Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

AND TRADERS 67The third reason was due to nearly all ordinary tradebeing effected by barter. Payment was in kine, kind, orservice. The ox, probably because all round the mostimportant of possessions,constituted the ordinary measure ofvalue : thus a female slave skilled in embroidery fetches fouroxen. Laertes gives twenty for Eurycleia, while much-wooedmaidens by gifts from their successful suitors " multiplyoxen " for their fathers.Mentes sails to Temesa with a cargo of " shining iron " toexchange for copper. ^ Then again in //., VII. 472 ff., " theflowing-haired Achaeans bought them wine thence, some forbronze and some for gleaming iron, and some with hides,and some with whole kine, and some with captives," Amongthe fishermen of the Indian Ocean, fish-hooks, on the sameprinciple of importance of possession, " the most importantto them of all implements, passed as currency and intime became a true money larin, just as did the hoe inChina." 2" The talents of gold," 3 probably Babylonian shekels,whether Hultsch's heavy or W. Ridgeway's hght one, implied,according to some, a money standard of value. But wrongly,because neither gold nor silver came to coinage in Greece oran5rwhere else till long after Homer's day.Fishermen seem slowly to have acquired some sort ofstatus, 'AAtEvc, at first meaning a seaman or one connectedwith the sea, in time denoted also a fisherman.Od., XIX. iii,characterises the well-ordered realm of a " blameless king "as one, in which " the black earth bears wheat and barley,and trees are laden with fruit, and sheep bring forth and failnot, and the sea gives store offish."Any objection that such a kingdom had no actual existence,but was only invented to heighten the hyperbole of laudationof Penelope's fame, " which goes up to the wide heaven, as doththe fame of a blameless king," concerns us not at all, for thekingdom whether actual or imaginary is held up as worthy of1 Od.. I. 182 ff.* W. Ridgeway, The Origin of Metallic Currency (Cambridge, 1892), 27 ff.3 //„ XXIII. 269.