Greek and Roman Fishing (part 1)

Chapter I. Homer—The Position of Fishermen

It is difficult to define accurately or trace separately the Lure or the Lore of these two nations, for their methods of fishing were practically the same or dove-tailed one into the other. Since our authors in both languages frequently synchronise, or as in the case of Pliny and Ælian the younger tongue antedates the elder by a century or more, and since this book is based on no zoological system, I shall deal with them for the most part in chronological order.

The opposite page reproduces the figures of the four fishermen from the famous Fishermen’s Vase of Phylakopi discovered in Melos some twenty years ago. If the period assigned to this, viz. c. 1500 b.c., be accurate, it seems to be the oldest Greek representation, at any rate in the Ægean area, depicting anything connected with fishing, and antedates the earliest Greek author by four to nine hundred years, in accordance with the varying ages allotted to the Homeric poems.

It is to Homer, whether written by half a dozen different authors or in half a dozen different centuries, as the oldest Greek writer extant that we naturally turn for information about fishermen and fishing. His evidence is not only the earliest, but also the most trustworthy, according to Athenæus. “Homer treats of the art of fishing with greater accuracy than professional writers on the subject such as Cæcilius, Oppian, etc.” —an endorsement from the piscatorial side of the Theocritean ἅλις πάντεσσιν Ὅμηρος.

Neither fishermen nor traders in the Iliad and Odyssey possess any real status. While farmers, more especially pastoral farmers, occupy an acknowledged and—next to the chiefs and warriors—the highest position, no fisherman or trader is regarded as a representative unit of the body, politic or social, or as a contributor to the wealth of the tribe or state, a condition with which that of the fisherfolk in ancient Egypt and in China, both in early times and in the present day, is elsewhere compared and contrasted.

“For trader Homer knows no word.” As traders he represents no Greeks, although the Taphians approximate closely (Od., I. 186). For this three reasons have been assigned:—

First, the Greeks of Homer’s time with the exception of the Phæacians, “who care not for bow or quiver, but for masts, and oars of ships, and gallant barques, wherein rejoicing, they cross the grey sea” (Od., VI. 270), hardly impress us, despite Dr. Leaf’s “The whole attitude of both the Poems is one of maritime daring,” as adventurous sailors.

They disliked long sea voyages; they shrank from spending the night on the water; they would go thrice the distance, if they could but keep in touch with land—and naturally enough, when we remember that for the Homeric boat the Ægean was safe for only a few months of the year.

Their food supply made the sea a hateful necessity. “As much as a mother is sweeter than a stepmother, so much is earth dearer than the grey sea” might have been written as appropriately by Homer as by Antipater centuries later.

Whatever trading existed was in the hands not of the Phæacians, but of the Phœnicians, to whose great port Sidon Homer makes reference more than once. Boldness of navigation, plus guile and gainfulness, characterised the nation; their “tricky trading” (cf. the Levantines of our day) found frequent comment.

A comparison of them with the seamen of Elizabeth’s time shows common traits. Both were “the first that ever burst into the silent seas,” both committed acts of piracy, both kidnapped and enslaved freely. Lest it be objected that the evidence of Od., XIV. 297 and 340 occurs in a fictitious account by Odysseus of himself and so is itself fictitious, let us call as witness the Hebrew prophet Joel: “What have ye to do with Me, O Tyre and Zidon? The children, also, of Judah, and the children of Jerusalem, have ye sold unto the sons of the Grecians.”

The second reason lies in the fact that each Homeric house or each hamlet, although perhaps not each town, apparently supplied nearly all its own wants and was practically self-supporting.

The chief crafts existed, as Hesiod shows, but only in a rudimentary stage; workers there were in gold, silver, bronze, wood, leather, pottery, carpentry. Although they were not “adscripti glebæ,” the proper pride or narrow jealousy of each settlement was strongly averse from calling in craftsmen from outside. Only apparently those “workers for the people,” such as “a prophet, or a healer of ills, or a shipwright, or a godlike minstrel who can delight all by his song,” were free to come and go, as they willed, sure of a welcome: “These are the men who are welcome over all the wide earth.”

The third reason was due to nearly all ordinary trade being effected by barter. Payment was in kine, kind, or service. The ox, probably because all round the most important of possessions, constituted the ordinary measure of value: thus a female slave skilled in embroidery fetches four oxen. Laertes gives twenty for Eurycleia, while much-wooed maidens by gifts from their successful suitors “multiply oxen” for their fathers.

Mentes sails to Temesa with a cargo of “shining iron” to exchange for copper. Then again in Il., VII. 472 ff., “the flowing-haired Achæans bought them wine thence, some for bronze and some for gleaming iron, and some with hides, and some with whole kine, and some with captives.” Among the fishermen of the Indian Ocean, fish-hooks, on the same principle of importance of possession, “the most important to them of all implements, passed as currency and in time became a true money larin, just as did the hoe in China.”

“The talents of gold,” probably Babylonian shekels, whether Hultsch’s heavy or W. Ridgeway’s light one, implied, according to some, a money standard of value. But wrongly, because neither gold nor silver came to coinage in Greece or anywhere else till long after Homer’s day.

Fishermen seem slowly to have acquired some sort of status. Ἁλιεύς, at first meaning a seaman or one connected with the sea, in time denoted also a fisherman. Od., XIX. iii, characterises the well-ordered realm of a “blameless king” as one, in which “the black earth bears wheat and barley, and trees are laden with fruit, and sheep bring forth and fail not, and the sea gives store of fish.”

Any objection that such a kingdom had no actual existence, but was only invented to heighten the hyperbole of laudation of Penelope’s fame, “which goes up to the wide heaven, as doth the fame of a blameless king,” concerns us not at all, for the kingdom whether actual or imaginary is held up as worthy of all praise and admiration. In this our Fish and so our Fishermen have attained some, if small, constituent status.

The period of such attainment cannot be dated, but how and why the status arrived I now try to trace.

Authorities differ widely as to whether the (so-called) Greeks, on leaving Central Asia or whatever their Urheimat, established their first lodgements in Europe or Asia, in Greece Proper or Asia Minor. E. Curtius maintained that the Ionians at any rate, if not all the Greeks, founded their earliest settlements on the coast of Asia Minor, and only later crossed to Greece.

This view finds little favour among most Homeric scholars of the present day, who reverse the theory. They place the first settlement of the immigrant Greeks in European Greece, whence by peaceable permeation or otherwise they subsequently colonised the coasts of Asia Minor and the Islands.

According to Professor K. Schneider the Greeks, when swarming from their original Aryan hive and establishing themselves on the coast of Asia Minor and in the Islands of the Ægean Sea, carried with them and for a long time closely preserved their original habits of life and livelihood. Descended from generations of inland dwellers, eaters of the flesh of wild animals, of sheep, etc., they were ignorant of marine fish as a food. Only when the population increased more rapidly than the crops, did they, profiting by their contact with the Phœnicians, to whom in seamanship and, according to some writers, in art they owed much, begin to realise and utilise the wealth of the harvest to be won from the adjacent seas.

Fishing, followed at first mainly by the very poor to procure a food in low esteem, gradually found itself.

In the Iliad and Odyssey no fish appear at banquets or in the houses of the well-to-do: only in connection with the poorest or starving do they obtain mention.

Meleager of Gadara accounted for this fact—previously noted by Aristotle—by the suggestion that Homer represented his characters as abstaining from fish, because as a Syrian by descent he himself was a total abstainer. The curious omission of fish has been held to indicate that Homer either lived before the adoption of fish as food, or, if not, that the social conditions and habits of diet which he delineates are those of generations before such transition.

The decision, if one be possible, lies for Homeric scholars, and not for a mere seeker after piscatoriana. Even to such an one, however, two alternatives seem clear.

First, if Homer did live after the transition occurred, his descriptions of ancient times and customs unconsciously included habits and conditions of a more modern society.

Second, if he lived before such transition—a supposition, which scarcely consists with the presence in Palæolithic débris of copious remains of fish—passages such as Od., XIX. 109-114, which ranks “a sea-given store of fish” a constituent of a well-ordered realm, and Il., XVI. 746, where “This man would satisfy many by searching (or diving) for oysters,” are interpolations by later writers.

It is difficult otherwise to reconcile or explain conflicting passages. How, for instance, can the dictum, that “Fish as a food was in the Poems only used by the very poor or starving,” be made to harmonise with Il., XVI. 746, just quoted? If it be confined solely to the Odyssey, a more plausible case may possibly be presented.

Another suggestion, not quite similar, yet not repugnant, is Seymour’s. “The Poet represented the life which was familiar to himself and his hearers. Each action, each event might be given by tradition, or might be the product of the poet’s imagination, but the details which show the customs of the age, and which furnish the colours of the picture, are taken from the life of the poet’s time. His interest is centred in the action of the story, and the introduction of unusual manners and standard of life would only distract the attention of his hearers.”

Mackail, perhaps, concludes the whole matter. “The Homeric world is a world imagined by Homer: it is placed in a time, evidently thought of as far distant, though there are no exact marks of chronology any more than there are in the Morte d’Arthur.”

Homer’s close knowledge of the many devices for the capture of fish, and his lively interest in the habits of fish quite apart from actual fishing seem inconsistent with Schneider’s contention of Greek ichthyic ignorance.

Fish, as we have seen, came gradually to be considered as much a part of natural wealth as the fruits of the ground or herds of cattle. And yet in all the pictures with which Hephæstus adorns the Shield of Achilles, pictures of common ever-present objects, first of the great phenomena of Nature—Earth, Sea, Sun, Moon, and Stars—and then of the various events and occupations that make up the round of human life—in all these pictures, which as a series of illustrations of early life and manners are obviously a document of first-rate importance, no form of sea-faring has any place. Ships of war, maritime commerce, and fishing are alike unrepresented.

No satisfactory explanation of this omission has as yet seen the light. The design of The Shield, say some, came from an inland country, such as Assyria. Others that Homer described some foreign work of art fabricated by people who knew not the sea, but Helbig points out that the omission consists with the references to ships and sea-faring elsewhere in Homer. No commerce or occupation, which could be placed side by side with farming in a picture of Greek life, then existed. If Mr. Lang’s view—which possesses the pleasant property of incapacity of either proof or disproof—that The Shield was simply an ideal work of art had been more generally borne in mind, we should have been spared endless comment.

In his ascription of The Shield to Assyrian or Phœnician influence Monro finds himself at variance with Sir Arthur Evans. Even if his statement, “the recent progress of archæology has thrown so much light on the condition of Homeric art,” be accurate and the deductions from such recent progress be justifiable, the still more recent progress in the same science (according to Evans) ousts the Assyrian or Phœnician in favour of a Cretan parentage.

“It is clear that some vanguard of the Aryan Greek immigrants came into contact with this Minoan culture at a time when it was still in its flourishing condition. The evidence of Homer is conclusive. Arms and armour described in the poems are those of the Minoan prime; the fabled Shield of Achilles, like that of Herakles described by Hesiod, with its elaborate scenes and variegated metal work, reflects the masterpieces of the Minoan craftsmen in the full vigour of their art. Even the lyre to which the minstrel sang was a Minoan invention.”

The suggestion that both authorities are really in agreement and that the influence at work may be traced back ultimately to the early Assyrian, i.e. Sumerian, culture, even if Evans holds “that the first quickening impulse came to Crete from Egypt and not from the Oriental side,” seems, on present data, untenable.

Till twenty years ago it was generally accepted that no character of Homer ever sailed for recreation, or fished for sport. They were far too near the primitive life to find any joy in such pursuits. Men scarcely ever hunted or fished for mere pleasure. These occupations were not pastimes; they were counted as hard labour. Hunting, fishing, and laying snares for birds in Homer and even in the classical periods had but one aim, food.

The Poet expressly mentions the hardships (ἂλγεα, Od., IX. 121) of hunters in traversing forest and mountains. Nowhere does he give any indication of sport in hunting or fishing, except perhaps in the case of the wild boar and in the delight of Artemis “taking her pastime in the chase of boars and swift deer,” where the word, παίζουσιν, would seem surely to indicate pleasure in sport.

But the recent discovery at Tiryns of a fresco where two ladies are depicted standing in a car at a boar-hunt —perhaps “in at the death”—certainly makes for considerable qualification, and, if succeeded by similar finds, for complete reversal of the non-sporting theory.

On Circe’s Island, Odysseus strikes down “a tall antlered stag” as “he was coming down from his pasture in the woodland to the river, for verily the might of the Sun was sore upon him.” He bears the “huge beast” across his neck to the black ship of his companions, who soon devour it. This is the only mention of venison in Homer (Od., X. 158 ff.).

Chapter II. Homer—Methods of Fishing

Whether Homer lived before or after the adoption of fish as a food, we find in the Iliad and Odyssey several references to fishing with the Spear, the Net, the Hand-line, and the Rod.

It is a point of curious interest that nearly all the references, where methods or weapons of fishing find mention, are made for the purpose of or occur in a simile, which despite the so-called Higher Criticism Mackail says, “In Homer reached perfection.” A Homeric comparison, like the parable of the New Testament in its very nature is intended to throw light from the more familiar upon what is less familiar. The poet cannot intend to illustrate the moderately familiar by what is wholly strange. In modern writers the subjects of a simile, apart from those drawn from nature, are sometimes modern or new; in the old they are almost invariably drawn from some well established custom.

If so, it follows that to the Greeks of Homer’s time (as was the case with the Egyptians before them) fishing with Spear, Net, Line, and Rod were old and familiar devices. Which of the first three—Spear, Net, Line—ranks the oldest, has (as shown in my Introduction) been long disputed and seems doubtful of definite settlement.

The passages referring to fishing number eight. Of the four methods of fishing mentioned one is with Spear (Od., X. 124) two with the Net (Od., XXII. 386; Il., V. 487), and one with the Rod (Od., XII. 251).

A. The Spear (Od., X. 124): “And like folk spearing fishes they bare home their hideous meal.” This gives a very lively image, because the companions of Odysseus, whose boats had been smashed by the thrown rocks, are in the water, and are being speared like fish by the Læstrygones.

B. The Net (Od., XXII. 383 ff.): “But he” (Odysseus after the slaughter of the suitors) “found all the sort of them fallen in their blood in the dust, like fishes that the fishermen have drawn forth in the meshes of the net into a hollow of the beach from out the grey sea, and all the fish, sore longing for the salt waves, are heaped upon the sand, and the sun shines forth and takes their life away: so now the wooers lay heaped upon each other.”

In Iliad, V. 487 ff.: “Only beware lest, as though entangled in the mesh of all-ensnaring flax, ye be made unto your foemen a prey and a spoil.”

C. The Rod (Od., XII. 251 ff.): “Even, as when a fisher on some headland lets down with a long rod his baits for a snare to the little fishes below, casting into the deep the horn of an ox of the homestead, and as he catches each flings it writhing, so were they” (i.e. the companions of Odysseus) “borne upward to the cliff” (by Scylla).

D. Line and Hook (Iliad, XXIV. 80 ff.): “And she” (Iris on her Zeus-bidden mission) “sped to the bottom like a weight of lead, that mounted on the horn of a field-ox goeth down, bearing death to the ravenous fishes.”

E. Iliad, XVI. 406 ff.: “As when a man sits on a jutting rock and drags a sacred fish from the sea with line and glittering hook of bronze, so on the bright spear dragged he Thestor,” etc.

F. Odyssey, IV. 368 f.: “Who” (the companions of Menelaus) “were ever roaming round the isle, fishing with bent hooks, for hunger was gnawing at their belly.”

Odyssey, XII. 330 f.: “They” (the companions of Odysseus) “went wandering with barbed hooks in quest of game, as needs they must, fishes and fowls, whatever might come to their hand, for hunger gnawed at their belly.”

The Rod finds one express mention—in passage C. Is its use implied in passages D. and E.? The answer depends greatly on whether the adjectives employed are really descriptive of the qualities and sizes of the fish, or whether they are merely (as often the case in Homer) ornamental or conventional epithets more suited for general than particular use, or are redundant.

Our wonder, if the adjectives are really descriptive, grows by the Rod being only specifically mentioned when “little fishes” are the prey. If the contention of modern fishermen—the value of the rod as an implement increases in proportion to the weight of the fish on the hook—holds good, why does Homer cite the Rod in connection only with “little” fishes, more especially as the prey in the simile (the companions of Odysseus) can hardly be classed as “little”?

Four differing explanations are possible:—

1. That “little” is an ornamental or redundant adjective.

2. That ῥάβδος, which is usually translated rod, i.e. fishing-rod, is (according to Hayman and others) not a fishing-rod, but merely a staff, or spear, shod with horn, and that “little” signifies only fish suitable for food, not large fish, such as dolphins, etc.

3. That the fishermen of Homer (anticipating our professional deep-sea fishermen in Kent and the Channel Islands, who for quickness and certainty, especially in the case of heavy fish, prefer hand-lines to rods), limited the use of the Rod to “little,” i.e. not large, fish.

4. That “little” is partly ornamental, partly intentional, because fish caught close inshore are normally smaller than those caught farther out.

From the adjectives in passages D. and E. can we infer the use of the Rod? Of the adjective in E., Butcher and Lang write: “It is difficult to determine whether ἱερός in Homer does not sometimes retain its primitive meaning of ‘strong’ (see Curtius, Etym., No. 614); in certain phrases, this may perhaps be accepted, as an archaism.... On the whole we have not felt so sure of the archaic use as to adopt it in our translation.”

Paley, “ἱερὸς means huge, as if a favourite of or dedicated to some sea-god.” Was it from this shade of meaning that Theocritus in his Fisherman’s Dream drew his conception that certain fish might be κειμήλιον Ἀμφιτρίτας, a pet of the sea-goddess? Faesi seems to incline to Paley’s view, but for a more general reason: ἱερὸς equalling ἄνετος earmarks “all herds and shoals of fish, especially those in the Sea, as consecrate to the Gods.”

Granting this, why should one fish be singled out by the epithet when the whole “herd or shoal” is equally ἱερός? The infrequent coupling of the adjective with ἰχθὺς suggests some less general meaning, if it mean anything.

Athenæus after trying to answer, “But what is the fish which is called Sacred?” by citing instances where the Dolphin, Pompilus, Chrysophrys, etc., are so designated, adds a sentence which seems either to be the authority for, or to confirm the authority of Faesi; “but some understand by the term ‘sacred fish’ one let go and dedicated to the God, just as people give the same name to a consecrated ox.”

Seymour holds that “the epithet ἱερὸς as applied to a fish in Il., XVI. 407, has not been satisfactorily explained from ordinary Greek usage: instead of sacred, it seems rather to mean active, vigorous, strong. Cf. the same epithet applied to the picket guard of the Achæans in Il., X. 56.” Curtius connects the word with the Sanskrit ishirá = vigorous. Ἱερὸς as active, agile, strong is applied to horses, spies, mind, women, and cows.

Leaf suggests that the word, when applied to night, etc., would have developed the meaning of mighty, mysterious, and so later on sacred. If sacred, the epithet may have arisen out of some sort of tabu or religious feeling against eating fish, in early times often regarded as either uncanny creatures living under water and possessed of superhuman powers, or as divine or semi-divine.

Gradually the dread of fish as creatures tabu wore off, but survived for long in a hole-and-corner way, e.g. the veneration of τέττιξ ἐνάλιος, ‘the lobster,’ at Seriphos, or the deification of καρκίνοι, ‘crabs,’ in Lemnos.

If ἱερὸς does mean a big, fine, vigorous fish, to most modern fishermen a Rod would seem implied. This is strengthened by the nature of the act to which the simile applies: ὣς ἕλκε δουρὶ φαεινῷ, as Patroclus dragged Thestor on the bright spear from the chariot, so the fishermen dragged the fish from the sea.

In D. the case, if any, for the implied use of the Rod is very weak. In this alone of all the references does lead as a weight occur. Here we have no comparison to action such as dragging up a fine fish, but simply to swiftness; the effect of it, the splash, makes the point of the comparison with which Iris sped on her mission. Nor does the adjective applied to the fish give any aid, for ὠμηστής, if it be not redundant, signifies ‘raw-flesh devouring’ (rather than ‘ravenous’) fish, such as shark or swordfish.

But if the early Greeks and Romans only fished for the pot and not for amusement, the question arises, why should this particular Homeric piscator “be after” swordfish or shark? Fishing, down to the early Roman times, continued to be more of a distinct trade than was the pursuit of animals and birds. Hence the Net with quicker and surer returns and not the Rod was the favourite weapon of the fishermen by trade.

In F. (Od., IV. 369, and XII. 330) something in the nature of a line and of a bait of some sort (though not necessarily of a rod) attached to the bent, or barbed, hooks, must be implied. Hunger would assuredly continue to “gnaw at their bellies,” if their only food was caught by hooks, pure and simple, for, as Juliana Berners pithily puts it, “Ye can not brynge an hoke into a fyssh mouth without a bayte.”

Abstention from fish, however general, did not prevail among Homer’s sailors. Athenæus (I. 22) points out that since the hooks used could not have been forged on the Island, and so must have been carried on board the ships, “it is plain sailors were fond of and skilful in catching fish.”

Basing my surmise on ὄρνιθας in Od., XII. 331 and on the statement of Eustathius ad loc., that hooks were used for capturing sea-birds as well as fish, I suggest that the baits on the hooks were either small fishes (left possibly by the tide in some pool in the rocks), or shellfish, or oysters. These attached to a line (with or without a rod) and thrown into the sea were taken by both sea-fowl and fish.

But all the preceding points dwarf in interest before the term κέρας βοὸς ἀγραύλοιο, “the horn of a field ox, or ox of the homestead.” How does the horn of an ox find itself in this galley? What was its exact use? Where and how was it employed?

Many scholars and fishermen, ancient and modern, have essayed the problem. The reason for the use of the horn passed early out of common knowledge and afforded matter for conjecture from Aristotle downwards.

To enumerate all the theories would necessitate a list almost as long as Homer’s catalogue of the ships. The following, the most important, must suffice for our purpose.

(1) Κέρας was a little pipe or collar of horn protecting the line (which passed through it) just at its junction with the hook, and served the same purpose as a “gimp” on a trolling line. “This precaution (according to Arnold) was taken so that the fish might not gnaw through the line”—a precaution very similar to our use of wire between the line and the hook, when fishing for tigerfish, tarpon, shark, etc.

A similar interpretation of the word occurred to Aristotle, who held that the lower piece of the line was fortified by a little hollow piece of horn, lest the fish should come at the line itself and bite it off. But the use of κέρας in the second (Od.) passage appears to rule out Aristotle’s and Arnold’s interpretations. The fish here are admittedly, not raw-flesh devouring, which might imply size, but small. Why then this elaborate contrivance as precaution against severance of the line?

The above explanation of the use of κέρας derives strong support from the method even now employed in the Nile. The native sportsman, as protection against its being bitten off, covers a soft woollen line, to which is tethered a live rat, a common bait for a big Nile fish, with a pipe or tube of maize stalk. Here the similarity ends; on the Nile no hook is employed; the sportsman harpoons the fish while hanging on to the rat.

(2) Κέρας, according to Paley (quoting Spitzner), was a bit of horn fastened to the hook and plummet to disguise their appearance; this, from being nearly the same colour as the sea, served better to deceive the fish.

(3) Κέρας, according to Trollope and others, was the horn or tube, but in it only the leaden weight was enclosed.

(4) Κέρας was a kind of tress, made out of the hair of a bull. Plutarch, however, states flatly, “But this is an error.” Damm and others insist that the word in this sense is post-Homeric, and agree with Plutarch that these tresses, if ever used, would have been of the hair of a horse, and not of a bull.

(5) Κέρας, according to Hayman and others, was simply a prong of horn attached to a staff to pierce and fork out the fish while feeding; hence the preliminary baits, εἴδατα (similar to baiting a swim on the Thames), are of course not on or attached to the horn.

The epithet in C. is περιμήκης, not merely long, but very long. The adjective, if not redundant, lends weight to Hayman’s theory of spear as against fishing rod. Against it, however, in Od., X. 293, the ῥάβδος, or wand of Circe, which thrice appears (in Od., X. 238, 319, 389) minus any adjective, suddenly takes unto itself περιμήκης, very long, without apparent reason for the distinction.

(6) Mr. Minchin’s explanation is ingenious, if open to two objections. “As to the ox horn puzzle,” he writes to me, “I feel no doubt that the Cherithai (as the Bible calls the Kretans) cut a ring out of the horn of an ox, and then cut a gap, thus making a crescent of horn, to the one end of which they attached their line, which is exactly what the black fellows (in Australia) do to-day with a pearl shell.”

But against this conjecture weighs the fact that as the grain of the horn runs from butt to point, if the hook be cut from cross-section it would probably break, as the cross-section would be across the grain, and so very frayable. If, however, the hook were cut from a panel removed from the side of the horn and just where the curve comes before the point, the substance of the hook might possibly stand.

