The decision, if one be possible, lies for Homeric scholars, and not for a mere seeker after piscatoriana. Even to such an one, however, two alternatives seem clear.
First, if Homer did live after the transition occurred, his descriptions of ancient times and customs unconsciously included habits and conditions of a more modern society.[145]
Second, if he lived before such transition—a supposition, which scarcely consists with the presence in Palæolithic débris of copious remains of fish—passages such as Od., XIX. 109-114, which ranks “a sea-given store of fish” a constituent of a well-ordered realm, and Il., XVI. 746, where “This man would satisfy many by searching (or diving) for oysters,” are interpolations by later writers.
It is difficult otherwise to reconcile or explain conflicting passages. How, for instance, can the dictum, that “Fish as a food was in the Poems only used by the very poor or starving,” be made to harmonise with Il., XVI. 746, just quoted?[146] If it be confined solely to the Odyssey, a more plausible case may possibly be presented.
Another suggestion, not quite similar, yet not repugnant, is Seymour’s. “The Poet represented the life which was familiar to himself and his hearers. Each action, each event might be given by tradition, or might be the product of the poet’s imagination, but the details which show the customs of the age, and which furnish the colours of the picture, are taken from the life of the poet’s time. His interest is centred in the action of the story, and the introduction of unusual manners and standard of life would only distract the attention of his hearers.”
Mackail, perhaps, concludes the whole matter. “The Homeric world is a world imagined by Homer: it is placed in a time, evidently thought of as far distant, though there are no exact marks of chronology any more than there are in the Morte d’Arthur.”[147]
Homer’s close knowledge of the many devices for the capture of fish, and his lively interest in the habits of fish quite apart from actual fishing seem inconsistent with Schneider’s contention of Greek ichthyic ignorance.
Fish, as we have seen, came gradually to be considered as much a part of natural wealth as the fruits of the ground or herds of cattle. And yet in all the pictures with which Hephæstus adorns the Shield of Achilles, pictures of common ever-present objects, first of the great phenomena of Nature—Earth, Sea, Sun, Moon, and Stars—and then of the various events and occupations that make up the round of human life—in all these pictures, which as a series of illustrations of early life and manners are obviously a document of first-rate importance, no form of sea-faring has any place. Ships of war, maritime commerce, and fishing are alike unrepresented.[148]
No satisfactory explanation of this omission has as yet seen the light. The design of The Shield, say some, came from an inland country, such as Assyria. Others that Homer described some foreign work of art fabricated by people who knew not the sea, but Helbig points out that the omission consists with the references to ships and sea-faring elsewhere in Homer. No commerce or occupation, which could be placed side by side with farming in a picture of Greek life, then existed. If Mr. Lang’s view—which possesses the pleasant property of incapacity of either proof or disproof—that The Shield was simply an ideal work of art had been more generally borne in mind, we should have been spared endless comment.
In his ascription of The Shield to Assyrian or Phœnician influence Monro finds himself at variance with Sir Arthur Evans. Even if his statement, “the recent progress of archæology has thrown so much light on the condition of Homeric art,” be accurate and the deductions from such recent progress be justifiable, the still more recent progress in the same science (according to Evans) ousts the Assyrian or Phœnician in favour of a Cretan parentage.