A comparison of them with the seamen of Elizabeth’s time shows common traits. Both were “the first that ever burst into the silent seas,” both committed acts of piracy, both kidnapped and enslaved freely. Lest it be objected that the evidence of _Od._, XIV. 297 and 340 occurs in a fictitious account by Odysseus of himself and so is itself fictitious, let us call as witness the Hebrew prophet Joel[134]: “What have ye to do with Me, O Tyre and Zidon? The children, also, of Judah, and the children of Jerusalem, have ye sold unto the sons of the Grecians.” The second reason lies in the fact that each Homeric house or each hamlet, although perhaps not each town, apparently supplied nearly all its own wants and was practically self-supporting. The chief crafts existed, as Hesiod shows, but only in a rudimentary stage; workers there were in gold, silver, bronze, wood, leather, pottery, carpentry. Although they were not “adscripti glebæ,” the proper pride or narrow jealousy of each settlement was strongly averse from calling in craftsmen from outside. Only apparently those “workers for the people,” such as “a prophet, or a healer of ills, or a shipwright, or a godlike minstrel who can delight all by his song,” were free to come and go, as they willed, sure of a welcome: “These are the men who are welcome over all the wide earth.”[135] The third reason was due to nearly all ordinary trade being effected by barter. Payment was in kine, kind, or service. The ox, probably because all round the most important of possessions, constituted the ordinary measure of value: thus a female slave skilled in embroidery fetches four oxen. Laertes gives twenty for Eurycleia, while much-wooed maidens by gifts from their successful suitors “multiply oxen” for their fathers. Mentes sails to Temesa with a cargo of “shining iron” to exchange for copper.[136] Then again in _Il._, VII. 472 ff., “the flowing-haired Achæans bought them wine thence, some for bronze and some for gleaming iron, and some with hides, and some with whole kine, and some with captives.” Among the fishermen of the Indian Ocean, fish-hooks, on the same principle of importance of possession, “the most important to them of all implements, passed as currency and in time became a true money _larin_, just as did the hoe in China.”[137] “The talents of gold,”[138] probably Babylonian shekels, whether Hultsch’s heavy or W. Ridgeway’s light one, implied, according to some, a money standard of value. But wrongly, because neither gold nor silver came to coinage in Greece or anywhere else till long after Homer’s day. Fishermen seem slowly to have acquired some sort of status. Ἁλιεύς, at first meaning a seaman or one connected with the sea, in time denoted also a fisherman. _Od._, XIX. III, characterises the well-ordered realm of a “blameless king” as one, in which “the black earth bears wheat and barley, and trees are laden with fruit, and sheep bring forth and fail not, and _the sea gives store of fish_.”