Anticipating and dissenting from Mr. Minchin’s explanation are Monro’s note on Il., XXIV. 80 ff., and Professor Tylor’s comment in the note. “The main difficulty in the ancient explanation of the passage is the prominence given to the κέρας, which is spoken of as if it were the chief feature of the fisherman’s apparatus. The question naturally suggests whether the κέρας might not be the hook itself, made, like so many utensils of primitive times, from the horn of an animal.”

On this point Mr. E. B. Tylor writes to Monro as follows: “Fish-hooks of horn are in fact known in prehistoric Europe, but are scarce, and very clumsy. After looking into the matter, I am disposed to think that the Scholiast knew what he was about, and that the old Greeks really used a horn guard, where the modern pike fisher only has his line bound, to prevent the fish biting through. Such a horn guard, if used then, would last on in use, anglers being highly conservative, and I shall look out for it.”

Maspero, however, states, “Objects in bone and horn are still among the rarities of our museums: horn is perishable and is eagerly devoured by certain insects, which rapidly destroy it,” with which statement may be compared Od., XXI. 395, “lest the worms might have eaten the horns” (of the bow of Odysseus).

Finally the explanation first suggested by Mr. C. E. Haskins and adopted by Dr. Leaf, that κέρας was an artificial bait of horn, appears to me as an angler and as having seen in the Pacific, but not used, “bait fish-hooks made of shell all in one piece, of a simple hooked form without any barb,” to be perhaps the most likely solution of our problem.

According to Mr. Haskins, κέρας means an artificial bait of horn, probably shaped like a small fish, and hollow at all events at the upper end, into which a μολύβδαινα (lead) was inserted to sink it. It had hooks of χαλκός fastened to it and was used by being thrown out, allowed to sink, and then rapidly drawn through the water to attract the fish by its glitter and motion. The εἴδατα may either be the same as the κέρας mentioned in the next line, or more probably ground bait thrown in to attract fish to the spot, while the use of the present participle, κατὰ ... βάλλων, seems to imply constant action, i.e. the fisherman throwing in at intervals a handful of ground bait.

While I have not, like Mr. Haskins, “caught many trout with artificial baits made of horn,” I can vouch that in England horn minnows still exist and that horn spoons are even now used for pike.

We find in Homer no special variety of fishes, except eels and dolphins. Eels are not ranked in a strict sense as fish; the words are “both eels and fishes” (Il., XXI. 203, 353). Sea calves and seals also find a place. Other fish occur in the picture of Scylla (Od., XII. 95): “and there she fishes (ἰχθυάᾳ) swooping round the rock, for dolphins or sea-dogs, or whatso greater beast she may anywhere take, whereof the deep-voiced Amphitrite feeds countless flocks.”

Seals greedily devour a corpse in the sea (Od., XV. 480). Il., XXI. 122, 203, extend the pleasant practice to fish and eels: “around him eels and fishes swarmed, tearing and gnawing the fat about his kidneys.”

It is noteworthy that in Greek and Latin literature the first fish attaining to the dignity of a name is the Eel.

The sea is called ἰχθυόεις, “fishy,” or perhaps better “fishful,” twelve times: the Hellespont only once. Plutarch (Symp., IV. 4) had this probably in mind, when he wrote, “the heroes encamped by the Hellespont used themselves to a spare diet, banishing from their tables all superfluous delicacies to such a degree that they abstained from fish.” Ἰχθυόεις happens but once in connection with a river, the Hyllus (Il., XX. 392).

Homer seemingly applies it only where he is impressed, not by the number of fish obvious to the eye or still remaining in, but by the number already taken out of the water. The proportion of salt water ‘fishfuls’ to fresh water ‘fishfuls’—13 as against 1—would, if not quite accidental, accord with the fact that the early Greeks, whatever be the time at which they became Ichthyophagists, set no high store on fresh-water fish.

Chapter III. The Contest Between Homer and Hesiod—Homer’s Death

The cause and circumstances of Homer’s death remain uncertain and disputed. For them some writers hold fisherfolk responsible.

Midway between (A) the tradition that Homer took so to heart his impotency to read—be it remembered he had been acclaimed “of mortals far the wisest”—the riddle of the fisher boys, that he took also to bed and shortly after died, and (B) the absolute assertion by Herodotus the Grammarian (Vita Homeri) that the poet “died at Ios of disease contracted on his arrival there, and not of grief at failing to understand the riddle of the fishers,” lies the account of the death given in the Ἀγὼν Ἡσιόδου καὶ Ὁμήρου, or The Contest between Hesiod and Homer.

The Contest, despite the rather laboured thrusts of the antagonists full of curious if not connected touches, makes the funeral solemnities of King Amphidamas the occasion and Chalcis (not Aulis or Delos) the scene of the encounter.

Victory and prize were adjudged to Hesiod, because he “sang of Tilth and Peace, not of War and Gore.”

If left to a jury composed of or even leavened by fishers instead of to the king, the verdict would surely have gone the other way, were it only on the ground that while Homer affords several spirited pictures of fishing, we search in vain all Hesiod’s genuine works for any mention, for even any allusion to fishing.

The word fish occurs only in Works and Days, line 277. Even if we allow The Shield of Heracles to be by Hesiod, we find but one passage (lines 214-5) relating to fishing, and this with a Net. Hesiod’s silence on the subject surprises, for (a) he boasts himself the poet of country life, (b) states that as a youth he fed and led his flocks on the sides and amid the streams of Mount Helicon, and (c) passed the rest of his life on the banks of the river Cephissus.

Homer had previously, on consulting the Pythian Priestess as to the country whence he sprang, received a response, which I render—

“Thy mother’s home is Ios, where in time Thou’lt lie; but ’ware the young lads’ riddling rhyme.”

But now let the Ἀγὼν speak. “After the contest the poet sailed unto Ios, and there abode a long time, being already an old man. Sitting one day on the sea-shore, he asked some lads returning from fishing,

‘Fishermen from Arcadia, have we aught?’

To which they made answer,

‘What caught we, we left; what caught we not, we carry.’

Homer, however, caught not on, until he was told that the key of ‘what’ was not fish, but lice.

“Remembering him of the oracle that the end of life was upon him, he makes the epitaph for his own tomb. Arising thence, he slipped in the mud, falling on his rib, and on the third day, so men say, died. And he was buried in Ios.”

This is the epitaph—

Ἐνθάδε τὴν ἱερὴν κεφαλὴν κατὰ γαῖα καλύπτει, Ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων κοσμήτορα, θεῖον Ὄμηρον.

or

“Here Earth has hid that holy head of thine, Marshal of heroes, Homer the divine.”

The story of Hesiod after his victory over Homer as set forth in The Contest repays telling.

He journeyed at once to Delphi to give the first fruits of his victory as a votive offering to the Oracle—and here let us note how in early times, certainly down to the time of Xenophon, the Greeks at important events in their lives resorted to some such fane for guidance.

Greeted from the inner shrine as one “held in honour high by the immortal Muses,” as one “whose fame shall reach as far as is spread the light of morn” (this use of one of Homer’s own and fairest lines was no doubt intended as the highest possible tribute to his victor), Hesiod is then warned, “But beware of the fair grove of the Nemean Zeus, for there lies thy fate of death.”

Alas! for the poet, who to escape the well-known temple of Nemean Zeus in the Peloponnese hurried off to stay at Oinoë in Locris, never to discover that there too was a place sacred to the same god and called by the same name.

At Oinoë he abode with his hosts, until suspecting that he had debauched their sister (Hesiod seems to have been endowed with superhuman powers, for according to Proclus and Suidas he was a youth twice!), they slew him and threw him into the sea. But on the third day his body was borne back to land by dolphins. On hue and cry for the murderers being raised the brothers seized a fishing boat and set sail for Crete. But they found not favour in the “pure eyes and perfect witness of all-judging” Zeus, who thundered and sank them. “But the maiden, their sister, after the rape hanged herself.” To conclude in the words of the Ἀγών,

“So much for Hesiod!”

Chapter IV. The Dolphin—Herodotus—The Ichthyophagi—The Tunny

The Shield of Heracles, now rarely attributed to Hesiod the poet nearest in time to Homer, gives us pictures, similar if more ornate in style to those in Homer’s “The Shield of Achilles.”

The Shield of Heracles would probably not have been written had not Homer’s “Shield of Achilles” existed. It differs from the older poem in the presentation of mythological scenes and a scene of fishing, but is perhaps the most complete illustration from fisher life extant before Theocritus.

“there appeared A sheltering haven from the untamed rage Of ocean. It was wrought of tin refined And rounded by the chisel; and it seemed Like to the dashing wave; and in the midst Full many dolphins chased the fry, and show’d As though they swam the waters, to and fro Darting tumultuous. Two of silver scale Panting above the wave, the fishes mute Gorged, that beneath them shook their quivering fins In brass. But on the crag a fisher sate Observant: in his grasp he held a net Like one that, poising, rises to the throw.”

The painting of the harbour, of the cliffs, of the fishes tossing in tumultuous heaps, and of the chase and capture by dolphins of their prey, all seem to Mr. Hall but a careful elaboration of a suitable background (as the fields, etc., in the ancient Pastorals form an artistic background to the shepherds) for the solitary figure.

“But, on the crag a fisher sate Observant; in his grasp he held a net, Like one that, poising, rises to the throw.”

The occurrence here of the Dolphin, together with the part that it played in the recovery of Hesiod’s body, makes this an appropriate place for a brief résumé of the position occupied by this fish in Greek and Roman authors, and of the many pretty legends in which for all time its memory is enshrined.

The myth of the Dolphin—a creature of lightness and swiftness—as the protégé of the gods and the helpmate of man stands out as a purely Hellenic conception, and contrasts sharply with that of the Tortoise, unmoving, half-hidden, which according to Eastern belief supports the weight of the world.

In Greek and Latin literature (exclusive of the recipes of the gourmets or the rhapsodies of the opsophagi) no fish wins more frequent mention or higher appreciation than the Dolphin.

And justly so, since, of a nature essentially philanthropic, it delights to be with man, and aid man by willing services. Pliny,indeed, confesses that he could never reach the end of the stories about their kindly acts, especially towards the young. He notes that they found pleasure not only in the society of man, but also in music, præcipue hydrauli sono, or “the organ,” the only trait, I imagine, common to the fish and to Nero!

The helpfulness of the Dolphin shows itself in diverse ways, often on vital occasions. In gratitude for the rescue of Telemachus, Ulysses wore its effigy stamped on signet and on shield. Attracted by Arion’s singing, it saves from the waves “the sweet musician,” and bears him safe to Tænarum. Later on, with pleasant disregard of religious bias, it rescues the Christian Saint Callistratus from a watery grave. It acts as willing, almost as “common” carrier, alike to gods, schoolboys, and damsels in distress. It anticipates our meteorological office, for from the direction of its swim can be predicted the wind of to-morrow.

Its constant and practical service to fishermen meets wide attestation. Oppian sings it: Pliny proses it: Ælian cribs, and confirms it.

From the lagoon of Latera (says our Latin author) multitudes of mugils or grey mullets at stated periods flock to the sea. The moment the migration begins, crowds collect for the sport, shout their loudest, and summon “Simo” from the vasty deep, or rather the mouth of the lagoon.

The Dolphins, formed in line of battle, swim swiftly in, cut off all escape to sea, and drive before them the frightened fish to the shoals. While the nets are being drawn the dolphins kill, but pause not to eat, such fish as escape the meshes. When at last the catch is saved, then they fall to and devour the fish already killed.

Here let us note an instance of intellectual anticipation of Trade Unionism. Well aware that their labour has yielded far more than the regulation Trade stroke, and earned more than the Eight Hours’ wage, they quietly await settling day—next morning—when they are paid by being stuffed not only with fish, but also with crumbs soaked in wine.

Thus Oppian of another fish-drive,

“The Fishers pick the choicest of the Spoil, Supply their wishes and reward their Toil.”

In a story of similar fishing by Mucianus the Dolphins await neither summons by voice as above, or signal by torch (as in Ælian, II. 8) but “uncalled and of their own accord” present themselves ready for work.

Trades Unionism among the Dolphins is again not obscurely indicated, ipsis quoque inter se publica est societas. Furthermore, close corporations, not unlike mediæval Guilds or modern Unions, but wotting not of “blackleg” or even “dilutee,” surely prevailed, for suum quæque cymba e delphinis socium habet.

Ælian’s dolphins foreshadow, it would seem, our modern principle of co-operation, when “they draw near demanding the due reward of their joint-undertaking.” But their organisation of labour differed from ours in two respects.

First, the willingness and the wage for night and day shift were identical. Second, since they were not blessed as we in the higher civilisation of the twentieth century are by the exalted, if not always successful conceptions of Conferences of Conciliation or Compulsory Arbitration, a strike, occasioned either by divergence from the strict terms of the bargain, or by gauche “handling” of the workers—whether for it the sanction of the Ballot or an order of the Shop Steward were a necessary preliminary my researches have not as yet disclosed—a strike, I repeat, could not be called off, but was irreparable, for οὐκέτι oἱ δελφῖνες ἀρηγόνες εἰσὶν ἐπ’ ἄγρην.

By the Dolphins the economic weapon was evidently brought to greater perfection than by their human brethren. The crude “down tooling” of the Egyptian masons in the fourteenth century b.c., although accompanied by violence such as forcing main gates, etc., was (according to Maspero) quickly settled by the attacked Governor handing over the keys of the granaries, whence with bags—and bellies—full filled they meekly returned to work.

Of another ingratiating characteristic of the Dolphin, its attachment and services to boys, instances are numerous and well attested. In truth we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, from the autoptic gospel of the Anti-Semite Apion and of the wide-travelled Pausanias to the gleanings of the industrious A. Gellius, that I can draw attention to two stories only. These illustrate the relations existing between the Dolphin, and (a) the boy of Baiæ as set forth by Pliny (IX. 8), and (b) the boy of Iasos by Oppian (V. 468), Athenæus (XIII. 85), and Ælian (VI. 15).

In the last two occurs the pretty tale of the fish waiting daily till school ended to take the beloved lad for swims and larks in the sea, but without the refinement found elsewhere of waiting every morning and afternoon to carry him to and from school! To the spectacle in Iasian waters of their play and of their races (“to bring the thorough-bred and the donkey together” à la Admiral Rous, the fish must have been crushingly handicapped!):

“Drawn by Report to see the strange Amour Admiring Nations crowded to the Shore. Rapt with delight, surveyed their am’rous Game And owned the Sight superior to the Fame.”

But alas! soon was “their am’rous Game” to end.

One day the lad, tired and eager for a bathe, threw himself on his comrade’s back, only however to impale himself on the dorsal spike and gradually bleed to death. No sooner did the Dolphin perceive the water tinged with blood, than “with the force of a full-sailed Rhodian ship,” he drave straight for land, flung himself and his burden high and dry on the strand, and there, by the side of his beloved dead, abode until death came unto him also.

To testify that these twain “were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided,” the citizens of Iasos erected a monument, showing the beautiful boy astride the back of the Dolphin, and issued coins bearing the effigies of each, which were sought far as souvenirs by bands of pilgrims attracted thither by the story. In such regard did the legend continue to be held that even up to the third century b.c. the Iasians struck coins with the device of a youth swimming beside a dolphin, which he clasps with one arm.

Like Scylla, who “fishes for dolphins and whatso greater beast she may anywhere take,” both the Thracians and Byzantines, despite the enormous annual revenues derived by the latter from their fisheries, caught and ate the Dolphin, and for so-doing are branded as impious and barbarian. The more ancient Byzantine coins show a cow standing on a dolphin, which perhaps symbolises the heifer crossing the Bosporus.

The ancient literature of the East also portrays Dolphins (Ç i çumâras) as the ready helpers of man, in rescuing lives, in drawing ships, etc. The inhabitants of Isle Sainte Marie, near Madagascar, even now never harm or eat the fish, holding it as sacred, because they believe it rendered signal service to some ancestor.

Herodotus mentions a tribe living round Lake Prasias, who in dwellings and food resemble the Wolga folk, and early Continental and English Lake-dwellers:—

“Platforms supplied by tall piles stand in the middle of the lake, which are approached from the land by a narrow single stage. At first the piles were fixed by all citizens, but since that time the custom that has prevailed about fixing them is this, every man drives in three for each wife he marries. Now the men all have many wives apiece, and this is the way they live. Each has his own hut (wherein he dwells) on one of the platforms, and each has a trap door, giving access to the lake beneath: their wont is to tie the baby children by the foot with a string, to save them from rolling into the water. They feed their horses and other beasts on fish, which abound in the lake in such a degree that a man has only to open his trap door, and let down a basket by a rope into the water, and then wait a very short time, when he draws it up quite full of fish.”

Confirming and illustrating Herodotus’s account (I. 202) of how a tribe dwelling on the Araxes lived on raw fish, but depicting more sharply how on fish a whole people were dependent for everything that made up their lives, comes Arrian’s description of the Ichthyophagi of the Persian Gulf.

Denied by the barrenness of their country the ordinary sources of subsistence, they were compelled to use fish for every purpose—food, clothes, houses, etc. These peoples (for the Indian Ichthyophagi are quite distinct from the Arabian) find comment by many authors—e.g. Strabo, Pausanias, Diodorus Siculus. Although by their diet of fish comparatively free from disease, they were noted as short-lived. Alexander the Great, with a view to increasing their span of existence, forbade all the Ichthyophagi an unmixed diet.

Solinus (56, 9) testifies as to their extreme swiftness in swimming: non secus quam marinæ beluæ nando in mari valent. Marco Polo (III. 41) found on the coast of Arabia an interesting survival of the Ichthyophagi. In consequence of the sterility of the soil they fed their cattle, camels, and horses on dried fish, “which being regularly served to them they eat without any signs of dislike. They are dried and stored, and the beasts feed on them from year’s end to year’s end. The cattle will also eat these fish just out of the water.”

Not dissimilar is the account given some twelve centuries earlier of the people of Stobera in India. “They clothe themselves in the skins of very large fishes, and their cattle taste like fish and eat extraordinary things: for they are fed upon fish, just as in Cairo the flocks are fed on figs.”

In strong contrast with these Ichthyophagi other races abstained entirely, not as the Egyptians and Jews partially, from fish. Of such were the Syrians, either because they worshipped fish as gods or held them as sacred, or because (as asserted by Anaximander) of the inhumanity, since mankind originally were born from fish, of devouring one’s fathers and mothers.

Surprising, indeed, sounds the statement of Plutarch that among total abstainers in early times were the more religious-minded of the Greeks, among whom later the eating of fish developed into a passionate, almost cat-like, devotion. Invested though the abstentions, total or other, were with divine origin or armed with divine sanction, the root reason of all of them rested, I believe, on the terror of skin-diseases, attributable to a fish diet. Others, however, hold that the ultimate reason of the tabu lay in the uncanny nature of creatures that can and do live under water, while we can not.

Fishermen rank higher in the time of Herodotus than in the Homeric era. Even the oracles and soothsayers now condescend to avail themselves of their technique and parlance for framing their answers. Thus Amphilytus the Acarnanian encourages Pisistratus before the battle of Pallene with

“The casting net is thrown down, and the fishing net spread wide. And the tunnies shall dart to and fro (therein) in the moonlight.”

If Pisistratus squared the Acarnanian, as effectively as the Alcmæonidæ (his hereditary foes and the ejectors of his descendants from Athens) absolutely bought the oracle at Delphi, words of greater light and leading than “The Tunnies shall dart to and fro in the moonlight” might have been vouchsafed, for Herodotus relates that Pisistratus fell on the enemy, when they were having their mid-day meal, or asleep after it, or playing dice. To suppose that these words foretold and were understood by Pisistratus to foretell the hour of the subsequent capture of Athens itself presumes a power of mental suggestion, which even Charcot would have envied.

The deliverance may possibly have been particular as regards time, but more probably was, oracle-like, entirely general in terms and time. The words “And the tunnies shall dart up and down in the moonlight” merely continue the fishing analogy of the first line, and refer to the well-known method of catching Tunnies “at the full of the moon,” when, allured by the silvery light, they glide and race through the water, and are easily taken.

The mention here of the Tunny makes appropriate some notice of a fish, which looms large in nearly all our authors. Most of them dilate at length on its multitude, migrations, habits, and size. Its economic value as a food asset, then and now, finds ample recognition by writers separated over two thousand years (such as Aristotle and Apostolides), and in its current title of “The Manna of the Mediterranean.”

It is curious that the first two fish, the Dolphin and Tunny, on which I have occasion to comment because of the chronological sequence of Hesiod and Herodotus, should have greater attention paid them and should occupy more space in ancient writers than any other.

The reasons, however, are very dissimilar.

The Dolphin by its engaging habits of aidfulness and of comradeship—to it scarcely anything human seems alien—evoked gratitude and liking. The Tunny, apart from the wonder awakened by its multitudes and migrations, compelled an economic interest from its food-producing quantities and qualities. Rhode has excellently summarised the dissemblance: “Delphinus veterum cordibus atque animis se insinuavit, thynnus gulis atque ventriculis.”

The annual campaign of the Tunny fishing, lasting from May 15 to Oct. 25, was based on a regular and thorough organisation. All the boats of a given section of the coast acted under the orders of an elected Captain, whose word was law.

Descriptions of fishing for Tunny and Pelamyde—the name given to the young Tunny from his habit of burying himself in the mud (πήλῳ μύειν), a derivation often attributed to Aristotle, see H. A., VIII. 15, or of herding together (πέλειν ἅμα) according to Plutarch—may be found in Aristotle, N. H., IV. 10, and VIII. 15, in Pliny, H. N., IX. 53, in Ælian, de nat. an., XV. 5 and 6, and in Oppian, hal., IV. 531 ff. The story by the last of the Thracians piercing and taking myriads of mutilated Pelamydes from the mud, in which they have for warmth ensconced themselves, merits reading if only for his indignant burst:

“The various Tortures of the bleeding Shoal Command a Pity from the stoutest Soul.”

Aristophanes (Hipp., 313) compares Cleon to the watch posted on a cliff or height to signal the advent of the Tunnies, a position (as Theocritus [III. 26] and Oppian [hal., IV. 637] show), very similar to that of the “Hooer” in the pilchard fishery of Cornwall at the present day.

These look-outs were frequently artificial. Ælian, de nat. an., XV. 5, describes a scaffolding consisting of two fir trees between which many cross pieces were fastened. The long ladders still used in Austria and Italy (of which Keller gives an illustration) and the Turkish dalian of the Bosporus represent the modern scaffold. Oppian (hal., III. 630 ff.) and Ælian (de nat. an., XV. 5) note the enormous hauls made by the fishermen when “the army” of the Tunnies set out on its migrations, company by company.

The nets used for the capture of Tunny by the Italians (at the present day) are fixed: made of thick cord, without leads, and sometimes as much as 250 fathoms long, and 15 fathoms deep, thus recalling Oppian’s “a Town of Nets.” Special regard has to be paid now as of old, in fixing their position, to the course frequented by this eminently migratory genus in its annual passage from the Atlantic to the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, a distance of 2800 miles and back again. The same route is always travelled by an ever living stream of undiminished fulness, furnishing food to millions on the Mediterranean.

To the Phœnicians and to the Spaniards of old the Tunny ranked high as a commercial asset. The Tyrian tunny was specially prized; its salsamentum travelled far and wide. Rhode (p. 38) points out, however, that this originally was designed not as a delicacy, but as a preventive against scurvy and other diseases attendant on the long voyages which the far-flung commerce of the Phœnicians demanded.

The older port, Sidon, got its name from its wealth of fish, which in Phœnician was called Sidon, while Tyrus, one of the earliest inhabitants of the younger port, traditionally invented fishing tackle. Many Spanish towns, as their coins attest, notably those of Gades and Carteia, owed much of their prosperity, if not their existence, to the salt or pickled fish trade. Tunny fishing still remains a lucrative industry in the Peninsula.

Pliny bears witness to the full stream of Tunny in IX. 2, where he tells us the multitude of the fish which met the fleet of Alexander the Great under the command of Nearchus on one occasion was so vast, that only by advancing in battle line, as on an enemy, was he able to cut his way through: non voce, non sonitu, non ictu, sed fragore terrentur, nec nisi ruina turbantur.

Faber’s account of the watchman, of the alarm caused by throwing in stones near the inlet through which the shoal of fish has just passed, of the raising of the hue and cry to drive it towards the end of the enclosure, the battering of the fish to death with oars, and of other devices might well pass, although written in the nineteenth century, for a description of the Tunny fishing by an author of the first century.

