The divers engaged in this trade made use, moreover, of many contrivances to diminish the toil and hazard of their dangerous calling. Sometimes they poured oil[1423] upon the waves, which rendered them at once more tranquil and translucent and enabled them the better to carry on their operations at the bottom of the sea. They made likewise the first step towards the invention of the diving-bell, by descending with a large vessel turned upside down upon their heads, taking care that its edges sank into the water at the same instant, by which means they carried along with them a quantity of air, and were enabled to continue a considerable space of time beneath the surface.[1424] A diver and his daughter are said to have performed good service for their country during the Median war; for, descending into the sea during a tempest, they loosened the anchors of many Persian vessels, and thus set them adrift to perish by the weather; in remembrance of which services, a statue was erected to both father and daughter at Delphi.[1425] ----- Footnote 1423: Dutens, Origine des Découvertes, 145. Footnote 1424: Aristot. Problem. xxxii. 5. Footnote 1425: Paus. x. 19. 2. Athen. vii. 48. Anthol. Græc. ad Palat. Cod. ed. ix. 296. Cf. Herod. viii. 8. Quint. Curt. iv. 3. ----- The business of fishing was pursued in much the same manner as in modern times. Great numbers of smacks,[1426] of all dimensions, crowded the narrow seas between the islands and the main, making sometimes pretty long voyages, and taking passengers to augment their gains.[1427] These, moreover, formed the principal nurseries for the Grecian navies,[1428] particularly those of Athens, which consequently were manned, in the better ages of the republic, by the hardiest and most expert seamen in the ancient world. They employed in their operations both the harpoon and various kinds of large nets;[1429] and the ease and rapidity with which they filled their vessels may be inferred from the accounts given in modern times of the vast shoals of fish of all species and dimensions which in spring time collect in the eastern extremity of the Mediterranean, and pour in such multitudes into the narrow stream of the Dardanelles and the Bosporos,[1430] that, with one sweep of a net, the fishermen are enabled to fill whole skiffs, while they may be taken by the hand from the shores, killed like birds with stones, caught with unbaited hooks, or by the women in common baskets, let down by ropes from the windows of such houses in Constantinople[1431] as happen to stand on the beach. Elsewhere the fishermen made use of stop-nets in rivers or along the sea-coasts where the water for some way out was shallow. Various kinds of baskets,[1432] also, they had recourse to, together with the rod and line. Even that barbarous method, still in many parts of Europe put in practice by the vulgar, of poisoning the waters, was known to the Greeks, who, for this purpose, cast into