So too, Scylla exercised her craft:
As when a fisher on a jutting rock,
With long and taper rod, to lesser fish
Casts down the treacherous bait, and in the sea
Plunges his tackle with its oxhorn guard;
Then tosses out on land a gasping prey;
So gasping to the cliff my men were raised.[[252]]
[252]. Odyssey, xii. 251-55 (W. C. Green’s translation in Similes of the Iliad, p. 259).
Spearing, not rod-fishing, is thought by some commentators to be here indicated; but a weighted line is plainly described where the ‘storm-swift Iris’ plunges into the ‘black sea’ on the errand of Zeus to Thetis.
Like to a plummet, which the fisherman