Note 131 — Chapter I · HOMER—THE POSITION OF FISHERMEN

Cf. however, Geikie, Love of Nature among the Romans, p. 300. Subdivided by the waters of the Ægean into innumerable islands, where the scattered communities could only keep in touch by boat or ship, Greece naturally became a nursery of seamen. The descriptive and musical epithets applied to the deep in Greek poetry show how much its endless variety of surface and colour, its beauty and its majesty, appealed to the Hellenic imagination. S. H. Butcher, Harvard Lectures (London, 1904), p. 49, speaks of the Greeks as “born sailors and traders, who from the dawn of history looked upon the sea as their natural highway.” Contrast with this Plato, Laws, iv. 705 a, ἁλμυρὸν καὶ πικρὸν γειτόνημα, “a bitter and brackish neighbour.”