[128] “With the division of the people of the Empire into four distinct classes—scholars, agriculturists, artisans, and merchants—the men and women who followed the trade of fishing for a livelihood were placed in an anomalous position from not being included in any of the four classes. Thus socially ostracised to a certain extent, they clung to themselves, forming groups or colonies of their own along the coasts or on isolated islands. They lived in a world of their own, knowing nothing of the affairs of their country and caring less. To this day they do not come into direct contact with their countrymen on the mainland.” Wei-Chung W. Yen: Fourth International Fishing Congress at Washington, 1908. _Bulletin of Bureau of Fisheries_, No. 664, p. 376. [129] Professor T. D. Seymour, _Life in the Homeric Age_ (London, 1907), p. 284, who might have added that Homer knows no general word either for trade; to traders, πρηκτῆρες (_Od._, VIII. 162) come nearest probably. From Seymour’s work, which sheds much valuable light on Homeric pursuits, I quote and borrow frequently. [130] See _Class. Journ._; _Chicago_, XIII. (1917), “The Leaf-Ramsay Theory of the Trojan War,” where he uses these words in reply to Maury, who holds that the view expounded in Leaf’s _Troy_ that the War was an economic struggle by the Greeks for trade expansion to the fertile lands of the Euxine and for the extinction of the tolls exacted by the Trojans is untenable, because (_inter alia_) of their want of nautical enterprise. In favour of Leaf there are, however, mentions (1) of a voyage from Crete to Egypt in five days, and (2) the big νηῦς φορτὶς εὐρεῖα twice mentioned. [131] Cf. however, Geikie, _Love of Nature among the Romans_, p. 300. Subdivided by the waters of the Ægean into innumerable islands, where the scattered communities could only keep in touch by boat or ship, Greece naturally became a nursery of seamen. The descriptive and musical epithets applied to the deep in Greek poetry show how much its endless variety of surface and colour, its beauty and its majesty, appealed to the Hellenic imagination. S. H. Butcher, _Harvard Lectures_ (London, 1904), p. 49, speaks of the Greeks as “born sailors and traders, who from the dawn of history looked upon the sea as their natural highway.” Contrast with this Plato, _Laws_, iv. 705A, ἁλμυρὸν καὶ πικρὸν γειτόνημα, “a bitter and brackish neighbour.” [132] He never mentions Tyre, the later port. Evans (_Scripta Minoa_, pp. 56, 80) and other archæologists nowadays hold that Homer’s Φοίνικες, or “red men,” are really the “Minoans,” and are to be distinguished from the Σιδόνιοι or Phœnicians. At what date the latter appeared in the West Mediterranean is still a matter of controversy, but the present trend of opinion is that they only succeeded to the “Minoan” heritage.