hunting, fishing, and gathering: Greece life of the farm and town Artemis was the goddess of the hunt and is often portrayed as an untamed spirit, exotic but dangerous Most hunting by real people of the ancient Greek world was for food rather than for sport Since the main source of protein for most people came from legumes such as lentils, meat was a welcome addition to the table Our best source for techniques of ancient hunting is the work by the fourthcentury philosopher, historian, and adventurer Xenophon Cynegeticus, literally Dog Leader but often translated as Hunter, describes techniques for hunting rabbits and hares, deer and hinds, and the most challenging prey, the wild boar He writes of how dogs or human “beaters” were employed to drive animals out of the brush and into the open Many of the other techniques Xenophon describes are clearly those of a practical-minded hunter rather than a sportsman He mentions using pits and snares to trap animals, setting out clogs (blocks of wood intended to trip a running animal) and nets to impede animals until dogs could take them down, and even capturing young animals, holding them, and beating them so that their cries would draw their larger mothers to the dogs or the spear Boar was prized as a catch both for its meat and because of the danger and difficulty of hunting it Even when hunting from horseback and with dogs, a human being had ultimately to face the boar and kill it with a spear An enraged animal could move quickly, dodging the spear or even impaling itself on the weapon so deeply that its tusks could wound the hunter An alternative was to kill the beast with thrown javelins, but this had its own risks; the historian Herodotus describes how the son of King Croesus of Lydia was killed by friendly fire during a boar hunt on Mount Olympus in Mysia Dogs were indispensable assets for a hunter, as the title of Xenophon’s treatise indicates The Greeks kept various breeds of hounds The most common of these was the Laconian hound (named after the southern region of Laconia, near Sparta), which was bred into a larger breed, the Castorian hound (perhaps like a modern greyhound), and crossed with foxes to form a smaller breed called the Vulpine hound, which may have resembled a modern whippet For hunting boar, the ancient Greeks preferred so-called Indian hounds, which may have been akin to the modern mastiff For the most part, hunting was not conducted from horseback except among Greek communities of Asia Minor Xenophon’s writing on hunting, as well as references in the works of Plato and those of Greek writers from later centuries, tend to support an elitist distinction between aristocrats, who could afford to hunt for sport, and the lower classes, who hunted for profit This reflected a general bias toward land ownership and agriculture as the proper pursuit of the upper classes, while any activity aimed at financial profit was considered a base pursuit for the masses Fishing appears widely in the art of the Bronze Age, particularly that of the Minoan palaces on Crete dating from the second millennium b.c.e Nonetheless, seafood was not a par- 579 ticularly important part of the ancient Greek diet The water of the Mediterranean Sea is too salty and too clear to support the variety of fish found in the Atlantic Ocean Fish populations around areas inhabited by Greeks in antiquity were migratory and variable, making them an unreliable source of food In fact, ancient literature tends to portray fishermen as figures of excess, swinging from utter poverty to wild, temporary wealth, with comic effect But the ancient Greeks liked fish, which provided a welcomed change of taste from the regular diet of bread, olive oil, and beans Because of its relative scarcity and the difficulties of transporting it fresh, fish was most often pickled and used as a relish to enhance the taste of bread The ancient Greek word for relish is opson or opsarion, and the modern Greek word for fish, psari, is derived from this ancient word Fish were often salted and dried by laying them out in shallow lagoons of seawater, which the sun would evaporate; the increasing salinity of the evaporating water would preserve the fish, which would end up very salty, dried, and easily stored The salts and trace minerals in this dried fish were probably as important nutritionally as the protein There were few rivers in the world of the ancient Greeks, and most rivers dried to mere trickles during the summer months There is virtually no evidence for freshwater fishing of any kind The Greeks caught fish close to shore with hand nets whose hauls included small octopuses and shellfish, from small boats offshore with cast nets, and in the deeper ocean with spears for larger fish such as tuna Fishing in deepwater was dangerous, since the seas of the Greek world were subject to sudden violent storms These storms were particularly dangerous for boats because of the relative shallowness of the sea Fragments of a fresco from Tiryns, showing hunter and dog (Alison Frantz Photographic Collection, American School of Classical Studies at Athens)