It is a point of curious interest that nearly all the references, where methods or weapons of fishing find mention, are made for the purpose of or occur in a simile, which despite the so-called Higher Criticism Mackail says, “In Homer reached perfection.”[153] A Homeric comparison, like the parable of the New Testament in its very nature is intended to throw light from the more familiar upon what is less familiar. The poet cannot intend to illustrate the moderately familiar by what is wholly strange. In modern writers the subjects of a simile, apart from those drawn from nature, are sometimes modern or new; in the old they are almost invariably drawn from some well established custom. If so, it follows that to the Greeks of Homer’s time (as was the case with the Egyptians before them) fishing with Spear, Net, Line, and Rod were old and familiar devices.[154] Which of the first three—Spear, Net, Line—ranks the oldest, has (as shown in my _Introduction_) been long disputed and seems doubtful of definite settlement. [Illustration: METHODS OF FISHING.] From Roman Mosaic at Sousse in _Revue Arch._, 1897, Pl. xi. The top left corner (destroyed) no doubt showed angling. The men in the left-hand boat are using (according to P. Gauckler ‘relève des nasses’) bottle-shaped baskets. The passages referring to fishing number eight. Of the four methods of fishing mentioned one is with Spear (_Od._, X. 124) two with the Net (_Od._, XXII. 386; _Il._, V. 487), and one with the Rod (_Od._, XII. 251). A. _The Spear_ (_Od._, X. 124): “And like folk spearing fishes they bare home their hideous meal.” This gives a very lively image, because the companions of Odysseus, whose boats had been smashed by the thrown rocks, are in the water, and are being speared like fish by the Læstrygones.[155] B. _The Net_ (_Od._, XXII. 383 ff.): “But he” (Odysseus after the slaughter of the suitors) “found all the sort of them fallen in their blood in the dust, like fishes that the fishermen have drawn forth in the meshes of the net into a hollow of the beach from out the grey sea, and all the fish, sore longing for the salt waves, are heaped upon the sand, and the sun shines forth and takes their life away: so now the wooers lay heaped upon each other.”[156] In _Iliad_, V. 487 ff.: “Only beware lest, as though entangled in the mesh of all-ensnaring flax, ye be made unto your foemen a prey and a spoil.” C. _The Rod_ (_Od._, XII. 251 ff.): “Even, as when a fisher on some headland[157] lets down with a long rod his baits for a snare to the little fishes below, casting into the deep the horn of an ox of the homestead, and as he catches each flings it writhing, so were they” (_i.e._ the companions of Odysseus) “borne upward to the cliff” (by Scylla).