SEALS, EELS, PROTEUS 85 
greater beast she may anywhere take, whereof the deep-voiced 
Amphitrite feeds countless flocks.” 
Seals! greedily devour a corpse in the sea (Od., XV. 
480). Il., XXI. 122, 203, extend the pleasant practice to fish 
and eels: ‘‘ around him eels and fishes swarmed, tearing and 
gnawing the fat about his kidneys.”’ 
It is noteworthy that in Greek and Latin literature the 
first fish attaining to the dignity of a name is the Eel.? 
The sea is called ix@vdéac, “ fishy,’’ or perhaps better 
“ fishful,’’ twelve times: the Hellespont only once. Plutarch 
(Symp., IV. 4) had this probably in mind, when he wrote, 
“the heroes encamped by the Hellespont used themselves to a 
spare diet, banishing from their tables all superfluous delicacies 
to such a degree that they abstained from fish.” ’Iy@udec 
happens but once in connection with a river, the Hyllus (I/., XX. 
392). 
Homer seemingly applies it only where he is impressed, 
not by the number of fish obvious to the eye or still remaining 
in, but by the number already taken out of the water. The 
proportion of salt water ‘ fishfuls’ to fresh water ‘ fishfuls ’"— 
13 as against 1—would, if not quite accidental, accord with the 
fact that the early Greeks, whatever be the time at which they 
became Ichthyophagists, set no high store on fresh-water 
fish.3 
1 In Victor Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée (Paris, 1903), vol. ii. p. 64 ff. 
(a work, compact of knowledge and of both classical and modern research, 
which tracks characters and episodes in Homer to and compares them with 
Egyptian and Pheenician accounts), is found a very interesting dissertation on 
Proteus, the guardian of the seals of Poseidon and foreteller of the future 
(Od.,IV.). Bérard holds that the name was simply a Greek form of the 
Egyptian word Prouiti, or Prouti, which was one of the ascriptions or titles 
of the kings of Egypt, as to whose knowledge of or association with magicians 
(who, like Proteus, were capable of transforming themselves or other objects) 
he cites alike Maspero and the Old Testament. See, however, for other 
possibilities, P. Weizsacker in Roscher, Lex. Myth., iii. 3172-3178, who concludes 
that for us, as for Menelaos or Aristaios, Proteus the shape-shifter is still a 
very slippery customer. 
2 Otto Keller, Die Antike Tierwelt (Leipzig, 1913), ii. 357. 
3 See infra, p. 207. 
