Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/511

 *lin. Some of its leads and floats remain, as well as a gourd, which assisted the floats.

Besides the verses of Oppian, which are above quoted, we find another passage of the same poem (Hal. iii. 82, 83), which mentions the following appendages to the [Greek: sagênê], viz. the [Greek: pezai], the [Greek: sphairônes], and the [Greek: skolios panagros]. As the [Greek: podes], or feet of a sail were the ropes fastened to its lower corners, we may conclude that the [Greek: pezai] were the ropes attached to the corners of the sean, and used in a similar manner to fasten it to the shore and to draw it in to the land, as is described by Ovid in the line already quoted,—

Hos cava contento retia fune trahunt.

The [Greek: sphairônes], as the name implies, were spherical, and must therefore have been either the floats of wood or cork at the top, or the weights, consisting either of round stones or pieces of lead, at the bottom. The [Greek: skolios panagros] must have been a kind of bag formed in the sean to receive the fishes, and thus corresponding to the purse or conical bag in the [Greek: arkus]. The term is illustrated by the application of the equivalent epithet [Greek: ankula] or "angular," to hunting-nets in a passage from Brunck's Analecta, which was formerly explained, and by the epithet "cava" in the line just quoted from Ovid.

In the following passage Ovid mentions the use both of the corks and of the leads. This passage also shows that several nets were fastened together in order to form a long sean:

Aspicis, ut summa cortex levis innatat unda, Cum grave nexa simul retia mergat onus?

Trist. iii. 4. 1, 12.

This use of cork and lead in fishing is also mentioned by Ælian, ''Hist. Anim.'' xii. 43; and that of cork by Pausanias,in the passage of Lucian's Timon, quoted below.], J. Pollux, x. 30. § 132.]