Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

—•392 THE FIGHT BETWEEN MARDUK AND TIAMATHow pigmy in comparison with Tiamat appears the decadentsea-dragon mentioned by Ignatius, on whose gut, 120 feet long,in the Hbrary of Constantinople were written in letters of goldthe Iliad and the Odyssey !Allied with Tiamat in her ftght were—" Spawned sea-serpents,Sharp of teeth and cruel of fang."" With poison instead of blood she has filled their bodies,And mighty tempests, and the fishman,^ and the ram,^They bear merciless weapons without fear of the fight."Beowulf in his famous battle with the Dragon stands outas nobler and braver than Marduk, inasmuch as he, a man,to free his country from the Dragon's toll of death and ravage,of his own volition seeks out the monster. He " attacks alone,for being altogether fearless he scorned to take an army againstthe foe," whereas Marduk—the god—was compelled to theduel, since he was unable to enlist a single god. Beowulf" counted not the worm's warring for aught," whereas Mardukamong his preparations," Made a net to enclose the inward parts of TiamatAnd the four winds he set so that nothing of her might escape."The protagonists (literally protagonists, for behind Mardukcowered the shrinking gods, and behind Tiamat her spouseand her spawned monsters) on meeting consume time, quitein the grand Homeric manner, by launching taunts and reproachesat each other.Eventually Marduk, after spreading out his net to catchher, seems to have anticipated the gassing tactics of the Hunsby many millenniums, and owing to the absence of a maskwith even greater success, for" The evil wind, that was behind, he let loose in her face,'As Tiamat opened her mouth to its full extent.He drove in the evil wind, while she had not yet shut her lips.^Aquarius.* Capricorn.' Similarly in the Gigantomachy as figured on the Siphnian Treasuryat Delphi, jEoIus, god of the winds, helps the deities against the giants bydeflating two bags of wind. He is represented by an Ionian sculptor as