From this fishing Æschylus drew his vivid image of the destruction of the host of Xerxes at sea—an image placed with more poetic than dramatic aptness in the mouth of the Persian messenger who paints the battle to Atossa. “But the Greeks,” he tells her, “kept striking, hacking us with fragments of oars and splinters of wrecks, as if we were Tunnies or a draft of fish.”

The comparison strikes as all the more telling, when we remember that one of the most killing methods of capturing the Tunny was and still is by stabbing with pikes and poles the fish, after having driven them into a narrow space.

Imagine the storm of applause, which that bold and glowing picture (in but two lines!) of the common practice and of the wondrous victory must have aroused from an audience who eight years before had either fought at or feared for Salamis, to an author whose conspicuous gallantry both there and at Marathon had earned for him the high honour of a place in the great commemorative fresco in the Stoa Poikile at Athens!

Phædimus states: “The Tunny is so sensible of the equinoxes and solstices that he teaches even men themselves without the help of any astrological table.” Further, that being dim sighted, or as according to Æschylus “casting a squint-eye like a Tunny,” the fish always coast the Euxine Sea on the right side and contrariwise when they come forth—“prudently committing the care of their bodies to their best eye!”

Again, although the fish lack knowledge of arithmetic, they are yet so endowed that “they arrive in such a manner to the perfection of that science,” that for mutual love and protection “they always make up their whole fry into the form of a cube and make a solid of the whole number consisting of six equal planes, and swim in such order as to present an equal front in each direction.”

“The Tunny more than any other fish delights in the heat of the sun. It will burrow for warmth in the sand in shallow waters near the shore, or will, because it is warm, disport itself on the surface of the sea.” With this pleasure inevitably surgit aliquid amari, for about the rising of the Dog-star this fish, as well as the sword fish, became the prey of a piercing parasite, which was nicknamed the “gadfly.”

The ordinary weights and sizes to which the Tunny attained are uncertain. The passages in Arist., N. H., VIII. 30, and in Pliny, IX. 17, on account of the doubt whether the span of tail should be two or five cubits are not authoritative. Richter records the capture in 1565 of a fish thirty-two feet long and sixteen feet thick, on whose skin a ship of war was depicted in its entirety.

The power of the skin to expand seems the only limitation of their size and weight, for they take on fat till they burst. No wonder that for beasts of such dimensions the Celtæ used great iron hooks, which elsewhere were double. But their devices met defeat by these “Fat” (if not somnolent) “Boys” of the Sea, for teste Oppian,

“Oft on the Spikes that arm the indented Chine Rolling averse they sawed the trembling Line.”

The Tuna of the Canadian and Californian coasts run very heavy: one of the former caught on a Rod and Line weighed 707 lbs.

Chapter V

ARISTOTLE—THE FIRST “SCALE-READER”; THE FIRST TO DISCOVER THAT IN THE MUREX ITS YEARLY GROWTH IS INDICATED BY THE SHELL—SENSES OF FISH: EXPERIMENTS AS TO HEARING

“Aristotle hath his Oare in every Water”

If the passage quoted in my Introduction left any doubt that Plato was no admirer of fishing or fishermen, the following, from The Laws, VII. 823 (Jowett’s translation), is conclusive proof.

“And, now, let us address young men in the form of a prayer for their welfare: O Friends, may no desire of hunting in the sea, or of catching the creatures in the waters, ever take possession of you, either when you are awake, or when you are asleep, by hooks, with weels, which latter is a very lazy contrivance, and let no desire of catching men, or piracy by sea, enter into your souls.”

Then Plato adds: “Only the best of hunting is allowed at all, which is carried on by men with horses, dogs, and men’s own persons,” and is really hard exercise. “Fishing is not an occupation worthy of a man well born or well brought up, because it demands more of address and ruse than force, and is not for young people, like hunting, the occasion of healthy exercise.”

When expressing astonishment at the variety and extent of Aristotle’s knowledge, one of the characters of Athenæus asks from what Proteus or Nereus he could have found out all he writes about fishes and other animals. The curiosity of the questioner was natural. It is, however, probable that Aristotle, from living for several years close to the sea and from his intercourse with fishermen, had amassed a big fund of information about fishes and other aquatic animals.

His knowledge of the Mediterranean fishes not only exceeded that of any ancient writer, but also, if Belon, Rondolet, and Salviani be excepted, that of any writer before Risso and Cuvier. However true may be the criticism of Dr. Günther that Aristotle’s “ideas of specific distinction were as vague as those of the fishermen whose nomenclature he adopted,” the fact cannot be gainsaid that Aristotle was, and remains, a very great Naturalist as well as a very great Biologist.

To him by right belongs the distinction, which (except incidentally in Mr. Lones’ work) I have so far failed to find attributed to him, of being the first writer to note, certainly the first to point out, that its scales make possible a shrewd, in the case of the murex an exact, computation of the age of a fish.

If from lack of the microscope he did not in all particulars antedate, he certainly blazed the trail for the discovery of scale-reading at the close of the eighteenth century by the Dutch microscopist van Leeuwenhoek and its rediscovery as regards the carp in 1899 by Hoffbauer, the Gadidæ and Pleuronectidæ in 1900-03 by J. Stuart Thomson, and the Salmonidæ about 1904 by H. W. Johnston and others.

He tells us in The Natural History, I. 1, that “what the feather is in a bird, the scale is in a fish”; in III. 11, that “the scales of fish become harder and thicker, and in those which are wasting or aging, become still harder”; in VIII. 30, that “the old fish are distinguishable by the size” (note this!) “and the hardness of their scales.”

He then buttresses this discovery of annual growth of scale by another fact resulting from his observation that “the Murex lives for about six years, and the yearly increase is indicated by a distinct interval in the spiral convolution of the shell,” or as Bohn renders the words, “its annual increase is seen in the divisions on the helix of its shell.”

In Leeuwenhoek we read that, in the examination by a rough self-made microscope of the scales of a large tame carp, he counted the component scale-layers lying one above the other, “as if glued together,” and found without exception that a new layer larger than the one of the preceding year is added. The carp, accidentally killed when forty years old, possessed forty such layers in each scale. He adds pathetically—anticipating perhaps Lytton’s—

“A Reformer, a creed by posterity learnt A century after its author is burnt”—

that “many people accused me of telling lies on the matter!”

One cannot help being struck with acute astonishment that for over the 2000 years between Aristotle and Leeuwenhoek we obtain, with the exception of nine words in Pliny (IX. 33), Senectutis indicium squamarum duritia, quæ non sunt omnibus similes, cribbed and condensed, as was often his wont, from Aristotle, little, if any, addition to our knowledge of scale-reading.

The ancient authors either ignore or are ignorant of it. Nowhere, not even in that close observer Oppian, that omnivorous reader Athenæus, that pleasant purloiner Ælian, do we read a single line on the subject. But our astonishment, even if we allow for absence of microscope, grows acuter, when we are met in the three most important Ichthyologists before the eighteenth century, Belon, Salviani, and Rondolet, with the same silence.

And this fate of silence apparently prevails even after Leeuwenhoek’s book; his discovery seems to have been lost or remained dormant in his pages till a score of years ago.

Had microscopes existed in his day, we may surely surmise that Aristotle would have perfected the system of scale-reading, and thus have come down to posterity with his title of “The Philosopher of the many Rings” better earned than by his foppish affection for jewellery.

In general opinion, the person most closely approaching the required Proteus or Nereus was his pupil and sometime friend, Alexander the Great. By placing at his disposal several thousand men to collect all kinds of animals and fishes from all parts of the then known world, he enabled him with the aid of the materials thus provided to produce his famous Natural History.

For this identification we have not a scrap of internal evidence, but merely the assertions of much later writers, such as Pliny, Athenæus (who adds that Philip gave him 800 talents to finish the History), and Ælian.

Apart from want of intrinsic evidence, the fact that the geographical references and the fish mentioned in his Natural History nearly all cluster round Lesbos effectually precludes the idea of Alexander “Hagenbecking” for Aristotle.

Internal evidence and reasons advanced by Professor D’Arcy Thompson indicate that nearly all the animals and fishes with which Aristotle was practically acquainted belonged to Greece, Western Asia, and Sappho’s Lesbos (especially of the lagoon of Pyrrha), where he lived some four years just previous to his Macedonian trip, 343 b.c.

The fishes in his Natural History, mostly given without any attempt at classification or really adequate description, number at least one hundred and ten. He discusses in some instances the anatomical characteristics, food, breeding habits, migrations, and modes of capture. Of the hundred and ten only some fifty fish can be scientifically identified; of which, all save six come from the sea.

This figure of about one hundred and ten speaks wonders for his industry and knowledge. Even after the lapse of 1800 years separating him from the sixteenth century, the list of Mediterranean fishes compiled by Belon comprises but a hundred or so, and by Rondolet but some one hundred and sixty names. Risso, writing as late as 1810, furnishes no more than three hundred and fifteen, of which he asserts that eighty-eight had never been previously described.

Not unnaturally, this industry and this knowledge caused our author to be at Athens not only a stumbling-block unto the wise, but “a very wonder unto fools,” as the comedians said, who fastened on an occasional lapse, such as his theory that the whole race of shell fish generate without connection.

The Natural History nevertheless will always remain a monument of extraordinary diligence and mental vigour, especially when we bear in mind that he seemingly lacked any antiseptic preparation for the preservation of specimens. His pre-eminence of merit is indicated by the fact that of all the Greek and Latin authors he approximates nearest to some idea of zoological system.

And yet this father of science and this founder of logic makes a direct personal appeal to us as a man very human in his life and tastes. Epicurus, “that most truthful of men,” alleges that, when young, Aristotle went the pace, and squandered his patrimony in good living and other pleasant delights. In addition to his love for jewellery and personal adornment we discover him as a great connoisseur of beautiful silver, of which he bequeathed over seventy rare bowls. He ranks in opsophagy as an epicure of the highest order.

It is curious to note that in Aristotle, who apparently was familiar with most, if not all, of the then existent methods, no mention, as far as I can recall, occurs of actual fishing, save his story of the fight and escape of a big Glanis.

He owed his knowledge largely to his intercourse with fishermen and his close acquaintance with the fish markets—a haunting of which in Mediterranean ports was, as in Naples it still is, productive of a liberal education from the numerous specimens displayed and the hundreds of vernacular names applied to them.

Contrast this with our British markets, where, despite our more favourable wealth of sea-harvest, the kinds on sale seldom exceed a score or so, and their vernacular names hardly reach half-a-hundred.

Granting, however, all the advantages accruing from such acquaintance with fishers and fishmongers, it needed an Aristotle to produce a book of such keen observation and (generally) accurate conclusions as his Natural History: for be it remembered that this, when compared with the vast volume of his other works, is a mere by-product of his industry and intellect, thrown off probably in the few years of his banishment.

Little escaped his ken, or his pen. At one moment he notes that neither hermaphroditism nor parthenogenesis are uncommon, at the next he deals with the senses in fish. The question whether fish do actually hear or do not hear, remains, comme les pauvres, always with us; it remains like Etna dormant for decades, suddenly to pour forth columns of print which lava-like scar the fair face of many a ream of paper.

Aristotle comes down flat-footed in his verdict: fishes (we read, IV. 8) in spite of having no visible auditory organs undoubtedly do hear; “for they are observed to run away from any loud noises like the rowing of a galley. Indeed some people dwelling near the sea affirm that of all living creatures the fish is the quickest of hearing.”

Space forbids my dwelling on the various theories as to whether the undoubted effect of their being disturbed by certain noises is attained by hearing proper, or by vibration acting on the surface part of the fish and communicating instantly with the internal ear.

Day’s summary of the question, still regarded after thirty years as fair and conclusive, even if attaching undue importance to the fontanelles, is as follows. “Hearing is developed in fish, and it is very remarkable how any diversity of opinion can exist as to their possessing this sense. The internal auditory apparatus is placed within the cranial cavity: its chief constituent parts are the labyrinth, which is composed of three semi-circular canals, and a vestibule, which latter expands into one or more sacs, where the ear bones or otoliths are lodged. A tympanum and tympanic cavity are absent. They possess fontanelles between the bones, forming the roof of the skull, which being closed by very thin bones or skin permit sounds from the surrounding water to be readily transmitted to the contiguous internal ears. But the chief mode in which hearing is carried on must be due to the surface of the fish being affected by vibration of the water, and the sounds are transmitted directly to the internal ear, or else by means of the air-bladder acting as a sounding drum.”

It goes against the grain to differ with such a charmful and theme-ful author as Sir Herbert Maxwell. But his conclusion that fish in Loch Ken were disturbed every time a shooting party half to three-quarters of a mile away discharged their guns cannot be reconciled with the experiments made by me in July 1918 to test the behaviour of trout, when guns were fired, not half a mile away, but quite close to them.

Three of us, all accustomed to watching fish, selected a narrow shallow burn in which the trout ran from fingerlings up to fish three or four years old. Each in turn fired the gun (an ordinary 12 bore C.F.), with the usual shooting charge of powder and No. 5 shot. At the first two trials only was the shot extracted, so as to eliminate any vibration set up by its striking the opposite bank. Two of us lying hidden in the grass observed from different spots.

The gun was fired eight feet, four feet, and three feet above the surface of the stream, which varied in breadth from eight to ten feet, and in depth from sixteen to nineteen inches. It was fired into the air and into the opposite bank (struck from four to two feet above the water) in a direct line above different fishes, lying either singly or in shoals from five to nine inches from the bottom in small pools or runs sixteen to nineteen inches deep. Care was taken to fire up stream, to prevent the trout being startled by the flash of the cartridge.

In no case did the trout take the very least notice, or give any sign of having heard the explosion or felt the concussion of the shot on the opposite bank, composed on three occasions of alluvial soil and on two of rock. Never once did a fish move or go down: in fact, in one of the experiments over a single well-grown trout, the fish was rising again to the natural fly in less than thirty seconds after the discharge of the gun.

Aristotle almost certainly learnt dissection when young. His father belonged to the Asclepiads, an order of priest-physicians who are believed to have practised dissection and taught it to their children. The son’s extensive knowledge of the internal parts of mammals, birds, and fishes probably resulted from dissections. Mr. Lones names forty-nine animals and fishes which from the trustworthiness of the definite information imparted were (he holds) certainly dissected. Of these some five are fish.

To the question whether Aristotle ever dissected the human body, the answer after examining the evidence available must, I think, be in the negative, for three reasons. First: after describing the external parts of the human body he states that the internal parts are less known than those of animals, and that we must, in order to describe them, examine the corresponding parts of animals which are most nearly related to man.

Second: his many mistakes—such as in the position of the heart being above the lungs, the emptiness of the occiput, etc.—can hardly be casual slips made by one familiar with human dissection. The passage, however, in Nat. Hist., VII. 3, points distinctly to his having to some degree dissected the fœtus.

But this would not conflict with the third and weightiest reason, namely the strong repugnance felt by the Greeks to any mutilation of the body proper and any neglect of speedy burial. The sad appeal of the shade of the unburied Patroclus (Il., XXIII. 71 ff.): “Bury me with all speed that I pass the gates of Hades. Far off the spirits banish me, nor do the phantoms of men outworn suffer me to mingle with them beyond the river,” the fervent desire of some of Homer’s Heroes that funeral rites should promptly follow their death, and the agony of Antigone, all these and other instances manifest Greek sentiment. So strong and widespread was this that human dissection would have certainly aroused intense bitterness and probably caused the perpetual banishment of the perpetrator. The suggestion, resting on no evidence, that Aristotle dissected the human body secretly can neither be proved, nor disproved.

The Japanese, till recently, also refrained from dissection of the human body. It was not till the arrival in 1873 of Professor W. Donitz to fill the Chair of Anatomy in the newly established Academy of Medicine in Tokyo that dissection first came to be employed. This new era of medical science started under the happiest circumstances, for frequent hangings, an aftermath of internal strife, provided ample material for its prosecution.

Chapter VI. Characteristics of Fishermen in Greece and Rome—Poverty “the Badge of All Our Tribe”—Deities of Fishing

“Laud to the Lord, who gives to this, to that denies his wishes, And dooms one toil and catch the prey, another eat the fishes.”

This seems the most convenient, if not quite the chronological, place for examining the position and attributes of fishermen in the poems, epigrams, and eclogues of Greek literature.

Of the two oldest of fisherfolk epigrams or epitaphs, the first is attributed to Sappho, the second to Alcæus of Mitylene. In these rings insistent the same note of hard toil and poverty, which permeates the piscatory eclogues of Theocritus and his followers.

From Sappho “the sole woman of any age or any country who gained and still holds an unchallenged place in the first rank of the world’s poets” comes down

“Meniscus, mourning for his only son, The toil-experienced fisher Pelagon, Has placed upon his tomb a net and oar, The badges of a painful life and poor.”

I cherished high hope of finding in the recently discovered Fragments of Sappho in Part X. of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, or in the articles on them by Mr. J. M. Edmonds in the Classical Review of May 1914 and June 1916, a second fisher epigram, or at any rate an allusion to fishing. Alas! the Papyri yield some amatory, but no piscatory verses. Apparently neither Sappho nor Alcæus make any other reference to fishing.

The verses of Alcæus stress poverty even more strongly:

“The fisher Diotimus had at sea And shore the same abode of poverty— His trusty boat—and when his days were spent, Therein self-rowed, to ruthless Dis he went: For that which did through life his woes beguile, Supplied the old man with a funeral pile.”

“From fragments of Greek Comedy it is evident that fishers were among the familiar characters on the stage, and were sometimes the protagonists.” Examination of the Old, Middle and New Comedians confirm Dr. Hall.

In Epicharmus (b.c. 540-450) the reputed founder of Comedy in Sicily; in Sophron’s The Fisherman and the Clown, where the former naturally outwits the country boor; in Plato the comedian’s Phaon, where he may have ridiculed the legend of Sappho’s vain love for the Lesbian fisherman; in The Fishes by Archippus, where people were satirised under the names of fishes spelled in the same way as their own; or (to pass from Old to Middle Comedy) in The Fisher-Woman by Antiphanes (in the fragments of which, however, we are confronted by no Sex problem, by no Suffragettism); and (of the New Comedy authors) in Menander’s The Fishermen (where we gather from Pollux that a fisher came on the stage fully equipped for fishing), in all these plays and many more appear fisher folk.

Archippus’ drama deserves a moment’s notice, because in imitation of Aristophanes’ Birds the poet ventured on a chorus composed exclusively of Fishes. Extant fragments of the play (performed probably in 413 b.c.) tell of war being declared by the fish against their oppressors the Athenians, who were passionate opsophagists. The principal condition of the Peace Points—whether Fourteen or more our data do not determine—secured the prompt delivery to the Fishes of the head of their chief foe, Melanthios.

If the protocol of this Treaty had attracted the notice of President Wilson, who as a constitutional historian attaches importance to the “broadening down from precedent to precedent,” the demands of the Allies for the immediate surrender of our arch-enemy, the Kaiser, might have been more insistent and scarcely less successful.

And so from the first loci classici of fishing in Homer we journey on through the succeeding centuries. In nearly all we encounter fishing and fishermen in literature or play. In the third b.c. we reach the next locus classicus—“The Fisherman’s Dream,” Idyll XXI. of Theocritus.

“Theocritus is the creator of the literary piscatory, as he is also of the literary bucolic.” This dictum would, I think, be rendered more accurate by the substitution of modeller in place of creator. Theocritus, even if we allow for Stesichorus, Epicharmus, and Sophron, stands out the first, not to create but to gather, and by his genius reduce to regular literary shape, the existent poems and songs (Volkslieder) which formed the stock in trade of the Bucoliastæ in Cos, Sicily, and Magna Græcia.

The influence of Theocritus on fishing literature in mime, epigram, or romance is writ large in the pages not only of Moschus, Leonidas of Tarentum, Alciphron, Plautus, Ovid, but also of Sannazaro in the fifteenth, of our Spenser and his followers in the sixteenth and subsequent centuries, and even of Keats.

This influence shows most widely in the more abundant literary bucolic. Virgil, for instance, admits his model in the opening lines of Eclogue IV.:

Sicelides Musæ, paulo maiora canamus ...

A recent writer straightly asserts that “without Theocritus the Bucolics (save the mark!) of Virgil could never have been conceived, or, if conceived, would have miscarried.”

Whether or not the offspring of this parentage is not too savagely depreciated, we note with surprise that Virgil,

“Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd; All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word,”

a professed imitator of Theocritus, to whom fishermen were as familiar as the waters by which they lived and figured in many of his Idylls, never mentions fishermen in his Bucolics.

His only (I believe) allusions to them—and the first is merely incidental to an account of the primitive Arts of Man, and how fishing as an Art came in only as the Golden Age went out—are in Georgic, I. 141-2, Atque alius latum funda iam verberat amnem | Alta petens, pelagoque alius trahit humida lina, and in the Æneid (XII. 517 ff.):

Et iuvenem exosum nequiquam bella Menœten, Arcada, piscosæ cui circum flumina Lernæ Ars fuerat, pauperque domus, nec nota potentum Munera, conductaque pater tellure serebat.

Even in these four lines observe how insistently rings out the note of poverty!—the constant characteristic, the almost invariable badge, as we shall soon see, of every professional fisherman in Greek poems, plays, or writers from Homer down to the later Greek Romanticists, or (as far as I know) in the epigrams from 700 b.c. to 500 a.d., of the Anthologia Palatina.

“The figure of the weather-beaten fisher is a favourite one in the old poets, and we meet it constantly in Art; in Greek, and in Roman Art especially, it was a very favourite subject.”

M. Campaux, Mr. Hall, and Herr Bunsmann confirm and amplify this sentence of Blümner’s. The thesis of Bunsmann—not easy to obtain, although published in 1910 at Münster in Westphalia—seems within its limited scope (he scarcely touches on the methods or craft of fishing) perhaps the best little treatise De Piscatorum in Græcorum atque Romanorum litteris usu.

He sets out to discover and formulate a list of the characteristics most frequently attributed to fishermen. He proceeds to establish each of the dozen selected by buttressing questions from Homer down to Sidonius.

Hospitality, Piety to the Gods and Dead, Shrewd (almost Pawky) Humour, Old Age, Toil and Poverty figure most prominently. I can only notice one or two of the passages cited in support of each characteristic, but the evidence adduced generally carries conviction.

On the Hospitality of fishermen, poor though it were, stress is laid by Greek and Roman writers.

Bunsmann’s citation of Petronius (Sat., 114) and Plutarch (Vita Pompeii, 73) as witnesses to credit is, however, far from happy, especially in the case of the former, who recounts that when the boat had been so battered as to be a-wash “procurrere piscatores parvulis expediti navigiis ad prædam rapiendam.” The lightning-like change of the fishermen, on realising that their intended victims were ready to defend themselves, from plunderers to helpers, and the non-denial to the shipwrecked folk of the use of their hut for eating some sea-sodden food, scarcely shine as exemplars of high Hospitality. No wonder the guests dragged out a “most miserable night.”

Tyrrhenus, the old deaf fisherman in The Ethiopian History (omitted by Bunsmann), embodies a far better instance of the characteristic Hospitality. His glad welcome and the surrender to his guests of “the cosier part of his dwelling” betoken Nature’s gentleman.

A still better instance meets us in the Greek romance of Apollonius of Tyre possibly an imitation of the Heliodorus idyll. The prince, sole survivor of a shipwreck, is found, fed, clad, and afterwards directed by an old fisherman to Pentapolis, where he wins a competition before the king. This romance, which survives in a Latin version of the sixth century, became in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries widely popular and translated into most European languages. To it, as the scenes and the characters prove, Shakespeare, or possibly Wilkins, must have owed much of his Pericles.

On the question whence originated their Piety to the Gods, whether it sprang from or was only influenced by the fact that their lives were passed amid the unknown but ever-present and awful forces of Nature identified with certain gods, or sprang rather from a gratitude proportioned to future benefits, Bunsmann is discreetly non-committal.

But of outward and visible signs of such Piety the Anthologia Palatina is eloquent. Their Piety towards the dead is strikingly attested by Hegesippus, the simplicity of whose style in his eight epigrams in Anth. Pal. betokens an early date. “The fishermen brought up from the sea in their net a half-eaten man, a most mournful relic of some voyage. They sought not for unholy gain, but him and the fishes too they buried under this light coat of sand.”

Bunsmann furnishes two records of impiety among fishermen. The first occurs in the well-known Baiano procul a lacu recede of Martial (Epigr., IV. 30), where an impious poacher in the very act of landing his fish from the Emperor’s lake is stricken with blindness. The second, in Athen., VII. 18, and Ælian, XV. 23, where Epopeus, a fisherman of the island of Icarus, enraged by taking nothing but sacred or tabu Pompili, turned to with his son and devoured them, only themselves in turn to be devoured by a whale.

