342 FISHING WITH THE HAIR OF THE DEAD 
I subjoin a translation :— 
“ And so hastening over the rugged ground he came unto 
the unsightly shores, and there seated on a rock tied the rod 
with dead hair, and taking bait and feeding with little morsels, 
drew the hook along (or up and down) in the deep pool. But 
as naught was caught,” and as atrn piv » pnpwOdc¢ ovdev 
toragev,t both in its literal and proverbial sense held true, he 
returned to the place whence he came, the place of corpses. 
The Editors’ introduction to the Papyrus runs: ‘“ The 
matter of the poem is hardly less remarkable than the manner 
in which it was written down. The subject is the adventures 
of a man whose name is not given. After some talk, the hero 
proceeds to a place which is full of corpses being devoured by 
dogs. He then makes his way to the sea-coast and proceeds 
to sit down on a rock, and fish with Rod and Line. He did 
not, however, succeed in catching anything: we then revert to 
the corpses, the gruesome picture of which is further elaborated. 
The language and style of the composition, the literary qualities 
of which are poor enough, clearly show its late date, not pos- 
terior to the second century.” 
I am indebted to Professor Grenfell for further information. 
“The Papyrus,” he writes me, “is certainly a poem describing 
the descent of some one to the under-world. An Austrian, 
A. Swoboda,? wrote an article to show that it belonged to a 
Naassene? psalm describing the descent of Christ to Hades. 
The beginning of a poem on this subject, in the same metre 
as the Papyrus, is known from Hippolytus, Refutatio Heret1- 
corum. The second column of the Papyrus seems to be an 
address to a Deity, and would fit in with Swoboda’s theory. 
“The composition being, in any case of a mystical and 
imaginative character, I do not think the description of the 
fishing incident is to be regarded as in any way real, and, 
from the fisher’s point of view, it is not to be taken literally. 
No parallel for the use of dead men’s hatr in fishing has ever been 
suggested. In none of the Papyri are there any details about 
1 Aristophanes, Thesm., 928. Cf. also Wasps, 174-6. 
2 Wiener Studien, XXVII. (1905), pp. 299, ff. 
3 Or early Gnostics, also called Ophites, who honoured serpents. 
