Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/495

 extended only in those openings, through which it was possible for the animals to escape. Also a river was of itself a sufficient boundary:

Inclusum flumine cervum.—Virg. Æn. xii. 749.

The proper Latin term for the hunting-net, but more especially for the purse-net, which will be hereafter described, was . "Cassis, genus venatorii retis." Isidori Hispalensis Orig. xix. 5. "Arctos rodere casses" is applied by Persius (v. 170) to a quadruped with incisor teeth caught in such a net and striving to escape. See also Propertius as just quoted, and the Agamemnon of Seneca and Virgil's Georgics as quoted below. Cassis seems to be derived from the root of capere and catch. But was also applied to hunting-nets, so that Horace describes the hunting of the boar in the following terms:

Aut trudit acres hinc et hinc multa cane Apros in obstantes plagas.—Epod. ii. 31, 32.

Lucretius (lib. v. 1251, 1252) aptly compares the setting up of the plagæ to the planting of a hedge around the forest:

Nam fovea atque igni prius est venarier ortum, Quam sæpire plagis saltum, canibusque ciere.

In the same manner plagæ is used in the Hippolytus of Seneca, as above quoted, and in Pliny.

To dispose the nets in the manner which has been described, was called "retia ponere" (Virg. Georg. i. 307) or "retia tendere" (Ovid, Art. Amat. i. 45).

In Homer a hunting-net is called [Greek: linon panagron], literally, "the flax that catches everything ." But the proper Greek term for the hunting-net, corresponding to the Latin cassis, was [Greek: arkys], which is accordingly employed in the passages of Oppian and Euripides cited above. Also the epigram of Antipater Sidonius, to which a reference has already been made, specifies the hunting-net by the same appellation:

[Greek: Damis men thêrôn arkyn oreionomôn.]

The word is used in the same sense by Cratinus ; also by Ar-*