But the impietas charged from Anth. Pal., VI. 24, is fantastic. The indictment has been drawn owing either to mistranslation of the passage or inability to appreciate the rather heavy-handed humour (frequent in the Greek and Roman writers of the time) of Lucilius, a conjectured author of the Epigram.

Heliodorus lays down at the portals of the temple of “the Syrian goddess” a votive offering of his fishing net worn out, not by catches of fish, but of seaweed “from the beaches of goodly havens.” This dedication, as fish were sacred to the goddess and in Syria were forbidden as a food, has been imputed as an affront to the deity, but quite incorrectly. Heliodorus in offering his net intended no disrespect, nor offended any law of the temple. Since its sole catch had been seaweed, his net could plead “pure from the prey of fishery.”

The point of the pleasantry is akin to the caustic defence offered on behalf of a Jewish portrait painter, “as none of the pictures are likenesses, he is guiltless of breaking the Second Commandment!”

Ovid’s pretty fancy to account for the Syrian abstention doubtless hangs together with the Greek conception of Atargatis and Aphrodite being one and the same. When the Giants revolted against the Gods, Venus fleeing with Cupid reaches, but is stayed by, the Euphrates: thither, Palæstinæ margine aquæ, in answer to her piteous plaints to heaven above and earth below, two fish approach and convey mother and child safely across the flood.

“Inde nefas ducunt genus hoc imponere mensis Nec violant timidi piscibus ora Syri.” Fasti, II. 473-4.

But other books, other legends! for the same author (in Met., V. 331) tells us that in the battle Venus changes herself into a fish.

Ktesias gives another account. Derceto by the wiles of Aphrodite “fell in love with a beautiful young man and was brought to bed of a daughter: being ashamed of what she had done, she slew the young man, exposed in the desert the child (who, fed with milk and then with cheese by pilfering pigeons, grew up to become the famous Semiramis) and then cast herself into the lake at Ascalon and was transformed into a fish—whence it came to pass that at this very day the Syrians eat no fishes, but adore them as gods” (Booth’s Trans.).

Of the instances of calliditas or shrewd wit of fishermen, the story (supra) of the fisher lads’ answer to Homer and the following from Alciphron (I. 16) must suffice, although from Æsop, etc., many others can be gleaned. The whole passage is far too long for quotation, but the final retort of the fisher, whose request for a battered disused boat has been selfishly refused by its owner, furnishes, according to a German critic, “a perfect gem of the Art of the Sophist, and sounds itself like an insoluble riddle.”

To enable the reader to form his own judgment on this particular instance of calliditas, I subjoin the retort: οὐκ ᾔτησά σε ἃ ἕχεις ἀλλ’ ἃ μὴ ἓχεις ἐπεὶ δὲ οὐ βούλει ἃ μὴ ἓχεις ἕτερον ἕχειν, ἕχε ἃ μὴ ἓχεις, “I didn’t ask you for what you have, but for what you haven’t. Since, however, you don’t wish another to have what you haven’t, what you haven’t you can have!”

But apart from this and similar instances of calliditas, the mood of piscatory poetry is generally serious or melancholy, and in keeping with the surroundings; we look in vain for the sunny warmth of Sicilian meadows, where youths pipe and sing gaily.

Like their modern brethren fishermen offered, before setting sail or after returning safe from dangers encountered, gifts to the gods of their craft, of whom first came Poseidon or Neptune, usually represented with a trident; second, Hermes or Mercury, the most venerated, because of his wily cunning and ready ruses; third, Pan, a son of Mercury, who taught him all his craft, and fourth, Priapus.

It is with a start of surprise that one finds Priapus, far more notorious as the god of propagation and fecundity, among the gods of fisherfolk. Can this be accounted for by some subtle, but inverse connection between the belief in India that the Fish was the symbol of Fecundation, and the God of Fecundation in Greece? Some support for this may lie in the statement of de Gubernatis, that as in the East the fish was a phallic symbol, so now pesce in the Neapolitan dialect means the phallus itself.

His lineage, either the son of Hermes, or his grandson, for among the many putative fathers of Priapus was Pan, may account for the inclusion of Priapus. To Priapus, arriving how he may at goddom, offerings were more freely made than to any other except Hermes.

In addition to these four flourished minor gods. Goddesses too of Fishing (such as Artemis), of rivers, of springs, and of the fish therein found devotees. First and foremost, ranked Aphrodite or Venus:

“But she Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea, And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds, and the viewless ways, And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.”

To her, seemingly, as many offerings, as many prayers were made as to any god.

Whether she can be identified or not with Atargatis, through Derceto or Astarte, matters little here. But the image of the goddess, as described by Lucian, “In Phœnicia, I saw the image of Derceto, a strange sight truly! For she had the half of a woman, and from the thighs downwards a fish’s tail,” corresponds closely with an image of Ascalon, “having the face of a woman, but all the rest of the body a fish.”

When in addition we find this same image at Ascalon stated by Herodotus (II. 115) to be that “of the heavenly Aphrodite,” the identification of the Greek-Roman goddess appears, at any rate, to have gained wide acceptance. Doubtless Horace had this, or perhaps some fish-tailed Egyptian goddess, in mind when he penned his famous comparison for an incoherent simile: “Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne.”

Coins of Hierapolis in Cyrrhestica often show Atargatis riding on a lion or enthroned between two lions, sometimes with the legend ΘΕΑΣ ΣΥΡΙΑΣ, ‘of the Syrian goddess.’ Strabo (XVI. 27, p. 748) tells us that this city worshipped the Syrian goddess Atargatis, who (Ibid., p. 785) according to Ktesias the historian was called also Derceto.

Another reason for abstention from fish, apart from their sacredness to the goddess, we owe to Antipater of Tarsus. Gatis, queen of Syria, developed such a passion for fish that she issued a proclamation forbidding their being eaten without her being invited (ἄτερ Γάτιδος). Hence the common people thought her name was Atargatis and abstained wholly from fish.

Mnaseas assigns to her the deserved and not inappropriate fate of being thrown into her own lake near Ascalon and devoured by fishes. But against this legend must be placed the fact that Atargatis, in common with many Asian deities and cults translated westward, found sanctuary and high veneration, in her case at Delos.

Theocritus in the fragment on Berenice recommends the sacrifice of a certain fish to a goddess. “And if any man that hath his livelihood from the salt sea, and whose nets serve him for ploughs, prays for wealth and luck in fishing, let him sacrifice, at midnight, to this goddess, the sacred fish that men call ‘silver white,’ for that it is brightest of sheen of all; then let the fisher set his nets, and he shall draw them full from the sea.”

If Apollonius of Tyana had been compelled to commend a beauteous fish for sacrifice—an act which his Pythagorean tenets forbade—he must have plumped for the Peacock fish.

Whether he were, teste Hieroclas, as great a sage, as remarkable a worker of miracles, as potent an exorcist as Jesus of Nazareth, or merely, in the words of Eusebius, a rank charlatan, whose magic, “if he possessed any,” was the gift of the powers of evil with whom he lived in league is no question to be considered here. Apollonius, at any rate, stands out, not only as one of the most interesting and most discussed personalities of the third century, but also as one of the most travelled.

During his fifty odd Wanderjahre many men had he known, and many cities had he seen of Asia and Africa. In the Hyphasis river of India there exist (we learn from his Life by Philostratus, III. 1) Peacock fish (sacred to Aphrodite) to which, if colour or “silver sheen” insure full creels, the Theocritean certainly must yield place, for “their fins are blue, their scales beautifully dappled, their tails, which fold or spread at will, of golden hue!”

But dominant over all other characteristics stands the inevitable and insistent connection of fishermen with Old Age, Toil, and Poverty. Everywhere, in every author, does this note strike loudest; nowhere, have I come across a young fisherman, except Virgil’s Menœtes.

These characteristics find their place not only in Greek and Latin literature from and before the “sleepless chase” of Sophocles (Ajax, 880) to the last Romanticist, but also in the statuary, pictures, frescoes, mosaics of Greek and Roman Art. Numerous examples can be cited from the museums of Naples, Rome, Paris, and London sustaining the contention that all real fishermen were ever depicted old and careworn.

The fishing boys and women of the Amorini at Pompeii and elsewhere may be adduced as vitiating this statement: but these, it must be borne in mind, are merely artistic representations of Anglers and of dalliance, not of real fishermen toiling for their livelihood. So, too, in the Greek representations where boys, not Putti or Amorini, figure as fishing, it will be found that they are helpers or “fish-boys” of the working fisherman.

The explanations why fishermen are so rendered vary. Perhaps the truest, certainly the concisest, is Alciphron’s, τρέφει γὰρ οὐδέν’ ἡ θάλαττα—the sea feeds no one. According to Bunsmann, fishermen are always represented as old and poor and worn, because their delineators desired by painting the career as blackly as possible to excite sympathy. For this purpose old age and poverty and heavy toil, which appeal unto all, stood ready as their most effective strokes.

According to Hall, the fisher, a common character in all Greek literature, was in early times described with simple truth. Only later, when imitation took the place of originality, did conventionalism render him always as aged, pathetic, superstitious, wretchedly poor, yet patient and content.

Whatever be the reason, Greek fishermen, whether we read of them in the Epigrams or in the fragments of lost works, all come down as old, patient, half-starved through dint of toil by day and night, sea-worn. Their horny hands grasp better a trident than hold the delicate pastoral reeds. They play no tunes, they dance no dances, they sing no songs save some rowing chant, as they tug at the oars when homeward bound.

Meniscus and Diotimus (in Sappho and Alcæus) are aged, lonely, and miserably poor. They are not “white-limbed” like Daphnis in The Herdsman’s Offering. They play no flute, nor carry the apples of Love.

So too the circumstances, the life, the recreations of the Shepherd of the Pastoral Idyll of Theocritus are as far removed as can be from those of the Fisherman of the Piscatory Idyll by the same author. The locus is the same. The characters dwell near each other, but how dissimilar their lots!

Chapter VII. Theocritus—The Greek Epigrammatists

But to return to our second locus classicus, ‘The Fisherman’s Dream’ of Theocritus. The whole Idyll (XXI.), an exquisite piece of word painting, deserves careful reading as a study of the piscatory genre, but room can only be found for part of it here.

“’Tis poverty alone, Diophantus, that awakens the arts; Poverty, the very teacher of labour. Nay, not even sleep is permitted by weary cares to men that live by toil, and if, for a little while, one closes his eyes in the night, cares throng about him and suddenly disquiet his slumber.

“Two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay down and slept—they had strown the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there they lay against the leafy wall. Beside them were strewn the instruments of their toilsome hands, the fishing creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster pots woven of rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old coble upon props. Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailor’s caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold had never a door, nor a watch-dog; all things, all to them seemed superfluity, for poverty was their sentinel. They had no neighbour by them, but ever against their cabin floated up the sea.

“The chariot of the moon had not yet reached the mid-point of her course, but their familiar toil awakened the fishermen; from their eyelids they cast out slumber, and roused their souls with speech.”

Asphalion, after complaining that even the nights in summer are too long—for “already have I seen ten thousand dreams, and the dawn is not yet”—is somewhat comforted by the thought that thus “we have time to idle in, for what could a man find to do lying on a leafy bed beside the waves and slumbering not? Nay, the ass is among the thorns, the lantern in the town hall, for they say it is always sleepless.”

Then he begs his friend to interpret to him the dream he has just dreamt.

“As I was sleeping late, amid the labours of the salt sea, (and truly not too full fed, for we supped early, if thou dost remember, and did not overtax our bellies), I saw myself busy on a rock, and there I sat and watched the fishes and kept spinning the bait with the rods.

“And one of the fishes nibbled, a fat one; for, in sleep, dogs dream of bread, and of fish dream I. Well, he was tightly hooked, and the blood was running, and the rod I grasped was bent with his struggle.

“So with both hands I strained, and had a sore tussle for the monster. How was I ever to land so big a fish with hooks all too slim? Then, just to remind him he was hooked, I gently pricked him, pricked, and slackened; and as he did not run, I took in line.

“My toil was ended with the sight of my prize. I drew up a golden fish, lo, you! a fish all plated thick with gold. Then fear took hold of me lest he might be some fish beloved of Poseidon, or perchance some jewel of the sea-grey Amphitrite. Gently I unhooked him, lest even the hooks should retain some of the gold of his mouth. Then I dragged him ashore with the ropes, and swore that never again would I set foot on sea, but abide on land and lord it over the gold.

“This was what awakened me, but for the rest set thy mind to it, my friend, for I am in dismay about the oath I swore.”

The Friend: “Nay, never fear, thou art no more sworn than thou hast found the golden fish of thy vision: dreams are but lies. But if thou wilt search these waters, wide awake and not asleep, there is some hope in thy slumbers: seek the fish of flesh, lest thou die of famine with all thy dreams of gold!”

The influence of Theocritus, though becoming less natural and rendered more conventional by the pretty conceits of the later Alexandrian period, permeates the literature of Greece and Rome for many centuries. In none, perhaps, is this influence more marked than in his pupils Bion and Moschus, and in his younger contemporary, Leonidas of Tarentum.

Three fisher epigrams by Leonidas suffice as evidence of this. The realism, the pathos, the detailed treatment, the subjects, lowly folk, all alike characterise the Sicilian.

In the first, the fisherman Diophantus on giving up his trade dedicates, according to custom, all the relics of his calling to the patron of his craft. The list of the implements, including a well-bent hook, long rod, and line of horse hair, here and in an epigram by Philippus of Thessalonica (which adds “the flint pregnant with fire, that sets alight the tinder”), corresponds in material and order of enumeration fairly closely with Asphalion’s in Theocritus.

Of the second I borrow a spirited translation of the last lines,

“Yet—not Arcturus, nor the blasts that blow Down-rushing, swept this aged man below: But like a lamp long burning, and whose light Flickers, self-spent, and is extinguished quite, In a rush hut he died:—to him this grave (No wife, no child he had) his brother fishers gave.”

The third, which should be The Awful Warning, if any warning avail, to boys fishing in the middle of a burn and holding while changing their lure a fish in their teeth (who of us has not done this?), sets a picture of a more violent death, “for the slippery thing went wriggling down his narrow gullet,” and choked him on the spot.

The subjoined, somewhat loose, translation is from Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. XXXVIII.

“Parmis, the son of Callignotus—he Who trolled for fish the margin of the sea, Chief of his craft, whose keen perceptive search, The kichlé, scarus, bait-devouring perch, And such as love the hollow clefts, and those That in the caverns of the deep repose, Could not escape—is dead! Parmis had lured A Julis from its rocky haunts, secured Between his teeth the slippery pert, when, lo! It jerked into the gullet of its foe, Who fell beside his lines and hooks and rod, And the choked fisher sought his last abode. His dust lies here. Stranger, this humble grave An angler to a brother angler gave.”

Alciphron, judging from his extant letters, seems the most prolific of the later Piscatory writers. His tribute to the veracity of Sosias, “who is famous for the delicious sauce made of the fish which he entices,” reads in such deadly opposition to the common but false impression that fishermen rank next to mining engineers as the biggest liars in the world, that it must be quoted, if only on the principle of “An angler to a brother angler gave.”

“He is one of those who duly reverence Truth, and such an one would never even slip into Falsehood.”

Lest as an Angler I may be accused of “slipping into Falsehood” in my translation, I subjoin the Greek:

Ἔστι δὲ τῶν ἐπιεικῶς τὴι ἀλήθειαν τιμώντων, καὶ οὐκ ἄν ποτ’ ἐκεῖνος εἰς ψευδηγορίαν ὀλίσθοι.

Lucian’s Dialogues of the Sea Gods, by their confidential chat, give witty expression to the author’s own scepticism towards mythology. “With their imitation of the earlier poets and their amœbean form they may be considered as connecting links between Theocritus and others of his group and the eclogues of marine mythology, sometimes classed as piscatory eclogues during the renaissance.”

If any doubt be as to their being “links,” there can be none as to the charm of The Dialogues of (in Macaulay’s words) “the last great master of Attic eloquence, and Attic wit,” or (he has been perhaps equally well termed) “the first of the moderns.”

The Fisherman, by the same author, bears no relationship to the Mimes, or Idylls. It takes its title from a scene in which the author sits on a parapet of the Acropolis equipped with the rod of a Piræan fisherman. His bait of gold and figs attracts a swarm of brilliantly coloured fish, Salmo Cynicus, Flat Sole Plateship, and other philosophers clad in scales.

The Romances, the last prose at times instinct with the genius of ancient Greece, bequeath us many fisherfolk. The famous pastoral Daphnis and Chloe, by Longus, introduces a pretty picture and illustrates the old contrast between the idyllic life of shepherds and the sordid lot of their fishing neighbours.

Daphnis sits with Chloe on a hill near the sea; “while at their meal, which, however, consisted more of kisses than of food, a fisher boat is seen proceeding along the coast.” The crew, carrying freshly caught fish to a rich man in the city, “dip their oars, doing what sailors usually do to beguile their toil—the boatswain sings a sea-song, and the rest join in chorus at stated intervals.”

As the boat reaches some hollow or crescent-shaped bay, the echo of their song floats up. This only incites Daphnis, who understands the echo, “to store up some of the strains in his memory that he may play them on his pipes, but Chloe, who wots not that such things can be, turns in pretty bewilderment to the boat, to the sea, and to the woods.”

The Aethiopica, by Heliodorus of Emesa, has been termed, perhaps with exaggeration, the most elaborate picture of a piscatory kind in ancient Greek. The influence of Theocritus is strongly suggested by the imagery incidental to the description of the cabin, the tackle, and the boat, as well as by the delineation of the character of Tyrrhenus, aged, sea-worn, wretchedly poor, yet content with his lot and hospitable to the stranger.

Agathias gives us one of the very few, perhaps the only, fisher epigram with a love motive. “A fisherman was employed in catching fish. Him did a damsel of property see, and was affected in her heart with desire, and made him the partner of her bed. But he, after a life of poverty, took on himself the swell of all kinds of high bearing, and Fortune with a smile was standing by, and said to Venus,—‘This is not your contest, but mine.’”

Lastly it is of interest to note that one of the few Greek poetesses concerned herself with a love-tale of the sea. Hedyle, who came of a poetic stock (for she was daughter of Moschine the iambist and mother of Hedylus the epigrammatist), penned a poem on Glaucus’ love for Scylla. In it she told how the love-sick swain would repair to the cavern of his mistress—

“Bearing a gift of love, a mazy shell, Fresh from the Erythrean rock, and with it too The offspring, yet unfledged, of Alcyon, To win the obdurate maid. He gave in vain. Even the lone Siren on the neighbouring isle Pitied the lover’s tears.”

Chapter VIII. The Two Plinys—Martial—Was the Rod Jointed?

After Theocritus we reach the period which chronologically might perhaps be termed that of the Roman writers, although our two greatest authorities on Fish Lure and Lore wrote in Greek, some three to four centuries after Plautus (c. 254-184 b.c.) had produced his Rudens.

This, the first Latin play, I believe, introducing fishermen on the stage, re-echoes the Greek note of poverty and misery. In Act II., Sc. 2, Trachalio asks, “Shellfish-gatherers, and hook-fishers, hungry race of men, how fare ye?” and receives the answer, “Just as befits fishermen; with hunger, thirst, and expectation.” The wretchedness of their calling is made further manifest in Act II., Sc. 1.

Descriptions of fishermen are found in Latin adaptations of Greek plays. The Latin mimes, as did the Greek, often display fishermen as characters. The Latin references to actual fishing not only far outnumber the Greek, but also, unlike the Greek, which are almost solely concerned with sea fishing, frequently treat of river and lake fishing. Plautus, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Tibullus, Pliny the Elder and the Younger, Martial, and Ausonius, by no means conclude the list of our Roman authors.

It may be fairly asked, why I omit any special notice of so valuable and voluminous work as the Natural History of Pliny the Elder.

My reasons are three. First, my book contains numberless references to or quotations from it. Second, none of its thirty-seven Books presents any controversial questions of angling interest—such as “Where is to be found the first mention of the Rod, or Fly?”—questions which demand for Martial and Ælian a full discussion. Third, my notice of Aristotle, on the principle that the greater includes the less, renders any lengthy comment on Pliny almost superfluous.

The Natural History of the latter, at any rate as far as fish and fishing are concerned, for the most part repeats the Natural History of the former, except in such instances as the caudal losses caused by the enmity between the Lupus and the Mugil, and between the Conger and the Muræna, where it exactly reverses Aristotle’s statement.

These and other instances, in addition to his words (IX. 88), “Nigidius auctor est,” and (X. 19) “Nigidius tradit,” led J. G. Schneider to conclude that it is open to grave doubt, whether Pliny ever read Aristotle at all in the original Greek. The probabilities, indeed, point to his having used for his Natural History the translation into Latin of Aristotle, which Nigidius Figulus, a friend of Cicero’s and (according to Gellius) next to Varro the most learned of the Romans, published with additions apparently of his own.

In Pliny the Younger, and Martial (perhaps Ovid in a lesser degree) one finds what among our classical writers seems the nearest approach to our English sportsman, delighting in his own place, however small, in the country, and in country pursuits. These writers, in spite of living half the year or more in Rome, fall within our conception of country sportsmen.

Most of the others seem more intent on bringing the scent of the hay before the footlights than on making us realise any real joy of fishing. They resemble more the week-enders of a fishing syndicate than the country gentleman living on his place or river.

Pliny the Younger possesses, in addition to his appreciation of the various joys of country life, a passionate yet exquisite feeling for beauty of scenery, especially for that round Lake Como, to which his letters recur again and again.

I cannot, however, conceive him much of a hunter, despite the abundant game which the Apennine or Laurentine coverts harboured, or much of a piscator, despite his notices of fishing on his favourite lake. A letter (Epist., I. 6) to Tacitus, who had apparently been chaffing him as a sportsman, frankly admits that although he has killed three boars his chief pleasure in the chase consists of sitting quietly beside the nets, to which the game was driven, wrapt in contemplation or jotting down on his tablets the ideas which the solitude and silence demanded by the sport were wont to produce.

As a fisherman he took his pleasure, if not sadly, for the most part vicariously. He joyed more, if I read him aright, in watching from one or other of his villas the boatmen toiling with their nets and lines than in a day’s fishing, an impression which seems confirmed by his appreciation of the joy of being able to angle from bed!

Thus we read in Epist., IX. 7: “On the shores of Como I have several villas, but two occupy me most ... That one feels no wave; this one breaks them. From that, you may look down upon the fishermen below; while from this, you may yourself fish, and lower your hook from your bedroom—almost from your very bed—just as from a little boat.”

If the site of the present Villa Pliniana is that of the ancient Villa, as from Pliny’s description of the close proximity of the spring (which even now preserves the unusual characteristics specified in his letter) we may safely conclude, the feat of throwing your hook from your bedroom is obviously of the easiest.

The mediæval writer, Paolo Giovio, dwells at length on the enormous fish to be seen 350 years ago in the depths of Lake Como, and states that trout of 100 lbs. and over were no uncommon objects.

What a prospect of joyous, easeful sport is opened here! No tedious travel of days or weeks to Norway, Canada, or New Zealand; no sleepless roughing it under tent or shack; no diet of canned food; no being “bitten off in chunks” by mosquito or black fly. Think of it, O Angler of high hope, but of sore disappointment—of hard toil and weary waiting! Think of it! To wake, after sound slumber, in one’s own comfortable room: to seize the ready rod, and with one dexterous cast, “almost from your very bed,” to be fast in a hundred-pound trout!

“Than which no more in deed, or dream!”

Martial’s abiding love for his birthplace on the picturesque banks of the River Salo in Spain (the delights of which in Ep., XII. 18, and I. 49, he paints with happy enthusiasm to Rome-tied Juvenal and to Licinianus) probably accounts for Angling being mentioned more appreciatively by him than by any other Latin poet.

Angling was one of the favourite amusements of men like Martial, a yeoman (if I may differ from Prof. Mackail) —to judge from the frequent references made to his own farm—or at any rate a close observer of the class, which in Ep. I. 55, he so well describes:

“Hoc petit, esse sui nec magni ruris arator, Sordidaque in parvis otia rebus amat.”

For in this same epigram and many others the poet is fain

“Ante focum plenas explicuisse plagas, Et piscem tremula salientem ducere seta.”

To him these rank among the chief delights of country life, which life he, though an admirable flâneur, places higher than all else.

He ends his vivid sketch of it with the passionate burst—“Let not the man who loves not this life, love me, and let him go on with his city life—white as his own toga!”

Martial’s charming picture of a Roman homestead, of its life, live-stock, of its pursuits, and of its fishing, contrasts vividly with his fawning eulogies of Emperors, and his savage satire on foes. It must be confessed, however, that some of his prettiest appreciations of country life were written in or about the large villas with which his rich patrons had studded, too closely to be really rural, Baiæ and the Bay of Naples.

