Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

CHAPTER IIHOMER—METHODS OF FISHINGWhether Homer lived before or after the adoption of fishas a food, we find in the Iliad and Odyssey several referencesto 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 madefor the purpose of or occur in a simile, which despite the socalledHigher Criticism Mackail says, " In Homer reachedperfection." A Homeric ^comparison, like the parable of theNew Testament in its very nature is intended to throw lightfrom the more familiar upon what is less famiHar. The poetcannot intend to illustrate the moderately familiar by whatis whoUy strange. In modern writers the subjects of a simile,apart from those drawn from nature, are sometimes modernor new ; in the old they are almost invariably drawn from someweU established custom.If so, it follows that to the Greeks of Homer's time (as wasthe case with the Egyptians before them) fishing with Spear,Net, Line, and Rod were old and famiUar devices. 2 Whichof the first three—Spear, Net, Line—ranks the oldest, has (as1 Lectures on Greek Poetry, 67 ff. There are nearly three hundred comparisonsin Homer's poems ; but of detailed similes only some two hundredand twenty, of which the Odyssey contains but forty. Miss Gierke {FamiliarStudies in Homer, p. 182 ff.) shows that angling is mentioned chiefly in similes,which may, perhaps, indicate that the poet knew that this particular methodwas not practised in the days in which his poem is placed.* Among the arguments elaborated by Payne Knight and others to provethat the Iliad and Odyssey were written by different authors and dealt withfar diflerent times, one is based on the fact that certain methods of fowlingand fishing are only found in the Odyssey. If this argument be pushed to itslogical end, it should be easy to prove that the ages of Shakespeare and BenJonson, which overlapped, were really far apart, because, while the lattermentions the familiar use of tobacco, the former never once alludes to it.74