[147] J. W. Mackail, Lectures on Greek Poetry (London, 1910), p. 47.
[148] Monro’s Note on Iliad, XVIII. 468-608.
[149] Presidential Address to the British Association, 1916.
[150] Eustathius (on Il., V. 487) after stating that by the Homeric heroes fishing and fowling were very rarely employed, continues Οὐκ ἠσαν ὑδροθῆραι παρ’ αὐτοῖς εἰ μὴ ἄρα ἐν λιμῷ.
[151] Od., VI. 102 ff. W. W. Merry ad loc. well compares Soph. El., 566 ff.
[152] G. Rodenwaldt in Tiryns (Athens, 1912), II. 96 ff. pls. 12 f.
[153] Lectures on Greek Poetry, 67 ff. There are nearly three hundred comparisons in Homer’s poems; but of detailed similes only some two hundred and twenty, of which the Odyssey contains but forty. Miss Clerke (Familiar Studies in Homer, p. 182 ff.) shows that angling is mentioned chiefly in similes, which may, perhaps, indicate that the poet knew that this particular method was not practised in the days in which his poem is placed.
[154] Among the arguments elaborated by Payne Knight and others to prove that the Iliad and Odyssey were written by different authors and dealt with far different times, one is based on the fact that certain methods of fowling and fishing are only found in the Odyssey. If this argument be pushed to its logical end, it should be easy to prove that the ages of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, which overlapped, were really far apart, because, while the latter mentions the familiar use of tobacco, the former never once alludes to it.
[155] The translations from the Odyssey are by Butcher and Lang (London, 1881), and those from the Iliad by Lang, Leaf, and Myers (London, 1883).
[156] So too the Egyptians likened the men slain at the battle of Megiddo: “Their champions lay stretched out like fishes on the ground.” See J. H. Breasted, Records of Egypt (London, 1906), vol. ii. par. 431.