[157] Alike, and yet unlike, is
“His rod was made out of a sturdy oak, His line a cable which in storms ne’er broke; His hook he baited with a dragon’s tail, And sat upon a rock, and bobbed for whale.”
[158] See Eustathius ad loc. The spear with which Telegonos wounded Odysseus was tipped with the κέντρον of a Roach, according to A. G. Pearson, Fragments of Sophocles (Cambridge, 1917), vol. ii. p. 105 ff., à propos of the lost Ὀδυσσεὺς ἀκανθοπλήξ. Van Leeuwen (Odyssey, 2nd ed., Leyden, 1917), in his note on xi. 134-7, makes the fish the sting-ray (radio raiæ pastinacæ), which from its deadly character (cf. Pliny, N. H., ix. 67) is to my mind much more probable, despite Liddell and Scott’s translation of τρυγὼν as ‘roach,’ the absolutely harmless Roach! Cf. Epicharmus, Frag. 66 Kaibel, τρυγὁνες τ’ ὀπισθόκεντροι, and Aristotle, N. H., ix. 48. Whatever the fish were, it is good to know that it too came to an untimely death at the hands of Phorcys, because of its cannibal propensities. See Eustathius, Od., p. 1676, 45, commenting on xi. 133. In The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, vi. 32, Philostratos says Odysseus was wounded by the αἰχμὴ τῆς τρυγόνος. Van Leeuwen instances among some old armour preserved at Bergum the weapon of an Indian pirate, “which is made of the tail of the ray.”
[159] It is with something of a shock I find such careful translators as Butcher and Lang translating γναμπτοῖσιν ἀγκίστροισιν in Od., IV. 369, as “bent,” and in Od., XII. 332, as “barbed” hooks, without one word of explanation. These weapons differ in appearance, execution, and date of invention. To evolve the barbed from the bent hook required probably as many generations of men, and centuries of effort, as the development of the bent hook from the primitive gorge. See Introduction.
[160] There are of course limitations to the “pulley-hauley” of a hand-line; with a 700 lb. Tuna a Rod may be a very present help, a windlass even more so. The practice in vogue among the Spanish Tunny fishers is to throw aside the Rod at the moment of hooking and man-handle the fish with the Line.
[161] Idyll, XXI. 55.
[162] vii. 18-21.
[163] See S. Reinach, Cultes, Mythes, et Religions (Paris 1908), iii. 43 ff.
[164] Ælian, N. H., xiii. 26.
[165] Hesych. s.v. Κάβειροι.