If it be true that an ancient simile was intended to throw light from the more familiar on the less familiar, but never to illustrate the moderately familiar by the wholly strange, one might, despite the absence of all reference to such tackle in the representations or in classical writers, possibly argue that lines made of the hair of the dead were known and were used by the Egyptians. The substitution of the hair of a dead person for the hair of a horse may be but a bold and not ineffective attempt to heighten the mysticism of the picture. Apart from the pleasant gain which the quest and the running down of this hare in “a mare’s nest” (to mix metaphors boldly) entailed, one’s only real satisfaction is that the Egyptian angler, notwithstanding his gruesome gut and loathsome bait, caught NOTHING! FOOTNOTES: [878] Aristotle (_H. A._, III. 11), states that the hair does grow in dead bodies. Since his time many descriptions of remarkable growth after death have been published, and many people believe that such growth does take place. Erasmus Wilson pronounces that “the lengthening of the hairs observed in a dead person is merely the result of the contraction of the skin towards their bulb.” [879] Blakey, _op. cit._, 207, states an engraving was found at Herculaneum “representing a little Cupid fishing with the ringlets of her (_sic_) hair for lovers.” So far I have failed to track this hermaphroditic representation, nor is Sir C. Waldstein aware of its existence. [880] Translated by Dasent. _Frodi’s flour_ = gold. [881] Professor Grenfell tells me that ὃτε here has no connection, unless the main verb came in line 16, where there is a lacuna, but the traces do not suggest any verb. He also approves my rendering of ψωμίσας having the sense of “baiting the swim” with bits of flesh from the corpses. [882] Aristophanes, _Thesm._, 928. Cf. also _Wasps_, 174-6. [883] _Wiener Studien_, XXVII. (1905), pp. 299, ff. [884] Or early Gnostics, also called Ophites, who honoured serpents. CHAPTER XXIX THE RING OF POLYCRATES In accordance with my custom of ending the _Fishing_ of each nation by a story in which fish play directly or indirectly an important part, I searched for an Egyptian tale or legend. The serpent Apep in the Ra myth is merely a variant of similar beasts figuring in the Bel and Andromeda legends: his story, moreover, lacks the stir of battle of the former, or the human interest of the latter.[885] The absence of any such legend is due doubtless to the bad esteem in which fish were held by the priests, who in the early days, at any rate, wrote the history of the country. As Maspero in his _Contes Populaires de l’ancienne Égypte_ (which by the by differs in _The Two Brothers_ from the account given by Plutarch) failed to provide provender, I perforce fall back on a story, which, if Ægean in _locale_, is Egyptian in effect, the tale of the ring of Polycrates.