The word _fish_ occurs only in _Works and Days_, line 277. Even if we allow _The Shield of Heracles_ to be by Hesiod, we find but one passage (lines 214-5) relating to fishing, and this with a Net.[185] Hesiod’s silence on the subject surprises, for (_a_) he boasts himself the poet of country life, (_b_) states that as a youth he fed and led his flocks on the sides and amid the streams of Mount Helicon, and (_c_) passed the rest of his life on the banks of the river Cephissus.[186] Homer had previously, on consulting the Pythian Priestess as to the country whence he sprang, received a response, which I render— “Thy mother’s home is Ios, where in time Thou’lt lie; but ’ware the young lads’ riddling rhyme.”[187] But now let the Ἀγὼν speak. “After the contest the poet sailed unto Ios, and there abode a long time, being already an old man. Sitting one day on the sea-shore, he asked some lads returning from fishing, ‘Fishermen from Arcadia, have we aught?’ To which they made answer, ‘What caught we, we left; what caught we not, we carry.’[188] Homer, however, caught not on, until he was told that the key of ‘what’ was not fish, but lice.[189] “Remembering him of the oracle that the end of life was upon him, he makes the epitaph for his own tomb. Arising thence, he slipped in the mud, falling on his rib, and on the third day, so men say, died. And he was buried in Ios.” This is the epitaph— Ἐνθάδε τὴν ἱερὴν κεφαλὴν κατὰ γαῖα καλύπτει, Ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων κοσμήτορα, θεῖον Ὄμηρον. or “Here Earth has hid that holy head of thine, Marshal of heroes, Homer the divine.”[190] The story of Hesiod after his victory over Homer as set forth in _The Contest_ repays telling. He journeyed at once to Delphi to give the first fruits of his victory as a votive offering to the Oracle—and here let us note how in early times, certainly down to the time of Xenophon, the Greeks at important events in their lives resorted to some such fane for guidance.[191] Greeted from the inner shrine as one “held in honour high by the immortal Muses,” as one “whose fame shall reach as far as is spread the light of morn” (this use of one of Homer’s own and fairest lines[192] was no doubt intended as the highest possible tribute to his victor), Hesiod is then warned, “But beware of the fair grove of the Nemean Zeus, for there lies thy fate of death.” Alas! for the poet, who to escape the well-known temple of Nemean Zeus in the Peloponnese hurried off to stay at Oinoë in Locris, never to discover that there too was a place sacred to the same god and called by the same name.