[153] _Lectures on Greek Poetry_, 67 ff. There are nearly three hundred comparisons in Homer’s poems; but of detailed similes only some two hundred and twenty, of which the _Odyssey_ contains but forty. Miss Clerke (_Familiar Studies in Homer_, p. 182 ff.) shows that angling is mentioned chiefly in similes, which may, perhaps, indicate that the poet knew that this particular method was not practised in the days in which his poem is placed. [154] Among the arguments elaborated by Payne Knight and others to prove that the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ were written by different authors and dealt with far different times, one is based on the fact that certain methods of fowling and fishing are only found in the _Odyssey_. If this argument be pushed to its logical end, it should be easy to prove that the ages of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, which overlapped, were really far apart, because, while the latter mentions the familiar use of tobacco, the former never once alludes to it. [155] The translations from the _Odyssey_ are by Butcher and Lang (London, 1881), and those from the _Iliad_ by Lang, Leaf, and Myers (London, 1883). [156] So too the Egyptians likened the men slain at the battle of Megiddo: “Their champions lay stretched out like fishes on the ground.” See J. H. Breasted, _Records of Egypt_ (London, 1906), vol. ii. par. 431. [157] Alike, and yet unlike, is “His rod was made out of a sturdy oak, His line a cable which in storms ne’er broke; His hook he baited with a dragon’s tail, And sat upon a rock, and bobbed for whale.” [158] See Eustathius _ad loc._ The spear with which Telegonos wounded Odysseus was tipped with the κέντρον of a Roach, according to A. G. Pearson, _Fragments of Sophocles_ (Cambridge, 1917), vol. ii. p. 105 ff., _à propos_ of the lost Ὀδυσσεὺς ἀκανθοπλήξ. Van Leeuwen (_Odyssey_, 2nd ed., Leyden, 1917), in his note on xi. 134-7, makes the fish the sting-ray (_radio raiæ pastinacæ_), which from its deadly character (cf. Pliny, _N. H._, ix. 67) is to my mind much more probable, despite Liddell and Scott’s translation of τρυγὼν as ‘_roach_,’ the absolutely harmless Roach! Cf. Epicharmus, _Frag._ 66 Kaibel, τρυγόνες τ’ ὀπισθόκεντροι, and Aristotle, _N. H._, ix. 48. Whatever the fish were, it is good to know that it too came to an untimely death at the hands of Phorcys, because of its cannibal propensities. See Eustathius, _Od._, p. 1676, 45, commenting on xi. 133. In _The Life of Apollonius of Tyana_, vi. 32, Philostratos says Odysseus was wounded by the αἰχμὴ τῆς τρυγόνος. Van Leeuwen instances among some old armour preserved at Bergum the weapon of an Indian pirate, “which is made of the tail of the ray.”