[739] History of the Chinese Empire (Paris, 1735), vol. I. p. 36.
[740] Leonard Mascall, owing to his recipes for preserving spawn in his Booke of Fishing 1590, “must be looked upon as the pioneer of fish-culture in England,” according to Mr. R. B. Marston, op. cit., 35.
[741] From a splendid vase-painting representing the two sides of a magnificent scyphos made by the potter Hieron and painted by the artist Makron. The original (now in Boston) is of the finest fifth-century (b.c.) art. See Furtwängler and Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei (München, 1909), vol. II. 125 ff., pl. 85.
[744] Eurip., Hel., 34.
[745] Plat., Phardi., 243A; Isokr., Hel., 65; Pausanias, III. 19, 13.
[746] Op. cit., IV. 16. In his palinode, of which a few lines (frag. 32, Bergk4) are extant, Stesichorus asserts that it was not Helen herself, but only her semblance or wraith, which Paris carried off to Troy. Greeks and Trojans slew one another for a mere phantom, while the real Helen never left Sparta. Hdt., 2, 112 ff., gives a rather different turn to the story. According to him, Helen eloped from Sparta with Paris, but was driven back by a storm to Egypt, where Paris told lies and was punished by Proteus. Euripides in his Helena combines the two versions. Like Stesichorus, he makes the truant a mere phantom, an ‘eloping angel.’ Like Herodotus, he sends the real Helen to Egypt. Menelaus, who, escorting the phantom home from Troy, arrives in Egypt, is there confronted with the real Helen and is sadly puzzled. Just as he begins to think himself a bigamist, the misty Helen evaporates!
[747] The illustration is reproduced by the kind permission of Prof. Flinders Petrie.
The data for this essay had been collected and half of it written, when I heard of an article on Ancient Egyptian Fishing by Mr. Oric Bates, in Harvard African Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1917. While somewhat disappointed of not being the first to write in English on the subject, I was quickly reconciled by the fact that the task had fallen to an experienced Egyptologist, whose monograph, while making necessary the recasting of this chapter, bequeathed to me some new, if not always convincing theories, and much technical and other data, the frequent use of which I gladly acknowledge.