The passages referring to fishing number eight. Of the four methods of fishing mentioned one is with Spear (Od., X. 124) two with the Net (Od., XXII. 386; Il., V. 487), and one with the Rod (Od., XII. 251).
A. The Spear (Od., X. 124): “And like folk spearing fishes they bare home their hideous meal.” This gives a very lively image, because the companions of Odysseus, whose boats had been smashed by the thrown rocks, are in the water, and are being speared like fish by the Læstrygones.[155]
B. The Net (Od., XXII. 383 ff.): “But he” (Odysseus after the slaughter of the suitors) “found all the sort of them fallen in their blood in the dust, like fishes that the fishermen have drawn forth in the meshes of the net into a hollow of the beach from out the grey sea, and all the fish, sore longing for the salt waves, are heaped upon the sand, and the sun shines forth and takes their life away: so now the wooers lay heaped upon each other.”[156]
In Iliad, V. 487 ff.: “Only beware lest, as though entangled in the mesh of all-ensnaring flax, ye be made unto your foemen a prey and a spoil.”
C. The Rod (Od., XII. 251 ff.): “Even, as when a fisher on some headland[157] lets down with a long rod his baits for a snare to the little fishes below, casting into the deep the horn of an ox of the homestead, and as he catches each flings it writhing, so were they” (i.e. the companions of Odysseus) “borne upward to the cliff” (by Scylla).
D. Line and Hook (Iliad, XXIV. 80 ff.): “And she” (Iris on her Zeus-bidden mission) “sped to the bottom like a weight of lead, that mounted on the horn of a field-ox goeth down, bearing death to the ravenous fishes.”
E. Iliad, XVI. 406 ff.: “As when a man sits on a jutting rock and drags a sacred fish from the sea with line and glittering hook of bronze, so on the bright spear dragged he Thestor,” etc.[158]
F. Odyssey, IV. 368 f.: “Who” (the companions of Menelaus) “were ever roaming round the isle, fishing with bent hooks, for hunger was gnawing at their belly.”
Odyssey, XII. 330 f.: “They” (the companions of Odysseus) “went wandering with barbed hooks in quest of game, as needs they must, fishes and fowls, whatever might come to their hand, for hunger gnawed at their belly.”[159]
The Rod finds one express mention—in passage C. Is its use implied in passages D. and E.? The answer depends greatly on whether the adjectives employed are really descriptive of the qualities and sizes of the fish, or whether they are merely (as often the case in Homer) ornamental or conventional epithets more suited for general than particular use, or are redundant.