His pleasure in this part of the coast was increased by the nearness of the baths of Baiæ, and the Lacus Lucrinus, the home of the famous Roman oyster.

These oysters held, I think, the highest place in Martial’s gastronomic affections. Constant his references to them, frequent his assertions or assumptions that they excelled all other. His well known lament for a beautiful little slave girl, who died when only six, employs as a term of highest praise Concha Lucrini delicatior stagni, rendered by Paley “more delicate” (in complexion) “than the mother-of-pearl in the shell of the Lucrine oyster.”

Others hold that concha is meant for the oyster itself. One author, basing himself on the varying praises of the particular beauties of the child, rhapsodises thus: “Oysters so tender, so juicy, so succulent, so delicious, that the poet could find no fitter comparison for a charming young girl!” But in the words of Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review, “This will never do.” To twist the verse into a comparison of pleasure derived from the sense of taste rather than of beauty from the sense of sight passes the inadmissible, and unless Martial could eat, or in Charles Lamb’s word on a gift of game, “incorporate” the pretty child, reaches the ludicrous.

Martial shows up as a sportsman. Proud of a good day, he knows—and tells us—what it is to be “blank” (“ecce redit sporta piscator inani,” Ep., X. 37, 17). That he is no “River Hog” and quite eligible for some select club on the Test or Itchen appears from his throwing back into his native river any mullet which looked less than three pounds.

The interest attaching to his Epigrams lies not only in the evidence they afford of his and his friends’ love for things piscatorial, but also in the probability that in them we meet with the first recorded mention of (a) a Jointed Rod, and (b) Fishing with a Fly. The former claim turns on the couplet,

“Aut crescente levis traheretur harundine præda, Pinguis et implicitas virga teneret aves.” Ep., IX., 54, 3.

For levis there are two other, though less well supported, readings, viz. vadis and velis. Is harundo (literally a ‘reed,’ then a ‘rod,’ but used impartially to describe both the weapon of the fowler and of the fisher) in these lines a fowler’s reed, or a fisher’s rod? The answer, if indeed any be possible, depends on the precise meaning to be attached to crescente, having regard to the context and the whole epigram.

Crescente, which some dictionaries, ignoring its use in a similar connection in Silius Italicus, VII. 674-77, “sublimem calamo sequitur crescente volucrem,” render jointed, can only here, I suggest, be properly translated by lengthening, or increasing. But whether this process of increasing was effected by real joints cannot be clearly ascertained.

In his solitary note on crescente Valpy (Delphin edition, 1823) vouchsafes the bald and not informative comment: “Vero mihi videtur intelligenda esse virga quæ crescat in locis palustribus.”

The following explanation is interesting, but to my mind indecisive, even though it claims the authority of “the old commentators.” Crescente—“L’oiseleur caché sous un arbre rappelait les oiseaux en imitant leur chant: puis, quand les oiseaux étaient sur l’arbre, il allongeait le roseau enduit de glu, qu’il tenait à la main et les oiseaux venaient s’y prendre. Le poëte dit que le roseau croissait, parcequ’à mesure que l’oiseleur se hissait sur ses pieds, la baguette engluée semblait croître en effet. Telle est la manière dont les commentateurs anciens interprètent ce distique.”

Much again depends on whether we read vadis (shallows) or levis (swift); vadis would incline the balance heavily, but not absolutely, to the rod, not to the reed. We get no help from Friedländer, who contents himself with a mere reference to Martial, Ep., XIV. 218, quoted below.

Paley is of doubtful or little avail. He holds that harundo means the fowler’s reed. The implement was so contrived that a smaller reed, tipped with birdlime (viscum), made from the cherries of the mistletoe, was suddenly protruded (perhaps blown) through a thicker reed against a bird on its perch, and that to this lengthening crescente refers. Cf. Ep., XIV. 218.

“Non tantum calamis, sed cantu fallitur ales, Callida dum tacita crescit harundo manu.”

The fowler attracted the attention of the bird as he approached it, by imitating its note.

Propertius refers to fowling (Vertumnus, V. 2, 33), and in Petronius (Sat., 109, 7) we find “volucres, quas textis harundinibus peritus artifex tetigit.” Textis here, which Mr. Heseltine renders ‘jointed,’ would seem to show Paley’s suggestion, that the first cane was hollow, while the second was “protruded” through it, to be wrong.

Rich explains this method of fowling as follows. The sportsman first hung the cage with his call bird on the bough of a tree, under which, or at some convenient distance from it, he contrived to conceal himself. When a bird, attracted by the singing of its companion, perched on the branches, he quietly inserted his rod amongst the boughs until it reached his prey, which stuck to the lime and was thus drawn to the ground. When the tree was very high, the rod was made in separate joints, like our fishing rod, so that he could lengthen it out until it reached the object of his pursuit, whence it is termed crescens or texta.

If the example given by Rich (from a terra-cotta lamp) be faithfully rendered, the joints in the rod are easily discernible.

But all question as to the existence of a jointed fowling rod is now settled past peradventure by Pl. 24, Fig. 686, in the Brit. Mus. Cat. of Gr. and Rom. Lamps, 1914. This shows an animal dressed in a hooded cloak, holding in his right hand a length of fowling rod, and in his left two spare lengths, trying to reach a tree on which sits a bird. Mr. Walters, the editor of the catalogue, kindly informs me that Fig. 686 can no longer be regarded as that of The Fox and the Grapes. Similar lamps shown in S. Loeschcke’s recent Lampen aus Vindonissa, e.g. Pl. 12, No. 473, confirm the evidence of the Brit. Mus. lamp in every detail.

Not a few editors, on the other hand, retain vadis in Martial’s epigram, instead of levis, as evidently did Hay, the Scotch poet, in translating the couplet,

“Could I a trout, now, with my angle get, Or cover a young partridge with my net.”

Much can be said for the view that line three applies to fishing. So much, indeed, that were it not for one, apparently fatal, omission, we might confidently proclaim the first definite mention of a jointed rod. To this omission, conclusive to my mind of the meaning of harundo, I have so far found no allusion.

Let us suppose that the first line of the couplet does refer to fishing. The poet would like to give some birds or fish, or both, to his friend Carus, but bewails his inability to send anything better than some chickens. He does explain fully why he cannot send birds, but he omits entirely any reason, or even any hint, as to what prevents him sending fish. We are not allowed to imagine that the weather was too bad, for the whistling ploughman imitating the magpie in his call, the starlings, the linnets, all negative that.

The whole epigram seems to refer to fowling. The application, even if vadis for levis be adopted, would not necessarily be altered. Are there not wild duck and snipe to be caught in the shallows (vadis) as well as fish, and probably by other means than birdlime, though with the use of a rod?

If levis, or even vadis be read, two arguments lean heavily against harundo being the fisher’s Rod. The first, in a poem dealing entirely with birds this somewhat obscure reference to fish would be extremely abrupt; the second, the line following “harundine præda” runs, “Pinguis et” (not “aut” as before) “implicitas virga teneret aves,” “and (not or) the sticky reed-line,” etc.

Save for this omission and the trend of the whole context, a strong argument might be easily advanced for fishing in the apparent redundancy of harundo and virga. But these two words may refer to two different weapons of capture, or, what is more probable, to two different ways of catching birds—the first, by a long reed with a noose, and the second by a branch with birdlime.

To conclude, whether harundo here be a weapon for capture of birds or of fish, it is now established beyond any doubt or contradiction that there was used in and probably long before Martial’s time a Reed Rod, capable of extension, either by protruding a smaller cane through a larger one, or else, perhaps, by an action somewhat similar to a chimney-sweep’s, with jointed rods fastened together in the hand, when prolonging his brush.

If such a Reed Rod was found of service to the fowler for reaching a bird on a high branch, is it not extremely probable, is it not almost certain, that in spite of no express mention of such use the fisherman also employed a similar jointed rod for the purpose—common alike to his primitive predecessor and his more advanced successor—of getting the bait over any obstacles which lay between him and the water, and for increasing both the reach of his arm and the length of his throw?

Whether the Rod of the piscator was similar to that of the aucupator or not, we do find these two pursuits, with but one verb for both, coupled in two of Tibullus’s beautiful lines on Hope (II. 6, 23). His Hope is very reminiscent of St. Paul’s Charity or Love, which “beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth.”

“Hæc laqueo volucres, hæc captat harundine pisces Cum tenues hamos abdidit ante cibus.”

“’Tis Hope, that taketh birds with the Snare, fish with the Rod with fine Hooks well hidden in the bait.”

Chapter IX. The First Mention of a Fly

The first mention of fishing with a fly occurs apparently in Martial’s lines, “Namque quis nescit, | Avidum vorata decipi scarum musca?” which have been translated:—

“Who has not seen the scarus rise, Decoyed, and killed by fraudful flies?”

These lines are of surpassing interest. In them we may possess the very first mention of a fishing fly, whether natural or artificial, in all the records written or depicted of the whole world.

If the reference be to an artificial fly, it certainly antedates by some two centuries the passage of Ælian (XV. 1), which has hitherto been universally acclaimed the first mention of such a fly. If on the other hand the reference be to a natural fly, it antedates by the same period of time the first mention of the natural fly, or rather winged insect (κώνωψ), to be found also in Ælian (XIV. 22).

And here, pray, observe the cold calm of the classical commentator! This passage, which, as I have said, may be the very first historical document testifying to the use of the fly, the very first tiny beginning of the immense literature consecrated to the fly, the very first starting point in the fly fisher’s journey of sore travail to farther knowledge, this passage so pregnant of possibilities and so provocative of comment, has never, I believe, been suggested by any editor as possibly the locus classicus of fly fishing, far prior to the generally adopted passage of Ælian.

Even if we make great allowance for the wrath of the literary angler at the careless indifference with which these lines appear from his standpoint to be treated, the comments by the editors of Martial must be classed, in other respects also, as unsatisfactory and jejune.

Paley and Stone, for instance, confine themselves to telling us that “scarus is some unknown but highly prized fish, which was caught by an inferior one used as bait.” That is all! nothing more! Their “unknown” stamps their indifference, or ichthyic ignorance. Further, they never even hint that in this passage commentators have suggested two readings, musco—‘moss,’ and musca—‘fly.’ They simply adopt musco without hinting at any difficulty arising from such adoption.

Friedländer adopts musca. His only note consists of, “Vorato—musco wollte Brodæus lesen wegen der von Athenæus, VII., p. 319 f., aus Aristoteles angeführten Stelle ...”

The majority of editors prefer, and probably rightly, the reading musca for many reasons, the chief being that all the manuscripts of Martial without a single exception give musca. The upholders of musco, in their endeavour to enforce that mere conjecture by quoting from Athenæus, “The Scarus flourishes on his food of seaweed,” and supporting it by Pliny, “The Scarus is said to be the only fish that ruminates and is herbivorous” (and here note that as Pliny—like Athenæus—was taking his information from Arist., N. H., VIII. 2, he should have translated φυκίοις by algis, not by herbis), make the mistake of translating φυκίον by muscus. They ignore, moreover, Oppian, II. 649, φέρβονται δ’ ἢ χλωρὸν ἁλὸς μνίον, κ.τ.λ. Φυκίον is, while muscus is not and never has been, algæ or true seaweed; muscus is ‘moss.’

Nor do these Olympian editors, who sit beside their proof-sheets, and whose notes are ever hurled far below them in the valley, condescend to explain to us poor gropers after light how moss to a sea-fish like the Scarus can be of value as food.

Most fishermen will tell you that fresh-water fish do eat moss; that they themselves have seen them in the act of eating such moss on the Thames; that roach in especial are particularly fond of this moss, which is used in summer months as a bait with great success; this moss they call by various names, ‘silk weed,’ ‘flannel weed,’ ‘blanket weed,’ and ‘crow-silk.’ Now all these so-called mosses are not mosses at all, but belong to the family Confervæ, which are fresh-water green algæ: so even in rivers we find that moss is not used as bait.

That not only the Scari but other fish, e.g. the Melanuri, feed on seaweed and that they are taken by baits composed of seaweed, many writers besides Athenæus and Pliny duly record. Theocritus (Id., XXI. 10) speaks of “baits of seaweed.” Oppian, describing the manner of catching the salpæ by baiting a place with stones covered with seaweed, states that when the fish have gathered round this in numbers, “then prepares he (the fisher) the snare of the weel.” Ælian asserts that among the marine plants, on which he says fish feed, are Βρύα ... καὶ φυκία ἄλλα, the difference between which seems according to Aristotle merely one of size.

If a poll of writers on Fishing and of practical Pisciculturists were taken to-day, a large majority would vote that sea-fish do not eat seaweed, but feed on the larvæ, and other minute insects in or on the various algæ or seaweeds. But against this opinion is arrayed the authority of Darwin and Wallace, who state that various species of Scarus do browse, and do graze on seaweed, and some of them exclusively on coral.

The Skaros (according to Aristotle) was the only fish which seemed to ruminate, whose food was seaweed, and teeth, set in deep saw-edged jaws, were not sharp and interlocking, like those of all other fish, but resembled those of a parrot, as its beak resembled that of a parrot.

From the seeming to ruminate of Aristotle we reach in later writers like Oppian, I. 134 ff., and Ovid, Hal., 119, the positive assertion that the scarus did ruminate.

Is it not possible, if a mere angler may hazard a suggestion on scientific points, that the belief of modern writers and pisciculturists is not far out, and that while some of the Scari do browse and graze exclusively on coral, and some sometimes on seaweed, they do this to obtain as food only the minute larvæ, which their so-called rumination helps them to separate from the seaweed or coral?

A second very practical argument against the reading musco suggests itself. Let us allow that some sea fish do eat not only algæ but moss: even then, why should our Scarus “be deceived” by the small amount possible of attachment to a little hook, of seaweed or moss or their larvæ? This is infinitesimal when compared with the greater masses, giving immeasurably ampler supply of larvæ, growing in the sea.

Were it not for the incitement or excitement caused by the fly’s movements or novelty, hardly a salmon, I venture to think, would rise to a fly; but to our scarus, since algæ and moss (if the latter exist in the sea of sufficient length) are familiar growths and constantly set in motion by the action of the water, both these incitements are surely lacking.

Even if neither of these arguments carries weight, the objection brought forward by Gilbert appears to me to put the reading musco out of court: “Suppose Martial knew what Athenæus and others state as regards this peculiar habit of the scarus, surely this was not the place, where the Scarus is introduced only as a representative of all fish, to air his knowledge—least of all in words such as ‘quis nescit.’”

In conclusion, if musca be the right reading, we can, I think, definitely assert:

A. That this passage contains the very earliest mention of a fly being used for the taking of fish:

B. That from Martial’s employment of it as an illustration, and from his not drawing attention to the novelty or oddness of such use, and especially from the words “quis nescit,” which imply a general knowledge, fly fishing had been long invented, and was a method common among anglers:

C. That this solitary passage is inconclusive as to whether the fly was simply a natural one attached to a hook, and used perhaps as now in dapping, or an artificial one.

To my mind, however, the scale dips deeply in favour of the artificial fly for the following reasons.

1. The trend and purpose of the whole passage, especially when we note carefully the preceding verse and a half, “Odi dolosas munerum et malas artes. | Imitantur hamos dona,” is to inveigh against fraudful gifts, typical of which fraudful flies are singled out—in fact, against all presents which are not what they appear. Mr. A. B. Cook writes: “I quite agree with your view that the passage gains much, if all three lines are made to refer to an artificial fly with a hook concealed in it. Indeed, that is pretty obviously the meaning.”

2. The difficulty which the ancients would have experienced in impaling, etc., on one of their hooks a natural fly would have been greater than dressing an artificial one. The smallest hook in the Greek-Roman Collection at the British Museum (found at Amathus in Cyprus 1894) measures over ¼ in. breadth at the bend. If we allow that owing to oxidation the metal may have coarsened and swollen, the task of impaling, and further of fastening a natural fly securely enough to withstand the buffets of even wavelets of the sea (for N.B. the Scarus is marine) must verily have demanded τὸν δημιοεργόν, “a craftsman of the people, welcome over all the wide earth.”

For these reasons the kudos of the first mention of an artificial fly belongs, in my opinion, to Martial rather than to Ælian.

Chapter X

THE SCARUS—THE EARLIEST ACCLIMATISATION OF FISH—THE FIRST NOTICE “FISHING PROHIBITED”

From the wealth of copious yet conflicting accounts of this famous fish in Greek and Roman writers, a large monograph might be produced. I restrict myself to a short notice of the acclimatisation of the fish, and of the controversies on its value, as (A) a Dainty, and (B) a Diet.

The original habitat of the Scarus was in the seas off Asia Minor, especially in the Carpathian Sea. During the Augustan age it was rarely taken in Italian waters, and then only when driven thither by storms. Thus Horace complains that neither Lucrine oysters nor Rhombi come his way,

“aut scari, Si quos Eois intonata fluctibus Hiems ad hoc vertat mare.” (Ep., II. 50 ff.)

Pliny (IX. 29), after attributing to the Scarus the unique characteristic of being herbivorous and never feeding on other fish and asserting that of its own accord it never passes from the Carpathian Sea beyond Cape Troas, goes on to tell us that in the time of Tiberius (or Octavius, according to Macrobius) vast quantities at the Emperor’s command were collected by an Admiral of the Fleet and planted along the Ostian and Campanian shores.

Careful protection by land and sea rendered poaching almost impossible. For the period of five years any scarus caught in the nets had, under heavy penalties, to be returned straightway to the water. The enforcement of these wise regulations effected such mighty thriving of the fish, that “postea frequentes inveniuntur Italiæ in litore, non antea ibi capti; admovitque sibi gula sapores piscibus satis et novum incolam mari dedit.”

This operation commands our comment, not merely on account of its big success, but because it is the earliest and (as far as I can discover) the only instance in all ancient literature, certainly in Greek and Latin, of the acclimatisation of fish (not eggs) in the sea, and on a large scale.

I do not include, though I do not forget, the large lucrative planting of oysters in the Lucrine lake by Sergius Orata centuries before. Later on we shall read of the Romans carrying eggs, naturally fertilised, from one water to another, and of the Chinese transporting vast quantities of similar eggs considerable distances.

But their methods and operations differed from the Emperor’s. Pliny expressly states that the Admiral planted fish, not eggs of fish, in the sea, not in fresh water, and in a new habitat hundreds of miles from the old.

To this planting or involuntary colonisation, Petronius—seemingly, despite controversy, the “Elegantiæ Arbiter,” or the not altogether Admirable Crichton, of Tacitus—probably alludes:

“ultimus ab oris Attractus scarus atque arata Syrtis Si quid naufragio dedit, probatur.”

Poets and gourmets have vied in singing the praises of the fish as the daintiest of dishes—“according to the Greeks to do justice to its flesh was not easy: to speak of its trail, as it deserved, was impossible, and to throw away even its excrement was a sin.” Confirmatory of Badham reads the pronouncement of magnus ille et subtilis helluo, “that great and exquisite gourmet” Archestratus, who from the grandiloquence and gravity of his Epic was evidently of opinion omne cum fidibus helluoni!

Epicharmus the comedian in his Hebe’s Wedding (frag. 54, Kaibel),

καὶ σκάους, τῶν οὐδὲ τὸ σκᾶρ θέμιτον ἐκβαλεῖν θεοῖς,

“Not even their trail is it lawful for the gods to throw away,”

summarises the wild infatuation of the Greeks for the scarus, while from Ennius some centuries later is extorted,

“Quid scarus? præterii cerebrum Jovis pæne supremi: Nestoris ad patriam his capitur magnusque bonusque.”

Although Pliny (IX. 29) definitely asserts “Nunc scaro datur principatus,” we find Martial within a few years dismissing the fish as of poor flavour—its only redeeming point the trail, which is excellent,

“Hic scarus, æquoreis qui venit obesus ab undis, Visceribus bonus est, cetera vile sapit.” (XIII. 84).

In the curious and rare Ichtyophagia (the omission of the second ‘h’ of the theta may be a printer’s error) by the learned Doctor Ludovicus Nonnius, published at Antwerp in 1616—a treasure-house from which I quote much and take more—an attempt is made to explain these diametrically opposed estimates. Nonnius asserts that as among the common herd only those fish which have fat flesh find favour or yield good flavour, and as the Scarus possesses a drier and more flaky flesh, “a plebis illis palatis spernebatur.”

This deals a nasty knock to poor Martial, who plumed himself on his taste as a gourmet, acquired (he fails to add) at the banquets and entertainments of his patrician friends or wealthy patrons.

Medical controversy, rarely absent, as to wholesomeness for once hardly exists. Galen, Diphilus, Xenocrates all agree as to the Scarus, although the last warns us that it is “hard to pass off in perspiration!” (δυσδιαφόρητος). Galen pronounces fish who haunt the rocks the most wholesome: of these, the Scarus is by far the best. Diphilus the Siphnian on the whole agrees, but condemns it as dangerous when fresh (!) because it hunts and feeds on the poisonous sea-hare and so frequently causes cholera morbus.

But according to Ælian, IX. 51, the Mullet (τρίγλη) was held by the initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries in the greatest honour, for one or other of two curious reasons: the first, because it brings forth its young thrice a year, and second, because it eats the sea-hare, who bears death to man.

Nonnius (p. 81) informs us that the followers of Pythagoras were forbidden to eat the Scarus because it was τρυγηφάγος, i.e. an eater of grain or grapes, whence or how obtained he vouchsafes not to inform us. It is of interest to read in Faber (op. cit., p. 27) that the common seal (Phoca vitulina) is believed at the present time to go ashore in the Ombla Valley in quest of grapes during the vintage, and is also said to commit great havoc in the vineyards of Sardinia and Sicily!

But for once Nonnius naps! Although, according to tradition, Pythagoras proscribed all fish, three kinds only are expressly and by name forbidden (in Symbols 18, 19, 60), viz. the Melanurus, the Erythinius, and the Sepia; nothing is said about the Scarus.

I presume that the error arose from Nonnius confusing a passage in Plutarch (Symp., VIII. 8, 3.) where à propos of Pythagoras, τρυγηφάγος is associated with the Scarus, but in exactly the opposite sense, “for we can not call the Mullet corn-destroying, or the Scarus grape-eating,” etc.

Again our Nonnius! By a passage from Pliny, XXXII. 3, he attempts to clear the Scarus and throw the blame for cholera on the Mullet.

But Pliny distinctly states that alone of all animals the fish called the Mullet, when he can annex no other food, eats the sea-hare without fatal consequences, after which he “tenerescit tantum et ingratior viliorque fit.” These Mullet, sold by fraudulent fishermen as Scari, caused the indictment of Diphilus. Rondolet bears witness that near Massilia similar sales took place “ab imperitis piscatoribus,” but surely “too skilled” would be the better epithet. It is but fair to add that Athen., VIII. 51, asserts that the Scarus also eats the sea-hare.

For this long discursus, the repute of the Scarus, the disputes of epicures and of doctors whether it be a dainty, or a sound diet, and the exclusive properties attributed to it by Greek and Roman writers must be my excuse.

Summarising these last, we find that the Scarus, in addition to being the most passionate in his love, alone of all fishes,

(A) Is not a cannibal, but a vegetarian (Pliny, IX. 29). Oppian claims for the mugil—grey mullet—that it is the only non-carnivorous fish (II. 642-3). Couch gives as his considered opinion, “Mugil capito is the only fish of which I am able to express my belief that it usually selects for its food nothing that has life.” Modern authorities have established that the scarus feeds on molluscs also.

(B) Seems to ruminate or does ruminate.

(C) Belongs to,

“The only kind that dare To form shrill sounds, and strike the trembling air.”

(D) Sleeps at night.

“Scarus alone their faded eyelids close In grateful intervals of soft repose.” (Oppian, II. 661 ff.)

But Aristotle (and, of course, Pliny) hold that most, perhaps all, fish do sleep, even if their eyelids are not closed: at any rate Tunnies and all flatfish do, while Pliny (X. 97) goes as far as asserting that “Dolphins and whales can be heard to snore!”

(E) Has plain, not sharp or jagged, teeth.

(F) Never deserts his fellow fish. If he have swallowed a bait, his friends flock around him and liberate him by biting the line in two. If he be caught in trap or weel, they approaching very delicately give the prisoner the choice of (a) gripping with his teeth a tail “by which he is dragged through the mesh of twigs,” or (b) of pushing through his own tail, which they (outside) seize, and pull him through the weel backwards—thus avoiding damage from the twigs to the eyes of the captive.

This devotion to his imprisoned fellow was turned to good account by fishermen. Fastening a hook in the jaw of and trailing a net behind a female scarus (preferably alive) they secured large catches by dropping the lead, which reversed the net and enmeshed the would-be rescuers. With the seed of the coriander Scari are taken “with a vengeance!”

