“For trader Homer knows no word.”[129] As traders he represents no Greeks, although the Taphians approximate closely (Od., I. 186). For this three reasons have been assigned:—
First, the Greeks of Homer’s time with the exception of the Phæacians, “who care not for bow or quiver, but for masts, and oars of ships, and gallant barques, wherein rejoicing, they cross the grey sea” (Od., VI. 270), hardly impress us, despite Dr. Leaf’s “The whole attitude of both the Poems is one of maritime daring,”[130] as adventurous sailors.
They disliked long sea voyages; they shrank from spending the night on the water; they would go thrice the distance, if they could but keep in touch with land—and naturally enough, when we remember that for the Homeric boat the Ægean was safe for only a few months of the year.
Their food supply made the sea a hateful necessity. “As much as a mother is sweeter than a stepmother, so much is earth dearer than the grey sea” might have been written as appropriately by Homer as by Antipater centuries later.[131]
Whatever trading existed was in the hands not of the Phæacians, but of the Phœnicians, to whose great port Sidon Homer makes reference more than once.[132] Boldness of navigation, plus guile and gainfulness, characterised the nation; their “tricky trading” (cf. the Levantines of our day)[133] found frequent comment.
A comparison of them with the seamen of Elizabeth’s time shows common traits. Both were “the first that ever burst into the silent seas,” both committed acts of piracy, both kidnapped and enslaved freely. Lest it be objected that the evidence of Od., XIV. 297 and 340 occurs in a fictitious account by Odysseus of himself and so is itself fictitious, let us call as witness the Hebrew prophet Joel[134]: “What have ye to do with Me, O Tyre and Zidon? The children, also, of Judah, and the children of Jerusalem, have ye sold unto the sons of the Grecians.”
The second reason lies in the fact that each Homeric house or each hamlet, although perhaps not each town, apparently supplied nearly all its own wants and was practically self-supporting.
The chief crafts existed, as Hesiod shows, but only in a rudimentary stage; workers there were in gold, silver, bronze, wood, leather, pottery, carpentry. Although they were not “adscripti glebæ,” the proper pride or narrow jealousy of each settlement was strongly averse from calling in craftsmen from outside. Only apparently those “workers for the people,” such as “a prophet, or a healer of ills, or a shipwright, or a godlike minstrel who can delight all by his song,” were free to come and go, as they willed, sure of a welcome: “These are the men who are welcome over all the wide earth.”[135]
The third reason was due to nearly all ordinary trade being effected by barter. Payment was in kine, kind, or service. The ox, probably because all round the most important of possessions, constituted the ordinary measure of value: thus a female slave skilled in embroidery fetches four oxen. Laertes gives twenty for Eurycleia, while much-wooed maidens by gifts from their successful suitors “multiply oxen” for their fathers.
Mentes sails to Temesa with a cargo of “shining iron” to exchange for copper.[136] Then again in Il., VII. 472 ff., “the flowing-haired Achæans bought them wine thence, some for bronze and some for gleaming iron, and some with hides, and some with whole kine, and some with captives.” Among the fishermen of the Indian Ocean, fish-hooks, on the same principle of importance of possession, “the most important to them of all implements, passed as currency and in time became a true money larin, just as did the hoe in China.”[137]