HKB
[Sidenote: Fishing for sword-fish.]
+3.+ Fishing for sword-fish at the Scyllaean rock is carried on in this way. A number of men lie in wait, two each in small two-oared boats, and one man is set to look out for them all. In the boat one man rows, while the other stands on the prow holding a spear. When the look-out man signals the appearance of a sword-fish (for the animal swims with one-third of its body above water), the boat rows up to it, and the man with the spear strikes it at close quarters, and then pulls the spear-shaft away leaving the harpoon in the fish’s body; for it is barbed and loosely fastened to the shaft on purpose, and has a long rope attached to it. They then slacken the rope for the wounded fish, until it is wearied out with its convulsive struggles and attempts to escape, and then they haul it on to land, or, if its size is not too great, into the boat. And if the spear-shaft falls into the sea it is not lost; for being made of two pieces, one oak and the other pine, the oak end as the heavier dips under water, the other end rises above it and is easily got hold of. But sometimes it happens that the man rowing is wounded, right through the boat, by the immense size of the animal’s sword; for it charges like a boar, and hunting the one is very like hunting the other.
This would lead us to conjecture that the wandering described by Homer was near Sicily, because he has assigned to Scylla the kind of fishing which is indigenous to the Scyllaean rock; and because what he says of Charybdis correctly describes what does happen in the Straits. But the
“Thrice sends she up the darksome tide,”
[Sidenote: Island of Meninx, off the lesser Syrtis. See 1, 39.] instead of twice “a day,” is an error to be ascribed to the copyist or the geographer.[217] So also Meninx answers to his description of the Lotophagi.
+4.+ Or if there are some points which do not answer, we must lay the blame on ignorance or poetic licence, which uses real history, picturesque detail, and mythological allusion. The object of history is truth, as when in the catalogue of ships the poet describes the features of the several localities, calling one city “rocky,” another “frontier-placed,” another “with wealth of doves,” or “hard by the sea.” But the object of picturesque detail is vividness, as when he introduces men fighting; and that of mythological allusion is to give pleasure or rouse wonder. But a narrative wholly fictitious creates no illusion and is not Homeric. For all look upon his poetry as a philosophical work; and Eratosthenes is wrong in bidding us not judge his poems with a view to having any serious meaning, or to seek for history in them.
It is better, again, to take the line[218]
“Thence for nine days the foul winds drave us on,”
to mean that he made but a short distance—for foul winds do not favour a straight course—than to imagine him to have got into the open ocean as running before favouring winds. The distance from Malea to the Pillars is twenty-two thousand five hundred stades. If we suppose this to have been accomplished at an even speed in the nine days, he would make two thousand five hundred stades a day. Now, who has ever asserted that any one made the voyage from Lycia or Rhodes to Alexandria in four days, a distance of four thousand stades?
To those who ask how it was that Odysseus, though he came to Sicily three times, never once went through the straits, I answer that all subsequent sailors avoided that passage also....
[Sidenote: Cadiz to the Don.]