The opposite page reproduces the figures of the four fishermen from the famous Fishermen’s Vase of Phylakopi discovered in Melos some twenty years ago.[123] If the period assigned to this, viz. _c._ 1500 B.C., be accurate, it seems to be the oldest Greek representation, at any rate in the Ægean area, depicting anything connected with fishing, and antedates the earliest Greek author by four to nine hundred years, in accordance with the varying ages allotted to the Homeric poems.[124] It is to Homer, whether written by half a dozen different authors or in half a dozen different centuries,[125] as the oldest Greek writer extant that we naturally turn for information about fishermen and fishing. His evidence is not only the earliest, but also the most trustworthy, according to Athenæus. “Homer treats of the art of fishing with greater accuracy than professional writers on the subject such as Cæcilius, Oppian, etc.”[126]—an endorsement from the piscatorial side of the Theocritean ἅλις πάντεσσιν Ὅμηρος. Neither fishermen nor traders in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ possess any real status. While farmers, more especially pastoral farmers, occupy an acknowledged and—next to the chiefs and warriors—the highest position, no fisherman or trader is regarded as a representative unit of the body, politic or social, or as a contributor to the wealth of the tribe or state, a condition with which that of the fisherfolk in ancient Egypt[127] and in China, both in early times and in the present day, is elsewhere compared and contrasted.[128] “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.