Ælian (I. 4) concludes a similar story, probably purloined from Oppian, for he was an adept in picking up unconsidered and unacknowledged trifles, with, “These things do they, as men do: but to do loving-kindness are they born, not taught”; which demonstrates that the invaluable Scarus provides men, not only with a menu, but also a moral!

If we cannot absolutely claim for Martial the first mention of the jointed Fishing Rod and the natural or artificial Fly, we are safe in acclaiming him the author of the first notice, “Fishing strictly prohibited,” or “Chasse défendue,” in his

“Baiano procul a lacu recede, Piscator: fuge, ne nocens recedas.” (IV. 30.)

This epigram furnishes Bunsmann with one of the only three acts of Impietas which he can allege against the blameless race of fishermen. Martial here solemnly warns a fellow craftsman against fishing in the lake of Baiæ, because (1) the fish there are sacred to the Emperor Domitian, (2) a previous intruder was smitten blind in the very act of landing his fish, so that—and here comes a touch of the true angler—“he could not see his spoil.”

The pretty compliment, veiled in the words “sacred fish,” ranks Domitian as a god, because, as at many temples of the gods fish were held sacred, so at his Baian abode the fish had been shown by divine action to be sacred. But the fulsome bluntness of “than whom in the whole world there is none mightier” mars the effect. Lest, however, his friend might think that “Not twice in this world shall the Gods do thus,” or deem the superhuman sanction played out, Martial adjures him to throw to the fish some plain hookless food, and “dum potes, innocens recede.”

These Baian fish were evidently not as sophisticated or as discriminating as their neighbours, the Melanuri, which greedily snatch food thrown into the sea, but to any bit whatsoever containing a hook they approach neither delicately, nor at all.

In case some reader, fired by the fame of Theocritus or Martial, imagine an easy affluence by writing Fisher Eclogues or Fisher Epigrams, I refer him to Martial’s other warning, where he states that a written copy of one of his books could be bought for about fourpence halfpenny (considerably cheaper than a printed one now) and that with a profit to the bookseller!

The seeming naïveté of Martial’s appeal to a buyer and of his recommendation that the book, which describes presents, would be for a man like himself not too flush of coin, an admirable present to send at the Saturnalia, incites me to give the whole, if fishless, passage.

The hint of how to get rid of their surplus stock or “remainders” at Christmas may avail our present poetasters in these days of economy and war taxes. “The whole collection of Xenia” (distichs describing certain kinds of viands so-called) “in this thin book will cost you four sesterces to buy. Is four too much? You may get it (in a cheaper form) for two, and even that will leave a profit to the bookseller. This book itself, which describes presents, may be sent as a present at the Saturnalia, if you have not much money to spare, like myself.”

Manuscript books at Rome cost even less than printed books do now. This seeming inconsistency was effected by a large number of slaves writing rapidly at the dictation of one person, and so multiplying copies very cheaply and easily.

By such means, no doubt, was published Acta Diurna, the fly sheet or daily newspaper of Rome. Composed originally of the reports of lawsuits, births, deaths, marriages, and the almost equally numerous divorces, it came to contain in the time of Julius Cæsar the debates and Acta of the Senate, and later the news collected and conveyed by constant couriers from all parts of the Empire.

Chapter XI

PLUTARCH: THE CHARGE AGAINST HIM OF CONTEMNING FISHING QUITE FALSE—CLEOPATRA’S FISHING—OPPIAN—THE TORPEDO FOR GOUT—ATHENÆUS

Our next two authors, Plutarch (a little later than Martial) and Oppian (c. 170 a.d.), both wrote in Greek.

Plutarch for centuries has been misrepresented and maligned as an opponent and contemptuous disdainer of fishing, but quite inaccurately. I am not of the class of writers who invest Nero with a halo, or canonise Clytæmnestra. I am no Knight of the Round Table on a quest to redeem lost characters, but I feel it a duty and a pleasure on behalf of Plutarch to fling down the glove and challenge his traducers to a duel à outrance.

Modern English writers,

“to the listening earth Repeat the story,”

but not, like the Moon, the story of “the birth” of their error. Inevitably in their pages crop up Burton’s words, “Plutarch, in his book De Sol. Anim., speaks against all fishing as a filthy, base, illiberal employment, having neither wit nor perspicacity in it, nor worth the labour.”

Holland translates the passage, “for the cowardice, blockishness, stupidity, want of shifts and means in fishes, either offensive or defensive, causes the taking of them to be dishonest, discommendable, unlovely, and illiberal.” I subjoin the Greek so that each reader may make his choice of or a translation of his own.

These words do, it is true, occur in Plutarch’s de Sol. Anim., 9. But the chapter merely gives a fanciful report of an imaginary debate before a jury empanelled to determine whether land or water animals are the more crafty. The words embody, not the opinion, matured or other, of the author, but one of the charges in the opening speech of Aristotimus, who appears on behalf of the superior sagacity of the terrestrials as against the aquatics.

From a sentence in the mouth of a special pleader Plutarch has been branded for centuries, at any rate since the time of Burton’s book (1621), as the foe of fishing and the maligner of the craft. And with as much reason you might make Plato responsible for an opinion alien to his nature but advanced by one of his dialecticians, or saddle Father Izaak with some heresy of Venator’s.

An attempt to account for so learned and on the whole so fair an author as Burton being led into a charge, the inaccuracy of which even cursory perusal of chapter nine evinces, may, if fishless, yet interest some of my readers. One of the blemishes ascribed to the Anatomy is the burdening of the text with too profuse quotations, ransacked from not only classical and patristic writers, but also (literally) from “Jews, Turks, and Infidels.”

Making full allowance for Burton’s encyclopædic knowledge, whence, and how, were these all amassed? Hearne, the Oxford historian, helps towards an answer in his statement that Mr. John Rouse, of Bodley’s Library, for many years provided his friend of Christ Church with choice books and quotations. Is it too much to surmise that the passages “provided” by the helpful service of Rouse —a trait fortunately still characteristic of his Bodley successors—included the sentence of damnation, which, even if verified, was, from being torn out of its context, certainly misunderstood and ill-digested?

One ought to be chary of attributing motives, much more so reasons; but the only apparent reason for the numerous repetitions of Burton’s slander must have been the line of least resistance or least exercise, which deterred writer after writer from taking the trouble to consult the original context and thus discovering by whom and how the words were spoken. I have so far failed to find a single defender of Plutarch on this count or any plea for reversal of a verdict based on evidence wrongfully accepted.

Indignation at the injustice of the charge waxes all the hotter, when one remembers that the person indicted is the very self-same Plutarch who stands out as our authority for much unique lore on fish, fishing, and tackle. He, and no other, consoles the victims of an Emperor’s decree of banishment by pointing out the happiness of their lot in being far removed from the intrigues, the vices, the dust, the noise of Rome to a fair Ægean island, where the sea breaks peacefully on the rocks below, and—an additional assuagement—“where there is plenty of fishing to be had!”

Could a man who contemned and denounced fishing so vigorously put into the mouth even of the pleader for the superior craftiness of fish, unless he himself had angled and possessed the true angling spirit, the following sentences, as true and as useful to-day as when written nineteen centuries ago?

“For the first and foremost, the cane of which the angle Rod is made, fishers wish not to have big and thick, and yet they need such an one as is tough and strong, for to pluck and hold the fishes, which commonly do mightily fling and struggle when they be caught, but they choose rather that which is small and slimmer, for fear lest if it catch a broad shadow, it might move the doubt and suspicion that is naturally in fishes.”

“Moreover, the line they make not with many water knots” (happy anglers!), “but desire to have it as plain and even as possibly may be, without any roughness, for that this giveth as it were some denuntiation unto them of fraud and deceit. They take order likewise that the hairs which reach to the hook should seem as white as possibly they can devise, for the whiter they be the less are they seen in the water for their conformity and likeness in colour to it.”

We anglers seem of a verity “nae gleg at the uptak.” After some 1650 years we find John Whitney, in the preface to The Genteel Recreation: or the Pleasure of Angling, ascribing with modesty as to personal prowess, but quiet pride as to discovery, his success very largely to the use of “fine Tackling” which in the poem (!) he further, if in barbarous verse, enforces,

“Fineness in Angling’s th’ Anglers nearest Rule: For Prudence must still regulate in all.”

The sentence in his Preface is apposite to many a Preface, whether in prose or verse. “As to the verse there is fault and folly enough, but grant Poetical License, if in pleasing nobody I have pleased myself, and that’s all the reward I desire,” for alas! to many of us writers self-pleasing must be the sole reward of our desert, if not of our desire.

Misrepresentation as a despiser of fishing and fishermen has clutched another victim, Dr. Johnson, of all people! As Plutarch has been branded for an opinion not his own, so Johnson has been held guilty of the famous libel—“A worm at one end and a fool at the other.” The popular belief is all false. According to Boswell, he was very appreciative—an attitude not always Johnsonian—of Walton’s work.

Again, it was no other than he who urged Moses Browne to bring out in 1750 a new edition—the fifth and last was published in 1676—of The Compleat Angler, of which his criticism, “a mighty pretty book,” hardly indicates contempt for its subject, or author, whose life he once meant writing.

On Voltaire also the Worm-Fool libel has also been saddled, but wrongly. To another Frenchman, Martial Guyet, it has been attributed, but not convincingly.

In Notes and Queries, 3rd series, X. 472, can be found the lines:

“Messieurs, je suis pêcheur, et pêcheur de la ligne, J’en fait ici l’aveu. Ce cas semble peu digne De vos graves esprits: car on l’a dit souvent La ligne, avec sa canne, c’est un long instrument Dont le plus mince bout tient un petit reptile, Et dont l’autre est tenu par un grand imbécile!”

“These lines were written by Guyet, who if he were Martial Guyet died nearly one hundred years before the great lexicographer was born.” Even before Guyet the libel seems to have become hackneyed, “car on l’a dit souvent.”

Plutarch’s works figure so frequently in these pages that I will not here specially dwell on or quote from them, except “once more the tale to tell” of Antony and Cleopatra’s fishing as given in his Life of Antony, 29, 2.

Antony (who “fishes, drinks, and wastes the lamps of night in revel”), when with Cleopatra on the Nile had, of course, if Beaumont and Fletcher’s lines hold, not been half as successful as his mistress:

“She was used to take delight, with her fair hand To angle in the Nile, where the glad fish, As if they knew who ’twas sought to deceive them, Contended to be taken.”

To shine in her eyes, he secretly commanded his diver to attach fish to his hook. Cleopatra, becoming aware of the trick, signalled her diver to go down (or as some others relate, bribed Antony’s own servants) to affix to his hook, a salted fish (τάριχος). This he promptly struck and hauled out mid laughter and ridicule. “Leave,” cried Cleopatra, “leave the fishing rod to us; your game is Cities, Provinces, and Kingdoms.”

Shakespeare makes Cleopatra’s diver attach the salted fish:

“Cleo: Give me mine angle, we’ll to the river: there, My music playing far off, I will betray Tawny finn’d fishes; my bended hook shall pierce Their slimy jaws, and as I draw them up, I’ll think them every one an Antony, And say ‘Ah, ha! you’re caught.’

“Charmian:’Twas merry when You wager’d on your angling; when your diver Did hang a salt-fish on his hook, which he With fervency drew up.

“Cleo:That time!—O times!— I laughed him out of patience, and that night I laugh’d him into patience; and next morn, Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed.”

We owe most of our knowledge as to the technical methods, the varying minutiæ, and the numerous materials employed by the Greeks and Latins in Fishing and Angling, to Oppian, to Ælian, Pliny the Elder, and Plutarch.

“Bearing somewhat the same relationship to Eclogues of Fishermen that Virgil’s Georgics do to those of Shepherds, were the Greek verse treatises on fish and fishing. No fewer than six didactic Epics of the sort were composed, but only that of Oppian is extant in complete form. It is written in hexameter, and combines material based on observations with much extraordinary information gathered from floating material. In the last part of the treatise, the accounts given of the methods of capturing fish by men on various coasts lend a few pictures akin to independent Idylls.”

“Most of the poem, however, is very like Pliny’s Natural History, put into verse. These didactic poems, as a whole, have little relationship with the Piscatory Eclogue, other than that implied in the fact that they are written in verse and tell much about the practices of fishers.”

This grudging estimate of Oppian by Mr. Hall contrasts strangely with the terms of highest eulogy which authors of all ages have bestowed on him. Scaliger calls him “a divine and incomparable poet.” Sir Thomas Browne bewails with wonder that “Oppian’s elegant lines are so much neglected: surely we hereby reject one of the best epic poets.” Scaliger remarks that no author makes more frequent use than Oppian of similes, which he praises warmly for their strength and beauty, for their brilliancy and effect.

In my humble opinion they occur far too frequently and regularly. If we do not come across one at least in every hundred lines, the effect is agreeable disappointment. The subjects of comparison, moreover, are conventional and limited.

But Oppian’s poems were held in the very highest favour, not only by our stingy stepmother, Posterity, but by his contemporaries. The Emperor (whether he were Antoninus—of all the Emperors perhaps the keenest fisherman—Caracalla, or Severus is not clear, as Oppian’s exact date is still unsettled), on hearing the author recite his verses revoked the decree of banishment on Oppian’s father (to Malta), and paid the poet a golden stater, or more than a guinea a verse.

With this very liberal payment by piece or verse-work may be contrasted the treatment meted out to the great Persian poet Firdausi by the Emperor Mahmud.

The most romantic of the versions of the story makes the latter promise a miskal (or something less than ¼ oz.) for every couplet of the former’s epic, Shah Nameh. On the poem’s arrival at Court, joy reigned till discovery that it contained some 60,000 couplets.

Aghast at the amount, Mahmud or his Chancellor of Exchequer took advantage of some ambiguity in the terms and, despite the protests of Firdausi that the largesse was promised in gold, made payment in silver. It chanced that the treasure arrived while the author was in the public baths at Tús; furious at the fraud, he gave 20,000 to the bathkeeper, 20,000 to the refreshment seller, and 20,000 to the camel driver who had brought the bags of bullion.

Many years after, the Emperor, either repenting him of his broken word or moved by reports of the great poverty in which the poet had long lived, dispatched the sum in gold, or, as some say, indigo. Alas! as the convoy entered Tús by the Rudbar gate, by that of the Razan was Firdausi being borne to his grave.

At the death of Oppian in his thirtieth year, the citizens of his native place in Cilicia erected a statue to his memory. It bore the most laudatory of inscriptions, of which the last two lines have been Englished—“All” (i.e. preceding poets)

“All the inspired him their chief allowed And all to him their humbler laurels bowed,”

—to which halting and involved translation we at least neither bow laurels nor doff hats.

The Halieutica is divided into five books. The first two treat of the natural history of fishes, the other three of the art of fishing. Despite this proportion of space, fish rather than fishermen are the heroes of the scenes. The work displays considerable knowledge of zoology, coupled with absurd fables, which are adduced as grave matters of fact.

In the fulness with which he enumerates the various kinds of fish, and methods of fishing, the technique, the weapons, the materials appropriate to each, Oppian stands pre-eminent among our authors. Nor need we wonder at this fullness of treatment. He was wedded heart and soul to all pertaining to fish, or fishing, which he calls the “lovely art.”

The kinds of fish mentioned by this “poeta doctissimus” number, according to Bishop Hieronymus, one hundred and fifty-three. This figure is verified by Ritter, who adds that “Pliny’s long list contains only twenty-three more, i.e. one hundred and seventy-six in all,” a total which hardly warrants the naturalist’s triumphal outburst, “In the sea and in the ocean, vast as it is, there exists by Hercules! nothing that is unknown to us, and a truly marvellous feat it is that we are best acquainted with those things which Nature has concealed in the deep.”

From the only English translation of the Halieutica (made in 1722 by Diaper and Jones, Fellows of Balliol) I take a few passages illustrating the character and methods of Oppianic fishing.

The latter at once arrest our attention by their modernity. They are practically ours. Apostolides in his work describing fishing in modern Greece states that “les quatre engins d’Oppien, les filets, les hameçons, les harpons et les nasses,” with the addition of “les claies de roseau, d’importation romaine sans doute,” are the weapons of Hellas in the present day. The tricks of Oppian prevail in the Peloponnese: to-day, as nearly two millenniums back, the Scarus and the Mullet are caught by using the female as decoy.

The procedure of taking the Octopus (which Aristotle pictures for us in IV. 8), “when clinging so tightly to the rocks that it cannot be pulled off, but remains attached, even when the knife is employed to sever it: and yet if one employ fleabane (κόνυζα) to the creature, it drops off at once,” remains the same in Greece to-day. Apostolides writes (p. 50), “Comme on voit, non seulement le procédé de pêche aux poulpes a persisté jusqu’à nos jours, mais la plante (Conyse) qu’on emploie à cet effet porte encore le même nom.”

But as Canning called into existence a new world to redress the balance of power in the old, so too the Attic fisherman to dislodge the Octopus has, Raleigh-like, imported to the aid of his old herb, American tobacco.

The devices for fishing, which in Oppian, I. 54-5, are—

“The slender-woven Net, Viminious Weel, The Taper Angle, Line and Barbed Steel Are all the Tools his constant Toil employs, On arms like this, the Fishing Swain relies,”

are amplified in III. 73 ff. in number and detail.

“y those who curious have their art defined, Four sorts of fishers are distinct assigned. The first in Hooks delight: here some prepare The Angle’s Taper Length, and Twisted hair. Others the tougher threads of flax entwine, But firmer hands sustain the sturdy Line. A third prevails by more compendious ways, While numerous Hooks one common Line displays.”

We then pass to fishing by Nets, Mazy Weel, and Spears or Tridents. A spirited passage, spoilt in the translation by superfluous verbiage, sings of nocturnal fishing with spears and an attracting light. The method probably obtained the world over, certainly in China, Rome, and Greece, where Plato (Soph., 220 D.) classes it under the heading πυρευτική next to Angling. In Scotland it prevailed extensively, if illegally, as Burning the Water, or Leistering, a Norse term, and practice which Thor himself did not disdain. A passage from a lost comedy—The Trident—perhaps by Philippides, shows a fisher armed with a three-pronged fork and horn-lantern off a-Tunnying.

The lines ring as true to-day as when Oppian penned them.

“Erected torches blaze around the Boat, And dart their pitchy Rays ... Admiring shoals the gaudy flames surround, And meet the triple spear’s descending wound,”

while if fishing were legally permitted only to those who came up to his ideal of what an angler should be (III. 29-31),

“First be the Fisher’s limbs compact and sound, With solid flesh, and well braced sinews bound, Let due proportion every part commend, Nor Leanness shrink too much, or Fat distend,”

rents the world over would speedily abate, and many a river would know its tenant no more.

For reading “at lairge” Oppian is admirable. At one moment you are enjoying a vivid and passably accurate account (III. 149 ff.) of how the Cramp or Torpedo Fish (νάρκη), like Brer Fox, lies low in the sand and the mud, but on a sudden “ejects his poisoned charms” with such effect that soon

“On every joint an Icy Stiffness steals, The flowing spirit binds and blood congeals.”

A fish stupefied by the shock is likened (II. 81 ff.) unto a man who in dreams tries to escape from the threatening phantoms, only to find his knees bound and his limbs incapable of flight.

At another moment our poet (in I. 217 ff.) is reproving the incredulity of those who doubt the fact that a sucker fish can stop a ship under full sail, by sticking to its keel!

The peculiar powers of the Torpedo Fish command some comment. Ancient authors galore, to whom, in the absence of the more powerful electric Eel of Central America, the νάρκη must have appeared an amazing creature, have written and differed about it. Aristotle had early noted that it caught its prey by means of a stupefying apparatus in its mouth, or rather at the back of its head. Claudian asks (Carm. Min. Corp., XLIV. (XLVI.) 1 f.):

“Quis non indomitam miræ Torpedinis artem Audiit et merito signatas nomine vires?”

Plato compares Socrates to the fish from his capability of electrifying his audience in the strict, but not in the corrupt present-day sense of the word, as some writers imagine. The comparison to the fish in Meno 80A illustrates the benumbing effect of the Socratic method on the thought and talk (τὴν ψυχὴν καὶ τὸ στόμα ναρκῶ) of Meno (and others), so that he was μεστὸς ἀπορίας, and reduced to silence (οὐκ ἔχω ὅ τι ἀποκρίνωμαι).

If limited to the electric fire which flashed from his eyes, the comparison is complimentary to the philosopher, but, if applied to the whole face, is, even if true, quite the reverse. The thirty odd busts still extant of Socrates hand down to us an ugly, flat face with pig’s-eyes, all characteristic of the Torpedo narke.

Ælian (IX. 14) indulges in wondrous stories gleaned from his mother and viris peritis of the permeation of the electric shock. Did one but touch the net in which the fish was taken, lo! he was cramp-bound. If some enquiring observer placed a pregnant torpedo in a vase of sea-water, his fate, did but a drop fall on leg or arm, was similar, but the fish, even though this virtue had gone out of her, in due season became a mother!

According to Mr. Lones, Oppian, Ælian, to whom (V. 37) we owe the specific for immunity when handling the fish, viz. “the liquor of Cyrene,” Theophrastus, all exaggerate the powers of the Torpedo.

A most interesting account is given in Athenæus (VII. 95), who avers that the shock was not produced by all parts of the fish’s body, but by certain parts only, and that Diphilus of Laodicea had proved this by a long series of experiments. According to Galen and Dioscorides the shock, whence or however obtained, relieved chronic headache, while a contemporary of the latter recommends a person suffering from gout in the feet to stand “bare-legged” on the shore, and apply the Torpedo.

As the German and Austrian watering places are still under a cloud, we may yet see on the shores of Italy bands of gouty and passionate pilgrims standing bare-legged, awaiting the cure of the νάρκη!

Complaints of gout are rife, even among our fish-affecting epigrammatists. From Hedylus, a singer rather of wine than of fish, we trace the lineage of the disease, “of Bacchus the limb-loosener, and of Venus the limb-loosener, is sprung a daughter, a limb-loosener, the Gout”!

As to spawning, every author from Herodotus down to Izaak Walton has evolved various but mostly inaccurate theories. Oppian (I. 479 ff.) lays down that, as the passion of Love overcomes fish, the bodies of the male and female meet in the water and “exude mingled slime,” which swallowed by the female produces conception. To this (I. 554 ff.) he allows an exception in the case of the murænæ. These mate with land serpents, “who for a time lay aside their venom”: a monstrous connection which finds affirmation by Sostratus and by Pliny.

The touching charm of the passage about the Naucrates ductor or pilot fish (whence its name of ἡγητήρ), which for some reason in more modern times has transferred its affection and services from the whale to the shark, compels quotation:

“Bold in the front the little pilot glides, Averts each danger, every motion guides; With grateful joy the willing whales attend, Observe the leader and revere the friend; True to the little chief obsequious roll, And soothe in friendship’s charms their savage soul. Between the distant eyeballs of the whale The watchful pilot waves his faithful tail, With signs expressive points the doubtful way, The bulky tyrants doubt not to obey, Implicit trust repose in him alone, And hear and see with senses not their own; To him the important reins of life resign, And every self-preserving care decline.”

Some of Oppian’s best bits contain animated portraits of sea-fights. The combatants are as intensely personified as Homer’s Greeks and Trojans in their hand-to-hand fight on the banks of the Scamander. But unlike the Heroes, the belligerents of Oppian pull each other to pieces without any responsibility on their part, or shock to moral sense on ours:

“Unwise we blame the rage of warring fish Who urged by hunger must supply the wish; While cruel man, to whom his ready food Kind Earth affords, yet thirsts for human blood.”

In proportion as fish, which according to the earliest authors was despised or disregarded, grew in favour with the Greeks, the frequency of its mention in Greek literature increased apace.

The Deipnosophistæ by Athenæus, to which belongs the distinction of being one of the earliest collections of Ana, is a curious sort of philosophers’ feast. It quotes from nearly every writer on nearly every topic; it discusses almost every conceivable subject, especially gastronomy. It weighs the qualities of all things edible. Comments on fish, taken from plays, histories, treatises, etc., are plentifully, if incongruously, scattered.

Everything goes in this work; grammatical problems are mixed up with gastronomic; the discursiveness of Athenæus races from grave to gay, grim death to any story, however apparently disconnected.

His tale of the Pinna (III. 46), a bivalve shellfish, and the Pinnothere (a small crab who inhabits the shell of the Pinna) resembles many of the fables current among the West Indian negroes as regards the cleverness of the Crab. As soon as the small fish, on which the Pinna subsists, have swum within the shell side, the Pinnothere nips the Pinna as a signal to him to close his shell and secure them.

Plutarch (De Sol. Anim., 30) shows that the habit was not entirely altruistic, for “this being done, they feed together upon the common prey.” From the Pinna which haunts the bottom of the sea. From the Pinna which haunts the bottom of the sea came ”the most transparent pearls, very pure and very large.”

