Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

2—THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES 71no exact marks of chronology any more than thereare in theMorte d' Arthur." 1Homer's close knowledge of the many devices for the captureof fish, and his Uvely interest in the habits of fish quite apartfrom actual fishing seem inconsistent with Schneider's contentionof Greek ichthyic ignorance.Fish, as we have seen, came gradually to be considered asmuch a part of natural wealth as the fruits of the ground orherds of cattle. And yet in all the pictures with whichHephaestus adorns the Shield of Achilles, pictures of commonever-present objects, first of the great phenomena of NatureEarth, Sea, Sun, Moon, and Stars—and then of the variousevents and occupations that make up the round of human lifein all these pictures, which as a series of illustrations of earlylife and manners are obviously a document of first-rateimportance, no form of sea-faring has any place. Ships ofwar, maritime commerce, and fishing are alike unrepresented.No satisfactory explanation of this omission has as yet seenthe light. The design of The Shield, say some, came from aninland country, such as Assyria.Others that Homer describedsome foreign work of art fabricated by people who knew notthe sea, but Helbig points out that the omission consists withthe references to ships and sea-faring elsewhere in Homer.No commerce or occupation, which could be placed side byside with farming in a picture of Greek life, then existed. IfMr. Lang's view—which possesses the pleasant property ofincapacity of either proof or disproof—that The Shield wassimply an ideal work of art had been more generally borne inmind, we should have been spared endless comment.In his ascription of The Shield to Assyrian or Phoenicianinfluence Monro finds himself at variance with Sir ArthurEvans. Even if his statement, " the recent progress of archaeologyhas thrown so much Ught on the condition of Homericart," be accurate and the deductions from such recent progressbe justifiable, the still more recent progress in the same science^J. W. Mackail, Lectures on Greek Poetry (London, 1910), p. 47.» Monro's Note on Iliad, XVIII. 468-608.