Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

—GREEK AND PHCENICTAN SAILORS 65" For trader Homer knows no word." ^ As traders herepresents no Greeks, although the Taphians approximateclosely {Od., I. 186), For this three reasons have beenassigned :First, the Greeks of Homer's time with the exception ofthe Phseacians, " who care not for bow or quiver, but formasts, and oars of ships, and gallant barques, wherein rejoicing,they cross the grey sea " {Od., VI. 270), hardly impress us,despite Dr.Leaf's " The whole attitude of both the Poems isone of maritime daring," 2 as adventurous sailors.They dishked long sea voyages ; they shrank from spendingthe night on the water ; they would go thrice the distance, ifthey could but keep in touch with land—and naturally enough,when we remember that for the Homeric boat the .^Egean wassafe for only a few months of the year.Their food supply made the sea a hateful necessity." Asmuch as a mother is sweeter than a stepmother, so much isearth dearer than the grey sea " might have been written asappropriately by Homer as by Antipater centuries later. 3Whatever trading existed was in the hands not of thePhaeacians, but of the Phoenicians, to whose great port Sidonon the mainland." Wei-Chung W. Yen: Fourth International FishingCongress at Washington, 1908. Bulletin of Bureau of Fisheries, No. 664,P- 376.1 Professor T. D. Seymour, Life in the Homeric ^g'e (London, 1907), p. 284,who might have added that Homer knows no general word either for trade ;to traders, np-nKTvpes {Od., VIII. 162) come nearest probably. FromSeymour's work, which sheds much valuable light on Homeric pursuits, Iquote and borrow frequently.* See Class. Journ. ; Chicago, XIII. (1917). " The Leaf-Ramsay Theory ofthe Trojan War," where he uses these words in reply to Maury, who holds thatthe view expounded in Leaf's Troy that the War was an economic struggleby the Greeks for trade expansion to the fertile lands of the Euxine and forthe extinction of the tolls exacted by the Trojans is untenable, because {interalia) of their want of nautical enterprise. In favour of Leaf there are, however,mentions (i) of a voyage from Crete to Egypt in five days, and (2) thebig vnvs (poprls evpe7a twice mentioned.* Cf. however, Geikie, Love of Nature among the Romans, p. 300, " Subdividedby the waters of the .lEgean into innumerable islands, where thescattered communities could only keep in touch by boat or ship, Greecenaturally became a nursery of seamen. The descriptive and musical epithetsapplied to the deep in Greek poetry show how much its endless variety of surfaceand colour, its beauty and its majesty, appealed to the Hellenic imagination.S. H. Butcher, Harvard Lectures (London, 1904), p. 49, speaks of the Greeksas " born sailors and traders, who from the dawn of history looked upon thesea as their natural highway." Contrast with this Plato, Laws, iv. 705A,aXjuupbp Ka\ iriKphv yeirdi/Tjua, "a bitter and brackish neighbour."