The enormous industry of Athenæus, who (VIII. 15) speaking of the materials he had amassed for this one book, casually states that he himself “had read and made extracts from 800 plays of the Middle Comedy alone,” and in it cites nearly 800 authors, and over 1200 separate books, has undoubtedly preserved to us many valuable passages of the ample literature and numerous plays in which fishermen once figured. My many quotations from and references to his Deipnosophistæ make it unnecessary to deal with this author at greater length.

Chapter XII

ÆLIAN—THE MACEDONIAN INVENTION, OR THE FIRST MENTION OF AN ARTIFICIAL FLY

“They knew ’e stole; ’e knew they knowed; They did not tell, or make a fuss, But winked at Ælian down the road, And ’e winked back—the same as us!”

Ælian (170-230 a.d.), who, though born in Italy and brought up in the Latin tongue, acquired so complete a command of Greek that he could speak it as well as an Athenian gentleman (hence his sobriquet μελίγλωττος), composed his works in Greek.

His Natural History soon became a standard work on Zoology, although in arrangement it is very defective: for instance, he skips from elephants (XI. 15) to dragons in the very next chapter, and from the livers of mice in II. 56 to the uses of oxen in II. 57. This treatment of things, ποικίλα ποικίλως, is asserted by the author to be intentional, so as to avoid boring the reader. For his part he avows that he prefers observing the habits of animals and fish, listening to the nightingale, or studying the migration of cranes, to heaping up riches!

Whether as a Naturalist Ælian possesses any value, whether his work is “scrappy and gossiping, and largely collected from older and more logical writers,” or “from the industry displayed, despite deficiency in arrangement, a valuable collection in Natural History,” to us fishermen matters little, for unto him has been ascribed the great glory of being the first author of all ages and of all countries specifically to mention and roughly describe an Artificial Fly.

And not only is he the first, but also (with possibly one exception) the only author during fourteen hundred years, who makes any reference to any such fly. From Ælian until the Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle we find no mention of, or allusion to, the Artificial Fly, but that it was well known as a method of angling is easily deduced from the authoress’s abrupt introduction of the subject, “There ben the xij flies or dubbes with which ye shall angle.”

The usually accurate Bibliotheca Piscatoria of Westwood and Satchell states under heading of ‘Ælian,’ that Stephen Oliver (Mr. Chatto), in his Scenes and Recollections of Fly Fishing, first pointed out this remarkable passage. Now the first edition of Oliver’s book is dated 1834; so, if the Bibliotheca Piscatoria be correct, Ælian’s statement apparently remained unknown to Anglers for nearly eighteen centuries.

I purposely set out a translation of the whole passage in Ælian, XV. 1, because short extracts are usually given, and because these vary greatly on a very important point. I adopt with some alterations the translation by Mr. O. Lambert in his Angling Literature in England (1881).

“I have heard of a Macedonian way of catching fish, and it is this: between Bercea and Thessalonica runs a river called the Astræus, and in it there are fish with speckled skins; what the natives of the country call them you had better ask the Macedonians. These fish feed on a fly peculiar to the country, which hovers on the river. It is not like flies found elsewhere, nor does it resemble a wasp in appearance, nor in shape would one justly describe it as a midge or a bee, yet it has something of each of these. In boldness it is like a fly, in size you might call it a midge, it imitates the colour of a wasp, and it hums like a bee. The natives generally call it the Hippouros.

“These flies seek their food over the river, but do not escape the observation of the fish swimming below. When then the fish observes a fly on the surface, it swims quietly up, afraid to stir the water above, lest it should scare away its prey; then coming up by its shadow, it opens its mouth gently and gulps down the fly, like a wolf carrying off a sheep from the fold or an eagle a goose from the farmyard; having done this it goes below the rippling water.

“Now though the fishermen know of this, they do not use these flies at all for bait for fish; for if a man’s hand touch them, they lose their natural colour, their wings wither, and they become unfit food for the fish. For this reason they have nothing to do with them, hating them for their bad character; but they have planned a snare for the fish, and get the better of them by their fisherman’s craft.

“They fasten red (crimson red) wool round a hook, and fix on to the wool two feathers which grow under a cock’s wattles, and which in colour are like wax. Their rod is six feet long, and their line is the same length. Then they throw their snare, and the fish, attracted and maddened by the colour, comes straight at it, thinking from the pretty sight to get a dainty mouthful; when, however, it opens its jaws, it is caught by the hook and enjoys a bitter repast, a captive.”

The lines which describe the making up of the fly—τῷ ἀγκίστρῳ περιβάλλουσιν ἒριον φοινικοῦν, ἤρμοσταί τε τῷ ἐρίῳ δύο πτερὰ ἀλεκτρυόνος ὑπὸ τοῖς καλλαίοις πεφυκότα καὶ κηρῷ τὴν χρόαν προσεικασμένα are translated in Westwood and Satchell’s Bibl. Pisc., and by Mr. Lambert quite differently.

In the Bibl. Pisc.:

“Round the hook they twist scarlet wool, and two wings are secured on this wool from the feathers which grow under the wattles of a cock, brought up to the proper colour with wax.”

In Lambert:

“They fasten red wool round a hook and fit on the wool two feathers which grow under a cock’s wattles, and which in colour are like wax.”

It is asserted in the Bibl. Pisc. that the whole passage is therein “for the first time, accurately, translated,” but this proud boast must take a back seat, for Mr. Lambert translates with far nearer accuracy. One grave error springs from mistranslation in the former of προσεικασμένα as “brought up to,” instead of “like,” a meaning very common in Greek writers of the second and third century.

But, apart from the question which of the two be the better rendering, no doubt whatever can exist which of the flies described would be found the better, if not the only, killer. Application of wax to the hackles of a cock would certainly cause the fibre to stick together, entirely destroy their free play in the water, and render them useless as wings.

This passage, ever since its rediscovery by Oliver in 1834, has been acclaimed by most writers on Fishing as (A) being the first instance in literature, or for that matter in art, of the Artificial Fly, and as (B) ascribing to the Macedonians the credit of a “new invention” in Angling.

It is undoubtedly the first and only express mention of a specially made-up Artificial Fly down to 500 a.d., and probably even down to Dame Juliana’s Book (c. 1500). But I suggest and believe that this passage is intended, not as a description of a “new invention,” or of a striking departure from old methods of Angling. It merely instances the Macedonian’s adaptability to his environment, and his imitative skill in dressing from his wools and feathers a fly to resemble as closely as possible the natural fly on which the fish were feeding, a practice very common among anglers of the present day.

So far from the Artificial Fly being a “new invention,” it seems to me to have been for a long time in more or less regular use. The materials necessary or employed for dressing flies are set forth in two other places by Ælian in this same work. The Macedonian fly is described at length and in special detail, probably because it marked an advance in making up a fly.

I have not been able so far to find the passages in Bk. III. 43, and Bk. XV. 10, mentioned (except in Blümner’s general list of fishing weapons under “Fischfang”) or alluded to in connection with fly-making, much less brought into the prominence which their special pertinence of a surety deserves and demands.

This omission may be due to previous writers being content with the authority and researches of Oliver and of Westwood and Satchell, and on the line of least exertion not pursuing the subject any further even in the pages of Ælian himself. If they had so pursued, they would have discovered in the first passage in Bk. XII. 43, which is separated by only three books, and in the second passage in Bk. XV. 10, which is separated by only nine chapters from the locus classicus in Bk. XV. 1, strong reasons for qualifying their statement as to the Macedonian “invention.”

In Bk. XII. 43, Fishing is divided into four kinds—by Nets, Spears, Weels, and Hooks; that by hooks (ἀγκιστρεία) is adjudged “the most skilful, and the most becoming for free men,” that by Weels (κυρτεία) the least so. In each class Ælian carefully enumerates the articles necessary or generally used.

The list of those necessary for fishing with hooks, or Angling, recounts “natural horse-hair, white, and black, and flame-coloured, and half-grey; but of the dyed hair, they select only those that are grey, or of true sea-purple, for the rest, they say, are pretty poor. They use, too, the straight bristles of swine, and thread, and much copper and lead, and cords.” Now follow the important words—“and feathers, chiefly white, or black, or various. They use two wools, red and blue.”

Further requirements are “corks, and wood, and iron, and of things they need, are reeds well-grown, and nets, and soaked rushes, a shaved wand, and a dog-wood Rod, and the horns and hide of a she-goat.” The equipment is as ample as amazing. What use, in the name of every fishing Deity, unless the author is referring to Oppian’s method, did the Angler make of the “horns and hide of a she-goat”?

Ælian concludes with ἄλλος δὲ ἄλλῳ τούτων ἰχθὺς αἱρεῖται, which antedates the tale of the millionaire, who, reproached with having brought a thousand times too many flies, ejaculated, “with some of these, if I can’t get a salmon, maybe I’ll strike a sucker”!

In XV. 10, which deals with the capture of pelamyde or young tunny fish, one of the crew sitting at the stern lets down on either side of the ship lines with hooks. On each hook he ties a bait (perhaps not a bait in our modern technical sense, but rather a lure) wrapped in wool of Laconian red, and to each hook attaches the feather of a seamew.

Let us set aside, because of Ælian’s haphazard method of arrangement, any argument which might otherwise fairly be adduced from the following facts. (A) He expressly sets forth in XII. 43 (three books before he mentions the Macedonian device) red and other wools and feathers as part of the ordinary tackle of an Angler—most probably in river or lake, for here, unlike XV. 10, where the prey is a sea-fish, we have no mention of a ship, oars, etc. (B) When he does mention the Macedonian device, he does not announce it in any way as a new invention or a striking departure from the old methods of fishing, but quite simply, in the words: “I have heard of the Macedonian way of fishing, and it is this.”

Setting aside, I repeat, any arguments thus to be deduced, we are face to face with the hard and curious fact, that in all three passages the materials, out of which the lures are constructed, are the same; they are wools of various colours, and feathers taken from birds, in XV. 1, from a cock, in XV. 10, from a seamew.

Any assertion or suggestion that these wools and feathers were used, and are specially stated to have been used for tying only the Macedonian fly, and that this special statement of such uses is meant expressly to differentiate the Macedonian from all other ways of fishing, and thus constitutes the first mention of an Artificial Fly, I counter by a couple of queries.

Why in XII. 43, and XV. 10, are these self-same wools and feathers set out among the necessary ordinary requisite tackle of a fisherman, if they were not used for dressing a fly, perhaps more primitive but still Artificial? And, if they were not so used, to what other fishing purpose can they be fairly applied?

Again, let us for a moment grant that the Macedonian device was the absolutely new invention or the striking departure from all preceding angling methods, which, had artificial flies not previously been well known, it most certainly would have been. In this case, surely Ælian, meticulous in his examination and classification of the tackle, etc., needed for each of the four stated kinds of fishing, would have employed, when about to tell of this invention, words calling more instant attention to and far worthier of this great revolution than the simple, “I have heard of the Macedonian way of fishing, and it is this”!

As supporting my contention, a further point must be noted. In the list of tackle in XII. 43, wools and feathers are mentioned in a general manner, but in XV. 1, their use is particularised and elaborated. Similarly in the first passage the making and material of Rods are given, but in the second (and here only) the particular length of rod is stated.

It is on these passages (XII. 43, and XV. 10) and on their natural implication, that I chiefly found my conclusion that (A) the practice of making up and fishing with some kind of artificial fly had been in more or less general use for a long time previous to the Macedonian device, and (B) that the device is quoted merely as an instance of a special, local, and improved adaptation of such usage—in a word as le dernier cri in flies!

If in Martial (Ep., V. 18. 8) musco, not musca, should be read, then to Ælian would belong the credit of being the first to mention not only the use of the artificial fly, but also the use of the natural fly.

In XIV. 22, we read of the Thymalus (a kind of grayling), which alone of all fishes gives out after capture no fishy smell, but rather so fragrant an odour that one would almost swear that in his hand he held a freshly gathered bunch of thyme (“that herb so beloved by bees”), instead of a fish. Ælian then lays down that, while it is easy to catch this fish in nets, it is impossible to do so with a hook baited with anything except theκώνωψ, i.e. the gnat, or more probably from the vivid description by one who has evidently suffered, the mosquito, “that horrid insect, a foe to man, both day and night, alike with his bite and his buzz.”

Here then, in XIV. 22, we get, if the conjecture musco should be held to deprive Martial of his priority, the first mention of angling with a natural fly.

The difficulty, obvious at once to the practical angler, of how the ancients (or even the moderns with all the elaborate perfections of Redditch) could manufacture a hook little enough to impale a mosquito did not escape Aldrovandi. But the κώνωψ, said to spring from the σκώληκες, i.e., larvæ found in the sediment of vinegar, was apparently even smaller than his brother mosquito, the ἐμπίς.

As only with great care, and even then only on very fine wire, can the smallest modern hook, No. 000, be coaxed to impale a big gnat, the problem before the Ancients of impaling with a hook one, and this not even the largest, of the mosquito tribe seems insoluble. But perhaps Ælian’s κώνωψ (as probably also his ἵππουρος) was far larger than its descendant of the present day, or perhaps our author has substituted by mistake the mosquito for some larger but similar gnat.

Chapter XIII. Ausonius—Salmo, Salar and Fario—First Mention of the Pike

Ausonius (c. 310-c. 393 a.d.) is practically the last Latin writer within my time-limit (a.d. 500) who has allusions of interest to Fishing. In the fifth century, however, Sidonius, whose fishing and hunting interest apparently equalled his diocesan—his ‘Nolo Episcopari’ was, if fruitless, at once exceptional and genuine, for the see of Clermont had to be forced on his acceptance—tells us in a letter and in his poems of the catching of fish, especially by night lines in a lake on his wife’s property in the Auvergne.

The tenth Idyll of Ausonius (“Ad Mosellam,” a great favourite with Izaak Walton), ranks, according to Mackail, “the writer not merely as the last or all but last of Latin, but also as the first of French poets.” It demands mention, quite apart from the vividness of its pictures, because it is the only fisher poem of any length in classical Latin, and because in it occurs the first mention of the Salar and the Fario.

Of the Salmo Pliny three hundred years previously was the first to speak. The Greeks knew not the Salmon: at any rate, no opsophagist or other author notices the fish. Their silence is natural; the high temperature of the water forbids its frequenting the Mediterranean or its inflowing rivers.

The length of the whole poem (483 lines) prevents entire quotation, although the touch and movement all through display fully the instinct and feeling for sport.

Pictures of the scenery along the banks of the Moselle are followed by the enumeration and characterisation of the fish in its waters rendered after the manner of the didactic epic. The poem furnishes a lively description of the fishermen of the Moselle, made from actual observation. Men in boats drag nets in midstream; men watch the corks of little nets in shallower water; men perched on banks or on rocks armed with rods scan the floats bobbing on the water, or jerk in the prey. But we search for fly-fishing in vain.

“And now, where the bank gives easy access, a host of spoilers are searching all the waters. Alas! poor fish, ill sheltered by thine inmost stream! One of them trails his wet lines far out in mid-river, and sweeps off the shoals caught in his knotty seine; where the stream glides with placid course, another spreads his drag-nets buoyed on their cork-floats.

“A third, leaning over the waters beneath the rock, lowers the arching top of his supple rod, as he casts the hooks sheathed in deadly baits. The unwary rovers of the deep rush on them with gaping mouth—too late, their wide jaws feel through and through the stings of the hidden barb—they writhe—the surface tells the tale, and the rod ducks to the jerky twitch of the quivering horse-hair. Enough—with one whizzing stroke the boy snatches his prey slant-wise from the water; the blow vibrates on the breeze, as when a lash snaps in the air with a crack, and the wind whistles to the shock.

“The finny captives bound on the dry rocks, in terror at the sunlight’s deadly rays; the force which stood to them in their native stream languishes under our sky, and wastes their life in struggles to respire. Now, only a dull throb shudders through the feeble frame, the sluggish tail flaps in the last throes, the jaws gape, but the breath which they inhale returns from the gills in the gaspings of death: as, when a breeze fans the fires of the forge, the linen valve of the bellows plays against its beechen sides, now opening, and now shutting, to admit or to confine the wind.

“Some fish have I seen who, in the last agony, gathered their forces, sprang aloft, and plunged head foremost into the river beneath, regaining the waters for which they had ceased to hope. Impatient of this loss, the thoughtless boy dashes in after them from above and strikes out in wild pursuit. Even thus Glaucus of Anthedon, the old man of the Bœotian Sea, when, after tasting Circe’s deadly herbs, he ate of the grass which dying fish had nibbled, passes, a strange denizen, into the Carpathian deep. Armed with hook and net, a fisherman in the depths of that realm whose upper waters he had been wont to plunder, Glaucus glided along, the pirate of those helpless tribes.”

Whether the Salar and the Fario of the Idyll are, or are not, identical with the burn trout or salmon trout of modern days affords a problem for ichthyologists, not for me.

Ausonius is the first to mention not only the Salar and Fario but also our Pike—Esox Lucius.

“Lucius obscuras ulva cænoque lacunas Obsidet; hic nullos mensarum lectus ad usus Fervet fumosis olido nidore popinis,”

which Badham has loosely translated:

“The wary luce, midst wrack and rushes hid, The scourge and terror of the scaly brood, Unknown at friendship’s hospitable board, Smokes midst the smoking tavern’s coarsest food.”

The striking silence as to a fish so far-spread in his habitat and so notable in his habits as Esox lucius in all preceding Greek and Latin literature must excuse a semi-excursus.

Cuvier writes: “We are necessarily astonished that the Ancients have left us no document, so to speak, on a fish so abundant in Europe as the Pike ... a fish which the Greeks must have known. The word Esox occurs only once (Pliny, IX. 17) as an example of a large fish comparable to the Tunny in form. In spite of Hardouin, I do not see that Esox of the Rhine is the Pike, or believe with Ducange that it is the Salmon. The name Luccio or Luzzo, by which we still call the Pike in this country, gives force to the supposition that the Latins of the time of Ausonius called it Lucius.”

The astonishment at the absence of all reference to the Pike would be greatly increased, if the authors, or really Valenciennes, had lived to read later writers. Parkyn (op. cit., p. 131) cites the fish among those represented by the craftsmen of both Palæolithic and Neolithic Art in the caves of France and Spain. G. de Mortillet (op. cit., p. 220) claims that the remains of Pike in the Palæolithic age occur not infrequently. F. Keller (op. cit., vol. I. 537, 544) notes their presence in Neolithic finds at Moosseedorf, etc. Meek, Migration of Fish, p. 18 (London, 1917), states that the Pike “occupied the European region in Oligocene and Miocene times, and that the remains of Pike are found in the Pleistocene of Breslau.”

Attempts have been made to explain the absence of this fish previous to Ausonius by identifying Esox lucius with (A) the Oxyrhynchus, and (B) the Lupus. These seem to me unsuccessful.

Petrus Bellonius among the early writers upholds the first identification. In his Observations de Plusieurs Singularitëz, Book II. ch. 32 (published 1553), “Le fleuve du Nil nourrit plusieurs autres poissons, lesquelz toutes fois ie ne veul specifier en ce lieu, sinon entăt que le Brochet y est frequent, et que nous avons difficulté de luy trouver une appellation antique, ie veul mŏstrer qu’il fut ancieňement appellé Oxyrynchus.”

His effort breaks down for three reasons. First, Ælian says that the Oxyrhynchus,—a fish supposed to have sprung from the blood of the dead Osiris, or to be the impiscation (if the word may be coined) of Osiris—although caught in the Nile (X. 46, 1, 12.), dwells mainly, or according to Plutarch, de Iside et Osiride, 7, altogether in the sea, whereas our Esox cannot endure sea-water. Second, the sharp pointed form of beak (whence the name) cannot possibly represent the broad goose-like mouthpiece of our Pike. Third, the size of the Oxyrhynchus, often 8 cubits or 12 feet in length, proscribes the Pike.

Against the identification suggested by Franciscus Philadelphus of Esox lucius with Lupus two reasons lean heavily: (A) the etymological impossibility of λύκος (because of the wolflike nature of the Pike) changing into Lucius, and (B) the Lupus is always in Greek called λάβραξ, never λύκος.

The story of how the Lupus comes to his death by the Prawn can be read in Oppian and in Ælian. The fish, ever voracious, takes the prawns into his mouth by the thousand; these, unable to resist or retreat, jump about and puncture his throat and jaws so seriously that he soon dies of poison and suffocation.

Pliny (IX. 17), it has been claimed, under the word Esox intends our Esox lucius; but Cuvier maintains, and rightly, that his Esox signifies some very large fish, perhaps a Tunny.

Sulpicius Severus, a presbyter who lived in Aquitania (c. 365-425 a.d.) and penned an enthusiastic Life of S. Martin of Tour, writes: “ad primum jactum reti permodico immanem Esocem extraxit.” It is not for me to discuss or decry this amazing statement of a very small net holding this monstrous Esox. But as the growth of a Pike under the most favourable circumstances is probably not more than 2 lbs. a year for twelve years when usually it lessens materially, I do suggest that the adjective immanem is hardly applicable (unless St. Martin’s biographer, perhaps also a fisherman, has lapsed unconsciously into a “fish story”) to a fish of about 20 or 30 lbs., and so would seem to confirm Cuvier.

Pike, Carp, and Grayling were not apparently indigenous in England. They were introduced from the Continent at some undetermined date by one of the earlier religious orders for the better keeping of Fast Days, which as enjoined by the Church, even in Queen Elizabeth’s time, amounted to no less than 145 in number.

The Pike, though known in the thirteenth century, was very scarce. Its price (as fixed by Edward I.) doubled that of the salmon, and exceeded ten times over that of either the turbot or cod. Even as late as the Reformation a large pike fetched as much as a February lamb, and a very small pickerel more than a fat capon. This ratio of prices recalls the rebuke administered by Cato the Censor to those prodigal Romans who were willing to pay more for a dish of fish than for a whole ox.

In view of the necessity for fish on the fast days, which claimed nearly half the year, the situation of twenty Sees (two Archbishoprics and eighteen Bishoprics) out of twenty-seven on what were then salmon rivers can hardly have been a geographical accident.

The Carp must also have been a scarce fish in Tudor England. Dame Juliana Berners writes, “Ther be fewe in Englande.” Holinshed, à propos of its scarcity in the Thames, states, “It is not long since that kind of fish is brought over into England.” Leonard Mascall, however, in his Book of Fishinge (1596), credits a Mr. Mascall of Plumstead in Essex with the introduction of carp.

A hackneyed couplet, frequently quoted for the purpose of establishing the date at which carp and pike were introduced, but so full of mistakes as to be worthless, runs thus:

“Turkies, Carps, Hops, Pickerell, and Beer, Came into England all in one year.”

Since another version brackets “Reformation, hops, bays, and beer,” the year intended is obviously 1532.

A Pike, or rather the head of a fish so-called, served at supper is said to have caused the end of Theodoric the Goth. In it he imagined he saw the face and head of Symmachus, whom he had just put to death; straightway he became so terror-stricken that within three days he had joined his victim.

Chapter XIV

INFATUATION FOR FISH—EXTRAVAGANT PRICES—COSTLY ENTERTAINMENTS—VITELLIUS—CLEOPATRA —APICIUS—COOKS—SAUCES

Leaving now the Lore of fishing among the Greeks and Romans, let us turn, before examining the nature and number of their Lures, to their estimation of Fish as a food.

We found, it will be remembered, that the Homeric poems make no mention of fish being served at a banquet of the heroes, or even appearing on the tables of people of position. Only poor or starving folk ate fish. Although fish became later an insensate luxury, the Greeks at first apparently abstained from all fish caught in fresh water, except the eels of Lake Copaïs, then as now far-famed.

This abstention from fresh-water fish originated (according to Plutarch) in the belief that every spring and every stream was sacred to some god or nymph, to catch whose property or progeny—the fish in them—would be an act of impiety. This sounds like a laboured explanation of a fact really due to other causes. One of these is brought out clearly in Geikie. When noticing the difference which existed between the Greek and the Roman interest in and feeling for the sea, he, or rather Professor Mackail, attributes it largely to a question of food supply.

Greece proper, from its comparative sterility and poverty of water, was very limited in its capacity to grow crops or rear herds. It compulsorily fell back largely on fish. And principally sea-fish, because of their superior palatability, and because of the inadequacy, owing to scarcity of lakes and perennial rivers, of fresh-water fish.

Whatever be the cause of the early abstention, three points arouse our interest. (A) The passages in Greek writers (previous to Ælian) that describe angling in Greek fresh waters, reach but a scant half-dozen, while those that depict fishing in such waters—sacred lakes, temple stew-ponds, and eeling in Lake Copaïs excepted—can probably be reckoned on both hands.

