And hungry still and breathing rage, retires with morning’s light.”
The existence of wild beasts in a country has by some been enumerated among the causes of civilisation, and it may, under certain circumstances, deserve to be so considered, though generally such modes of accounting for things are exceedingly unphilosophical. Mitford, who advances it,[[691]] needed but to cast a glance across the Mediterranean to dissipate his whole theory, since nowhere are there more wild beasts or men less civilised than in Africa. Egypt, Chaldæa, Assyria, the earliest peopled countries, enjoyed few of these helps to refinement. The reasons of Greek civilisation lay neither in their country or in the accidents of it, but in the race itself, which, as one family in a nation is distinguished from its neighbours by superior genius, was thus distinguished from other races of men. However, the lion, as we have seen, formerly existed among them, though never probably in great numbers, and even in the age of Herodotus was still found in a wild tract of country extending from the Acheloös in Acarnania to the Nestos in Thrace,[[692]] where in fabulous times Olynthos, son of Strymon,[[693]] is said to have been slain in a lion hunt. In the age of Dion Chrysostom, however, this fierce animal was no longer known in Europe.[[694]]
Dogs, all the world over and from the remotest times, have been man’s companions in the chase, and Homer, the noblest painter of the ancient world, has bequeathed us many sketches of the antique hunting breed. It has above been seen that in company with man they feared not to attack even the lion. Odysseus’ famous dog Argos was a hound that
“Never missed in deepest woods the swift game to pursue
If once it glanced before his sight, for every track he knew.[[695]]”
And again when the same sagacious Nimrod makes his rounds in quest of “belly timber,” a brace of dogs runs before him “examining the traces,” while with boar-spear in hand he follows close at their heels.[[696]] But already, even in those days, the habit of keeping more cats than catch mice had got into fashion—that is among the great—since we find grandees with their κύνες τραπεζῆες or “table dogs,”[[697]] valued simply for their beauty. Patroclus maintained nine of these handsome animals, and Achilles understanding his tastes, cast two of them into the flames of his funeral pile, that their shades might sit at his board in the realms below.[[698]]
Fowling too, if we may depend upon Athenæus,[[699]] entered into the list of heroic amusements. It is clear, however, that the sportsmen of those days were arrant poachers, for, not content with attacking their prey in open fight, they condescended to spread nets for them and set gins for their feet. But being accomplished bowmen, however, they could occasionally, when pressed for provisions, fetch down a thrush, a pigeon, or a dove with an arrow, dexterously as that Jew in Eusebius[[700]] who exhibited his marksmanship to demonstrate the fallacy of augury. For in the funeral games of Patroclus, we find one of the heroes hitting from a considerable distance a dove which had been tied by a small cord to the summit of a mast.[[701]]
They were given moreover not only to fishing with nets—a practice in nowise unbecoming a hero when in want of a dinner—but even to angling with “crooked O’Shaughnessies,”[[702]] as Homer expresses it; though the passage in the Iliad, indeed, where a net is mentioned, cannot well be adduced in corroboration, since it may refer to fowling as well as to fishing.[[703]] Certain verses in the Odyssey, however, prove beyond a doubt that the Greeks had already begun to derive a great part of their sustenance from the sea;[[704]] and the Homeric heroes even understood the value of oysters, which, as appears from the Iliad, were procured by diving.[[705]]
Nevertheless these ancient heroes, though by no means averse as we have seen to pigeons or oysters, delighted chiefly in the chase of the larger animals, in which article of taste they agreed with Plato, who considered all other kinds as unworthy of men. He appears to have entertained an especial aversion for the Isaac Waltons of the ancient world, and in his advice to youth earnestly exhorts them to eschew hooks and fish-traps, which he slily classes with piracy and house-breaking: and so he does fowling. Nor would his generous philosophy countenance poaching with nets and gins and snares. His sportsmen, modelled after the old Homeric type, were to mount their chargers,[[706]] and accompanied by their dogs come to close quarters with their wild foes in open daylight, and subdue them by dint of personal courage.[[707]] Precisely similar views prevailed in the heroic age, when the chiefs and principal men were exercised from boyhood in the chase, as appears from the examples of Achilles and Odysseus;[[708]] of whom the former, according to Pindar, tried his hand at a lion at the age of six years, ἐξέτης τοπρῶτον. Being swift of foot as those Arabs of Northern Africa, who, as Leo[[709]] says, are a match for any horse, he used without the aid of dogs to overtake and bring down deer with his javelin, and whatever prey he took he carried to his old master Cheiron. This passage Mr. Cary has translated in the following vigorous and elegant manner:—
“In Philyra’s house a flaxen boy