Chapter 5 - Greed

Summary

Several of the themes that have emerged in the exploration of guile and trickery in Chapter 4 – Oppian’s emphasis on the Odyssean qualities of fishing, as well as a fascination with short-sighted or impulsive behaviour and its evil consequences – take on particular force in the third book of the Halieutica, which turns from cunning to greed, and from fish to fishing. Fish, we are told, are inescapably σιφλός – deficient, lazy, gluttonous, blindly self-destructive –¹ and the fisherman’s use of bait turns the creatures’ own appetites against them, exploiting their precipitous passions.