CHAPTER II 
HOMER—METHODS OF FISHING 
WHETHER Homer lived before or after the adoption of fish 
as a food, we find in the I/ad and Odyssey several references 
to fishing with the Spear, the Net, the Hand-line, and the Rod. 
It is a point of curious interest that nearly all the references, 
where methods or weapons of fishing find mention, are made 
for the purpose of or occur in a simile, which despite the so- 
called Higher Criticism Mackail says, “In Homer reached 
perfection.””!_ A Homeric comparison, like the parable of the 
New Testament in its very nature is intended to throw light 
from the more familiar upon what is less familiar. The poet 
cannot intend to illustrate the moderately familiar by what 
is wholly strange. In modern writers the subjects of a simile, 
apart from those drawn from nature, are sometimes modern 
or new ; in the old they are almost invariably drawn from some 
well established custom. 
If so, it follows that to the Greeks of Homer’s time (as was 
the case with the Egyptians before them) fishing with Spear, 
Net, Line, and Rod were old and familiar devices.2 Which 
of the first three—Spear, Net, Line—ranks the oldest, has (as 
1 Lectures on Greek Poetry, 67 ff. There are nearly three hundred com- 
parisons in Homer’s poems; but of detailed similes only some two hundred 
and twenty, of which the Odyssey contains but forty. Miss Clerke (Familiar 
Studies in Homer, p. 182 ff.) shows that angling is mentioned chiefly in similes, 
which may, perhaps, indicate that the poet knew that this particular method 
was not practised in the days in which his poem is placed. 
2 Among the arguments elaborated by Payne Knight and others to prove 
that the Ihad and Odyssey were written by different authors and dealt with 
far different times, one is based on the fact that certain methods of fowling 
and fishing are only found in the Odyssey. If this argument be pushed to its 
logical end, it should be easy to prove that the ages of Shakespeare and Ben 
Jonson, which overlapped, were really far apart, because, while the latter 
mentions the familiar use of tobacco, the former never once alludes to it. 
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