life of the farm and town. Artemis was the goddess of the
hunt and is oft en 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 fourth-
century philosopher, historian, and adventurer Xenophon.
Cynegeticus, literally Dog Leader but oft en 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 men-
tions 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 diffi culty 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 fi re
during a boar hunt on Mount Olympus in Mysia.
Dogs were indispensable assets for a hunter, as the title
of Xenophon’s treatise indicates. Th e Greeks kept various
breeds of hounds. Th e most common of these was the La-
conian hound (named aft er the southern region of Laconia,
near Sparta), which was bred into a larger breed, the Casto-
rian 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 centu-
ries, tend to support an elitist distinction between aristocrats,
who could aff ord to hunt for sport, and the lower classes, who
hunted for profi t. Th is refl ected a general bias toward land
ownership and agriculture as the proper pursuit of the upper
classes, while any activity aimed at fi nancial profi t was con-
sidered a base pursuit for the masses.
Fishing appears widely in the art of the Bronze Age, par-
ticularly that of the Minoan palaces on Crete dating from the
second millennium b.c.e. Nonetheless, seafood was not a par-
ticularly important part of the ancient Greek diet. Th e water
of the Mediterranean Sea is too salty and too clear to support
the variety of fi sh found in the Atlantic Ocean. Fish popu-
lations 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 fi shermen as
fi gures of excess, swinging from utter poverty to wild, tempo-
rary wealth, with comic eff ect.
But the ancient Greeks liked fi sh, which provided a wel-
comed change of taste from the regular diet of bread, olive oil,
and beans. Because of its relative scarcity and the diffi culties
of transporting it fresh, fi sh was most oft en pickled and used
as a relish to enhance the taste of bread. Th e ancient Greek
word for relish is opson or opsarion, and the modern Greek
word for fi sh, psari, is derived from this ancient word.
Fish were oft en 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 pre-
serve the fi sh, which would end up very salty, dried, and eas-
ily stored. Th e salts and trace minerals in this dried fi sh were
probably as important nutritionally as the protein.
Th ere were few rivers in the world of the ancient Greeks,
and most rivers dried to mere trickles during the summer
months. Th ere is virtually no evidence for freshwater fi shing
of any kind. Th e Greeks caught fi sh close to shore with hand
nets whose hauls included small octopuses and shellfi sh, from
small boats off shore with cast nets, and in the deeper ocean
with spears for larger fi sh such as tuna. Fishing in deepwater
was dangerous, since the seas of the Greek world were subject
to sudden violent storms. Th ese storms were particularly dan-
gerous for boats because of the relative shallowness of the seaFragments of a fresco from Tiryns, showing hunter and dog (Alison
Frantz Photographic Collection, American School of Classical Studies at
Athens)hunting, fishing, and gathering: Greece 579