[138] Il., XXIII. 269.
[139] See, however, Hogarth’s Ionia and the East, pp. 8, 120. A fish, the Eel, plays an important part in the attempt to determine the original home of the Indo-European family. See S. Feist, Kultur, Ausbreitung und Herkunft der Indogermanen (Berlin, 1913), pp. 187, 525.
[140] Der Fischer in der antiken Litteratur (Aachen, 1892).
[141] While the early Greeks learned much with regard to navigation from the Phœnicians, none of the Homeric nautical terms have been traced to a Phœnician source, as might have been expected in view of the large number of such terms which the English language has borrowed from the Dutch, such as ahoy, boom, skipper, sloop, etc. The French has taken from the English, beaupré, cabine, paquebot, etc. Seymour, p. 322.
[142] “The choice of the subjects (in The Shield of Achilles), especially the absence of mythological subjects, the arrangement of the scenes in concentric bands, and the peculiar technique, all point to oriental, i.e. in the main to Phœnician and Assyrian influence. In these respects the earliest actual Greek work known to us by description, viz. The Chest of Cypselus (c. 700 b.c.), consisting of cedar wood, ivory, and gold, and richly adorned (according to Pausanias, V. 17) with figures in relief, holds an intermediate place between The Shield of Achilles and the art of the classic period. Hence we infer that the Shield belongs to the earlier time, when (as we also learn from Homer) the Phœnicians were the great carriers between the Mediterranean countries and the East” (Monro, Il., XVIII). Professor Jebb (Homer, p. 66) ranks, in the earlier period, Phœnician lower than Phrygian influence, but the latest writer on the subject—F. Poulsen, Der Orient und die frühgriechische Kunst, Leipzig-Berlin, 1912—makes large claims for the influence of the Phœnicians in art.
[143] Under ‘Piscator’ in Dict. des Antiquités Daremberg and Saglio write: “The configuration of the country generally would naturally induce a large part of the population to seek their livelihood in fishing and fish.”
[144] The explanation of Athenæus (Bk. I. 16, 22 and 46) is ingenious. Homer never represents fish or birds, or vegetables, or fruit “as being put on the table to eat, lest to mention them would seem like praising gluttony, thinking besides there would be a want of decorum in dwelling on the preparation of such things, which he considered beneath the dignity of Gods and Heroes.” The latest explanation—by Professor J. A. Scott, Class. Journ.; Chicago, 1916-17, p. 329—that “Homer looked upon fish with great disfavour, because as a native of Asia Minor he had been trained to regard fish as an unhealthful and distasteful food to be eaten only as a last resort,” would attain nearer “what seems the solution of this vexed question” (Scott’s words), if he produced (1) data establishing Homer’s country of birth, and (2) evidence far stronger than “Tips to Archæological Travellers” (even though these be written by Sir Wm. Ramsay) as regards the general “unhealthfulness” of the fish of Asia Minor.
[145] Schrader, Reallexikon (Strassburg, 1901), p. 244, states that in neither the Avesta nor the Rig-Veda is there any mention of fishing, nor in the Aryan period were there any common names for fish, and that throughout the Homeric age, which generally knows fishing as an existent occupation, there still seems to be a recollection of a time when the Greek hero ate fish just as little as he rode, wrote, or cooked soup!
[146] It is but fair, however, to add that the Scholiast notes this passage as the only one in the Iliad where fish is mentioned as a food, while Monro makes the ingenious comment that these oysters, or shell fish, are to be regarded not as luxuries, but as a way of satisfying the hunger of a crew at sea. Of oysters this is the only mention in the Homeric Poems. As oyster shells and even unopened oyster shells were found by Dr. Schliemann at Mycenæ, the liking for oysters is not likely to have been lost between the Mycenæan and the Homeric times. The remains of the Homeric (sixth) city at Troy yielded very many cockle shells, but of cockles there seems no mention in the poems.
Numerous representations of fishes are found on Mycenæan and Cretan works of art.