- rian, where he remarks that the Celts dispensed with the use of
nets in hunting, because they trusted to the swiftness of their greyhounds[1]. In Euripides[2] it is used metaphorically: the children cry out, when their mother is pursuing them,
[Greek: Hôs engys êdê g' esmen arkyôn ziphous],
i. e. "Now how near we are being caught with the sword."
Also in the Agamemnon of Æschylus (l. 1085):
[Greek: Hê diktyon ti g' Aidou;
hall' arkys hê zyneunos, hê zynaitia
phonon.]
In this passage reference is made to the large shawl in which Clytemnestra wrapt the body of Agamemnon, as in a net, in order to destroy him. On account of the use made of it, the same fatal garment is afterwards (l. 1353) compared to a casting-net, which in its form bore a considerable resemblance to the cassis. In l. 1346, [Greek: arkystata][3] denotes this net as set up for hunting. The same form occurs again in the Eumenides (l. 112); and in the Persæ (102-104) escape from danger is in nearly the same terms expressed by the notion of overleaping the net. In Euripides[4] this contrivance is called [Greek: arkystatos mêchanê]; and in the Agamemnon of Seneca[5] the same allusion is introduced:
At ille, ut altis hispidus silvis aper;
Cum, casse vinctus, tentat egressus tamen,
Arctatque motu vincla, et incassum furit,
Cupit, fluentes undique et cæcos sinus
Disjicere, et hostem quærit implicitus suum.
Part of the apparatus of a huntsman consisted in the stakes which he drove into the ground to support his nets, and which Antipater Sidonius thus describes:
[Greek: Kai pyri thêgaleous ozypageis otalikas];
i. e. "The sharp stakes hardened in the fire[6].", i. e. "And here greyhounds answered the same purpose as Xenophon's hunting-nets." De Venat. ii. 21. See Dansey's translation, pp. 72, 121.], ed. Schütz. l. 1376.]in Oppian, Cyneg. iv. 67, 71, 121, 380; Pollux, Onom. v. 31.]
