_Odyssey_, xii. 251-55 (W. C. Green’s translation in _Similes of the Iliad_, p. 259). Spearing, not rod-fishing, is thought by some commentators to be here indicated; but a weighted line is plainly described where the ‘storm-swift Iris’ plunges into the ‘black sea’ on the errand of Zeus to Thetis. Like to a plummet, which the fisherman Lets fall, encas’d in wild bull’s horn, to bear Destruction to the sea’s voracious tribes.[253] Footnote 253: _Iliad_, xxiv. 80-82. (Lord Derby.) River-fishing is passed over in silence. Yet it was doubtless practised, since the finny denizens of Scamander are remembered with pity for the discomfort ensuing to them from the fight between Achilles and the River; and the admixture of perch with tunny and hake-bones in the prehistoric waste-heaps at Hissarlik[254] makes it clear that fresh-water fish were not neglected by the early inhabitants of the Troad. Footnote 254: Virchow, _Berlin. Abh._ 1879, p. 63. Homeric seafarers did not resort to fishing as a means of diversifying the monotony, either of their occupations or of their commissariat. They got out their hooks and lines when famine was at hand, and never otherwise. Menelaus accordingly, recounting the story of his detention at Pharos, vivified the impression of his own distress, and the hunger of his men, by the mention of the piscatorial pursuits they were reduced to.[255] And Odysseus, in his narrative to Alcinous, similarly emphasised a similar experience. Fishermen by profession, it can hence be inferred, belonged to the poorest and rudest of the community. Among them were to be found divers for oysters. Patroclus, mocking the fall of Cebriones, exclaims: Footnote 255: _Odyssey_, iv. 368. Out on it, how nimble a man, how lightly he diveth! Yea, if perchance he were on the teeming deep, this man would satisfy many by seeking for oysters, leaping from the ship, even if it were stormy weather; so lightly now he diveth from the chariot into the plain. Verily among the Trojans too there be diving men.[256] The trade was then well known, and the molluscs it dealt in constituted, it is equally plain to be seen, a familiar article of diet. Their provision for the dead, in the graves of Mycenæ,[257] emphasises this inference all the more strongly from the absence of any other evidence of Mycenæan fish-eating. Footnote 256: _Iliad_, xvi. 745-50. Footnote 257: Schliemann, _Mycenæ_, p. 332.