of either proof or disproof—that The Shield was 
simply an ideal work of art had been more generally borne in 
mind, we should have been spared endless comment. 
In his ascription of. The Shield to Assyrian or Pheenician 
influence Monro finds himself at variance with Sir Arthur 
Evans. Even if his statement, “ the recent progress of archzo- 
logy has thrown so much light on the condition of Homeric 
art,’’ be accurate and the deductions from such recent progress 
be justifiable, the still more recent progress in the same science 
1 J. W. Mackail, Lectures on Greek Poetry (London, 1910), p. 47. 
2 Monro’s Note on Iliad, XVIII. 468-608, 