(B) The Palatine Anthology (at least in the period from 700 b.c. to 500 a.d.) contains no reference (as far as I know) to aught but sea-fishing.

(C) The Greek comedians, Athenæus, the Greek opsophagic authors all almost always reserve their appreciations for food from ἰχθυόεις πόντος.

The statement that the Romans abstained, like the Maeatæ or Celts of North Britain, from fresh-water fish from similar, or any motives, cannot be established. It goes far beyond the evidence at our command, although some aversion may be possibly deduced from Ovid (Fast., VI. 173 f.), and as regards shellfish from Varro. Unlike the Greeks, however, they certainly in a very short period became great consumers of fish from the Tiber, the Po, the Italian Lakes, and afterwards from the Danube, Rhine, etc., but in their estimation, as in that of the Greeks, fish from the sea ever held the higher place.

If cost be a true criterion, this preference for salt-water fish continued as late as the fourth century. In Diocletian’s Edict, 301 a.d., fixing the price of food, etc., throughout the Empire, the maximum allowed for best quality sea-fish was nearly double that of best quality river-fish.

In both Greece and Rome fish became luxuries of the most expensive kind. Seas and rivers were scoured far and wide. No price was thought too extravagant for a mullet, a sturgeon, or a turbot; three mullets of historical celebrity even fetched in Rome the almost incredible sum of £240!

In spite of many laws and decrees made at Athens and at Rome (where the Censor often interfered in cases of extravagance in dress, living, etc.) the prices, owing to the ingenuity of the sellers and the wild competition of the buyers, rose constantly higher. The plaint of Cato the Censor that things could not be well with a community, where “a fish fetched more than a bull,” was uttered in and of a generation, which in comparison with its successors looks frugal, even niggardly.

Pliny records (N. H., IX. 31) “octo milibus nummum unum mullum mercatum fuisse”—one mullet equalled £64, or the price of nine bulls! He also says (N. H., IX. 30) that mullets were plentiful and cheap when under 2 lb., “a weight they rarely exceeded.” Martial (Ep., XIV. 97) confirms this in his “Do not dishonour your gold serving-dish by a small mullet: none less than two pounds is worthy of it.” In proportion as they exceeded this, they grew in value.

One would imagine that Nature had fallen in with the caprice of the Romans, for the fish seems to have grown larger in the decline of the Empire, as if to humour the extravagance of this degenerate people. Horace thought he had pretty well stigmatised the frantic folly of his glutton by a mullet of 3 lbs. (Sat., II. 2, 33); but the next reign furnished one of 4½ lbs., which presented to and sold at auction by the Emperor Tiberius was bought by Octavius for £40 (Seneca, Ep., XCV. 42), while in Juvenal, IV. 15 f., we have one of 6 lbs.

How long the passion for these big mullets lasted it is impossible to tell, but Macrobius, speaking with indignation of one purchased by Asinius Celer in the reign of Claudius for £56 (in Pliny, N. H., IX. 31, I find the price was £64!), declares that in his time (fifth century a.d.) such mad prices had vanished.

Alongside of Pliny’s caustic comment that the price of a victorious Triumph equalled that of a cook, or a fish, can be set the lament of the Greek comedians that for some fish one had to pay ἴσον ἲσῳ, i.e. for weight avoirdupois you handed over a similar weight in money or, as Mayor neatly renders it, “£ for lb.” This gibe at the public mania sprang from bitter personal experience. At Rome, too, we read “of those who sell rare fish for their weight in money.”

Does not Martial’s savage outburst on a glutton who had sold a slave for £10 to procure a dinner, which was not really a good one because nearly all the money was spent on a mullet—

“Non est hic, improbe, non est Piscis: homo est; hominem, Calliodore, comes,”

apply with greater force to “the men-eaters” who purchased mullets for £40 or £60 each?

Juvenal’s scathing invective on Crispinus—who had bought a mullet of 6 lbs. for £48—runs:

“What! you, Crispinus, brought to Rome erewhile, Lapt in the rushes of your native Nile, Buy scales at such a price! You might, I guess, Have bought the fisherman himself for less; Bought, in some countries, manors at this rate, And, in Apulia, an immense estate.”

The folly of the Roman nobles and millionaires did not exhaust itself in buying fish at insane prices, or squandering their fortunes on Vivaria and similar extravagances. They touched a yet lower depth of infamy by taking their cognomen from fish.

Thus Columella contrasts the custom of their ancestors of taking a cognomen from some great victory, e.g. Numantinus or Isauricus, with that of their decadent successors such as Licinius Muræna or Sergius Orata.

The Greek Comic Poets and Satirists castigate with bitter sarcasms and jeers the frenzied, almost cat-like devotion to fish.

Even Diogenes the Cynic came to an untimely end by eating with eager haste a polypus raw. Philoxenus the Poet, when warned by his doctor, after “he had bought a polypus two cubits long, dressed it, and ate it up himself all but the head,” that he had but six hours left to live and to arrange his affairs, bequeathed his poems and the prizes of his poems to the Nine Muses:

“Such is my Will! But since old Charon’s voice Keeps crying out ‘Now cross’: and deadly Fate, Whom none can disobey, calls me away, That I may go below with all my goods, Bring me the fragments of that polypus.”

The moralists of the Empire bewail “the costly follies of the patricians.” Juvenal, Martial, and other Roman Satirists lampoon the gluttony and extravagance connected with opsophagy, or the eating of fish. This limitation of the word is explained by Plutarch (Symp., IV. 4), “fish alone above all the rest of the dainties is called ὄψον, because it is more excellent than all the rest,” and characteristically defended by Athen., VII. 4.

The banquets of the Greeks seem to have outdone even those of Imperial Rome. Both must have weighed heavy, alike on table and on chest.

At these, writes Badham, “although all flesh was there, although quadrupeds mustered strong, and a whole heaven of poultry, still it was the flesh of fishes that ever bore away the palm; they were the soul of the supper, and the number of kinds brought together at one repast was surprisingly great. From the poetic bills of fare preserved by Athenæus I have verified twenty-six species of fish in one Attic supper, and not less than forty at another! On the fish course being brought in, the appearance of the banqueting hall soon became more splendid: hardware made way for solid silver: gold breadbaskets were now handed round: the flower of youth of both sexes entered bearing bits of pumice, drugs against drunkenness, and trays full of chaplets of Violets and Amaranth, while others hung up that mystic flower, the present of the God of Love to the God of Silence, to intimate that henceforth all things said or done at the feast were to be kept, inviolable and sub rosa, under which flower by the rain of myriads of petals all the guests literally soon were.”

The amount of money spent on suppers and entertainments at Rome staggers conception. The figures recorded by even serious historians seem beyond all belief: for instance, the ordinary expense of Lucullus for a supper in the Hall of Apollo is given at 50,000 drachmæ, or £1600.

At one of the suppers to which it was the custom of Nero to invite himself—his meals, Suetonius (Nero, 27) tells us, were prolonged from mid-day to midnight or vice-versa—no less than £32,000 was expended on chaplets, and at another still more on roses alone. But it must be remembered that the Italian rose bloomed only for one day—witness the lines, “Una dies aperit, conficit una dies,” and “Quam longa una dies, ætas tam longa rosarum.” The cost of an entertainment by his brother in honour of the Emperor Vitellius on his entrance to Rome was nearly £80,000!

But of Vitellius himself let Suetonius speak: “He was chiefly addicted to the vices of luxury and cruelty. He always made three meals a day, sometimes four—breakfast, dinner, supper, and a drunken revel afterwards. This load of food he bore well enough, from a custom to which he had inured himself, of frequently vomiting!” No wonder Seneca lashes the gluttons of Rome with “Vomunt ut edant, edunt ut vomant!” For each of these meals he would make different appointments at the houses of his friends for the same day. None ever entertained him at less expense than 400,000 sesterces (or £3200). But the most famous entertainment—given in his honour by his brother—commandeered no less than 2,000 choice fishes, and 7,000 birds.

Yet even this supper he himself outdid at a feast to celebrate the first use of a dish fashioned expressly for him, and from its extraordinary size yclept “The Shield of Minerva.” In this dish costing £100,000 and capable of feeding one hundred and thirty guests “were tossed together the livers of charfish, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingos, and the entrails (or rather the milt) of lampreys, brought in ships of war from the Carpathian Sea, or the Spanish Straits.”

In order “satiare inexplebiles libidines,” etc., Vitellius is believed to have squandered in a few months no less than seven million two hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds (£7,265,000)!

No wonder that Caligula, perhaps the biggest spendthrift of the Cæsars, laid down the maxim that “a man ought to be either an economist, or an Emperor!”

The fabulous sums spent on entertainments by the Greeks and Romans were equalled, even surpassed by the Persians, the Sybarites, the Egyptians, and other nations. But the cost, though prodigious, of Cleopatra’s four-day entertainment to Antony and his captains (in the menu of which fishes from the Nile and the Red Sea figured conspicuously), pales before that of a supper given in honour of Xerxes and his captains by Antipater of Thasos, i.e. 400 (presumably Attic) talents or some £100,000! No wonder Herodotus mournfully adds, “Wherever Xerxes took two meals, dinner and supper, that city was utterly ruined!”

Nor at the feasts, which the invader of Media made “for a great multitude every day,” was it a case of taking up of the fragments that remained but twelve basketsful, because, as Posidonius (in the 14th book of his History) continues, “besides the food that was consumed and the heaps of fragments which were left, every guest carried away with him entire joints of beasts, and birds, and fishes, which had never been carved, all ready dressed, in sufficient quantities to fill a waggon. And after this they were presented with a quantity of sweetmeats,” etc.

The prize, however, for mad lavishness must be adjudged even in a race of such strenuous competitors, to “that most admirable of all monarchs,” Ptolemy Philadelphus. It is “Eclipse first, the rest nowhere,” if the description of the coronation feast given by Callixenus in his History of Alexandria be faithfully rendered by Athenæus.

The imagination of the average reader before reaching the last chapters will have been fatigued and appalled by the picture of overwhelming wealth and magnificence, but as Ptolemy, after a reign of grandiose and continuous expenditure, left at his death £200,000,000 in the treasury, the cost of the whole entertainment must have been as nought compared with his revenue.

M. Gavius Apicius, after squandering half a million sterling on the indulging his passion for creating new dishes and new combinations of food from materials collected in Europe, Asia, and Africa, one day balanced his accounts. Finding that but barely £80,000 remained, and despairing of being able to satisfy the cravings of his hunger from such a miserable pittance he poisoned himself. He is possibly the author of a Treatise (in ten books!) of recipes for new dishes and new sauces for fish; for one of the latter more than twenty-five ingredients were necessary.

The importance attached to cooks and cooking finds a cloud of witnesses in Greek and Roman writers. Athenæus in especial recites their triumphs and their bombastic boasts. So high was the chef’s position and so excellent was the cuisine in Greece that we find the Roman ambassadors, who in the sixth century b.c. were sent to investigate the working of Solon’s Laws, bringing home a special report on Cooking!

To these Attic cordons bleus in succeeding generations not only Italy but Persia were glad to send pupils, and pay exorbitant fees for tuition. The Attic cook gave himself the same airs of superiority over his Roman brother, as the French chef over the Anglican—him “of a hundred sects but only one sauce.” Carême, the chef of Talleyrand (the author of this mot), never abated his claim that to the success of the Congress of Vienna he contributed no less than his master. His salary, however, does not begin to compare with that of Antony’s cook, £3000 a year and “perquisites” galore.

Anaxandrides compares the beauteous work of portrait painters unfavourably with the beauty of a dish of fish. Xenarchus contrasts poets with fishmongers, much to the detriment of the former:

“Poets are nonsense: for they never say A single thing that’s new. But all they do Is to clothe old ideas in language new, Turning the same things o’er again And upside down. But as for fishmongers, They’re an inventive race and yield to none,” etc.

Hegesippus’s summing up, “But the whole race of cooks is conceited and arrogant,” finds confirmation in dozens of instances. Two grandiloquent boasts may serve: “I have known many a guest who has, for my sake, eaten up his whole estate,” and

“I am in truth a God, I bring the dead By mere scent of my food, to life again.”

Self-laudation is no monopoly of Greece, or Sicily, whence came perhaps the most famous of the tribe. In our own Beaumont and Fletcher’s play—The Bloody Brother—a chef vaunts,

“For fish I’ll make you a standing lake of white broth, And pikes shall come ploughing up the plums before them, Arion on a dolphin playing Lachrymæ.”

Lucian, in his witty Dialogue, makes Hermes act as auctioneer at the sale of the different creeds as personified by their founders or by philosophers, and dilate on the exceptional merits of the lot then under the hammer, “because he will teach you how long a gnat will live, and what sort of soul an oyster possesses.” Mr. Lambert states that Ausonius wrote a poem on the oyster! To be more accurate, he wrote two, and lengthy ones to boot!

The Emperor Domitian (Juvenal, IV.) ordered a special sitting of the Senate to deliberate and advise on a matter of such grave State importance as the best method of cooking a turbot.

Greek and Roman writers frequently poke fun at the gourmets who asserted that they could instantly tell from the flavour whence the fish came: from what sea, and what part of that sea, from what river, and even from which side of that river.

Either these ancient connoisseurs were blessed with a more exquisite and developed sense of taste than we moderns, or the whole pose was an intolerable affectation, for “they drenched their subtly-conceived dishes with garum, alec, and other sauces, which were so strong and composite that it would have been hardly possible to distinguish a fresh fish from a putrid cat—except by the bones!”

This assertion is none too strong, if the receipts for these sauces be duly pondered. Mention of garum, which gets its name from being made originally from the salted blood and entrails of a fish called garon or garos by the Greeks, is in classical writers very general: we find it even in Æschylus and Sophocles.

The various sauces known in Latin are too numerous to recite. The two best, although the authorities are far from unanimous, seem to have been made out of the gills and entrails of the Mackerel and Tunny. The components of one recipe justify Robinson. In addition to other odds and ends, its outstanding feature was the gore and entrails of the Tunny, crammed in a vessel hermetically closed, and only drawn off when decomposition was complete! No wonder Plato the Comedian complains ... “drenching them in putrid garum they will suffocate me.”

Alec, like garum, once the name of a fish (possibly the anchovy), came to signify only the sauce made from it, and subsequently from other cheap fish. It differed from garum chiefly from being thicker, and judging from the recipes probably nastier. You took first the dregs and fæculence remaining after the garum liquor had been decanted: to them, add turbid brine, sodden bodies of the fish, etc., and then you have the semi-solid compound, from which alec was derived, not inaptly yclept “Putrilago.”

If, as Badham (p. 69) asserts but not convincingly, garum a double duty served, as a sauce and as a liqueur, the price of the latter was exorbitant, over £3 a gallon. Martial (Ep., XIII. 102) in

“Expirantis adhuc scombri de sanguine primo Accipe fastosum, munera cara, garum,”

calls attention to the expensive nature of his present, for garum made from the scomber was in Pliny’s words “laudatissimum,” while the ἄλμη, or muria, fabricated from the intestines and nothing else of the tunny was cheap and inferior.

Apart from their gastronomic popularity, the medical efficacy of the various gara as pæaned by Pliny must, like the Waverley Pen, have “come as a boon and a blessing to men,” in the wide range of their cures. For ulcers of the mouth and ears, one mirifice prodest. On the application of other gara, “dumb-foundered flee away” burns, blains, dysenteries, bites of dogs, maximeque crocodili, etc. Chapter 44 might indeed easily pass as the leaflet of an advance agent for a patent pill.

With the knowledge and use of the various internal parts of fish, it is strange to find Caviare, made out of the roe of the Sturgeon, first in a recipe of the ninth century. Soft and hard roes then, as now, were generally exported, but as a separate article it became known only in Byzantine times.

With the hungry desire for fish among all classes and with the deep pockets of the rich enabling them to go to any extreme price, is it any wonder that the trade of a fishmonger at Athens and Rome was most lucrative? Several fishmongers acquired large fortunes and high position. The Athenians even raised to the rank of citizens the sons of Chærephilus, for the adequate reason that he sold such excellent pickled fish!

At Athens, and probably at Rome, there existed a Society or Corporation of Fishmongers, akin to our own Fishmongers’ Company, one of the many trade guilds of mediæval times. Its power and political pull often defeated or evaded the stringent regulations, which from time to time fixed the price of fish. In early times fish were sold by the fishermen themselves, as soon as the Fish-Market at Rome had been opened by the ringing of its bell.

Chapter XV. Fish in Sacrifices—Pickled Fish—Vivaria of Oysters, Etc.—Archimedes

The Feast Day, Ludi, of the Tiber fishermen was celebrated on the Campus Martius in June under the management of the Prætor Urbanus with much ceremony. Ovid sings:

“Festa dies illis qui lina madentia ducunt, Quique tegunt parvis æra recurva cibis.”

The custom of offering to the Gods fish (although rarer than that of animals) certainly and widely prevailed. Proof can be piled on proof—pace a passage from Plutarch and pace the contention that the practice is not purely Hellenic—from the pages of both Greek and Roman authors.

Take, for instance, the statement of Agatharchides of Knidos: that the largest eels from Lake Copaïs were sacrificed by the Bœotians, who crowned them like human victims, and after sprinkling them with meal offered prayers over them. Or the story in Posidonius the Stoic of Sarpedon celebrating his victory by “sacrificing to Neptune, who puts armies to flight, enormous quantities of fish.” Theocritus in his fragmentary Berenice, Ælian, and Antigonus on the offering of the Tunny all confirm the custom.

Plutarch (Symp., VIII. 3) would seem indeed the only exception: he straightly asserts, according to Nonnius and others, that “no fish is fitting for offering or sacrifice.”

This is but another instance of Plutarch’s being saddled with responsibility for some expression or opinion uttered by one of his characters, as is clearly shown by the words: “Sylla, commending the discourse, added with regard to the Pythagoreans that they tasted especially the flesh sacrificed to the gods, but that no fish is fit for offering or sacrifices.”

P. Stengel holds that fish, with the curious exception of the Eel, were not sacrificed to the gods in early days, because they neither possessed blood which could be poured forth at the altar, nor could they be offered up alive as could be an enemy, a sacrifice which found special favour in divine eyes.

This statement, unless explained in some manner, contrasts queerly with the passage in Plutarch’s Life of Numa Pompilius, where the king is taught by Picus and Faunus, reinforced subsequently by Jupiter himself, to make a lustration “as a charm against thunder and lightning, composed of Onions, Hair, and Pilchards!” Lest these curious constituents arouse your mirth and infect you with doubt as to their efficacy, hearken unto Plutarch’s further words, “which is used even unto this day!”

From this account (wittily versed by Ovid) we discover Jupiter, resentful at being brought down to earth by the magic of Picus and Faunus, ordering the charm to consist “of Heads”—“Of onions,” replied Numa. “Human”—“Hairs,” said Numa, desirous to fence against the dreadful injunction, and interrupting the god. “Living,” said Jupiter—“Pilchards,” broke in Numa.

Whether fish were but rarely sacrificed or not, Festus at any rate makes clear that at the Ludi on June 7th, and possibly the Volcanalia in September (although at the latter the oblations were mostly animal), Roman fishermen did offer up fish, “quod id genus pisciculorum vivorum datur ei Deo pro animis humanis.”

Offerings of fish may be (as O. Keller suggests) a relic of Totemism resting on the belief that the spirits of men after death pass into fish.

The suggestion gains force when we remember that Anaximander and others taught that men lived once as fishes, but later came on land and threw off their scales; and that the early religious conceptions of Latium were so debased as readily to engender or harbour such a conception. On the other hand, it must be admitted that not a single clear and convincing case of Totemism has hitherto been adduced from the Græco-Italic area.

In these oblations and in Varro’s “Populus pro se in ignem animalia mittit,” an animal in place of a man be it remarked—can be detected a mitigated survival of the widespread custom of human sacrifice in propitiation of a deity. On much the same lines grew up the custom, as civilisation progressed, of burning the weapons of, instead of killing, the captured foe, after a battle. The immolation of prisoners formed a sacrifice not so much of revenge, as one in honour of the slain on the side of the victors: such at least is the conclusion suggested to me by the words of Festus, “humanum sacrificium dicebant, quod mortui causa fiebat.”

As offerings at Rome had dwindled from men down to animals, or small fish, or eventually even salt or pickled fish, or fish mixed with wheat, so among the Israelites the Scape-Goat had become the vicarious victim offered up to Jehovah “for the sins of all the people,” and among the Assyrians the oblation had even shrunk to little fishes, made of ivory or metal.

Fish, in addition to being worshipped as gods or held so sacred that eating them was prohibited, were frequently used by the Priests or by the Augurs for divinatory purposes. In accordance with their swimming or not, and in what direction, with their leaps into the air, how, whence, and whither effected, with their reception, or refusal, or smashing with their tails of particular foods, were framed the oracular deliverances or priestly predictions, as Plutarch and others show.

Thus at the spring of Limyra in Lycia, if the fish seized food thrown to them greedily, the omen was favourable; if they flapped at it with their tails, the reverse. In Lydia (according to Varro) from their movements, when rising to the surface at the sound of a flute, the watching seer deduced and delivered his answer. Divination was not limited to certain holy waters; when in the war between Augustus and Sextus Pompeius a fish darted from the sea and threw itself at the feet of the former, the ready augur found no difficulty in acclaiming him as the future “Ruler of the Waves.”

Ichthyic soothsaying held its ground among the Greeks of the Byzantine empire. One prediction —when a boiled fish shall spring out of the pot, then the last hour of Constantinople will have struck—is of present-day importance. But whether the fish has filled his saltatory rôle, and if so whether the doom of the city has sounded, lie for decision at the moment of writing on the lap of the Big Four in Paris.

The belief that fish could and did foretell events lingered long in England; thus the deaths of Henry II. and of Cromwell were foreshadowed by the fighting of fish among themselves in the vivaria belonging to Henry II. and Cromwell.

As is but natural in hot countries, the trade in salted and pickled fish, the τάριχος of the Greeks, the salsamentum of the Romans, grew to great importance.

This sweet-sour comestible was among both nations early, universal, and pushed to the extreme of madness. In such high esteem was it held that it came to be looked on as an offering meet for the gods. Cato and others testify to the exorbitant prices commanded by Pontic and kindred salsamentum, of which a small flask fetched more than one hundred sheep! Of every kind—and they were as diverse as the countries and towns that furnished them—we find champions ready to go to the stake to prove the superiority of their own pet choice.

Of some towns it was the chief, if not the only, commerce. As modern towns frequently bear for their arms or on their seal some device connected with their history or trade, so ancient seaports which produced salsamentum often stamped their coins with the figures of fish, etc.

Thus Olbia, one of the most important markets for salt or pickled fish, bears on its money an eagle taking a fish, while a copper coin of Carteia depicts an angler, possibly Mercury—a god of fishing. Sinope, and many other places, have left similar numismatic representations. Of most interest from a monetary point of view are the Greek diobols of Tarentum. Those bearing the figure of Taras on his dolphin passed as current token in the fish market.

Famous for the beauty of their execution were some of the Syracusan coins, representing the head of Arethusa surrounded by dolphins. The accounts of the legend vary. Shortly, the lovely maid of the train of Artemis fled the embraces of her lover Alpheus,

“Arethusa arose From her couch of snows In the Acroceraunian Mountains,”

and prevailed on Oceanus to open a way through his waves till reaching seeming safety in the Isle of Ortygia, close to Syracuse, she welled forth in the midst of the salt sea a fountain of sweet pure water. Alpheus, not to be outdone, got himself transformed into a river to emerge also at Ortygia and to mix his stream with the spring of the nymph.

Around her head or amidst her hair on Syracusan coins dart dolphins (some hold eels, which were sacred to Artemis), symbolic of the sea, to show that the sweetness of the fountain was still untainted by the surrounding salt of the ocean. Sweet the water may have been, but Athenæus (II. 16) characterises it as “of invincible hardness.” These coins are the work of those great masters, Cimon, Euaenetus, and an unknown third, the ‘New Artist’ of Sir Arthur Evans. On an electrum coin of Syracuse an octopus is well delineated, while the obverse shows a veiled female head in profile.

The octopus, judging by the fact that at Mycenæ in one tomb alone Dr. Schliemann excavated fifty-three golden models of it, and by the many gold ornaments of which the fish forms the chief or only figure, was undoubtedly a very frequent and favourite subject for the craftsmen of the ‘Minoan’ age, although it did not bulk so big in early Mediterranean religion as L. Siret would make out.

The taxes or duties derived from fish or fishing furnished the peculiar of the Temples at Delos, Ephesus, and elsewhere: at Byzantium and some other places they went to the city. After the Roman conquests these imposts were paid not to the cities (Cyzicus and other places were the exceptions), but to the State, and were gathered by the intermediary “publicans.”

With stories before him, such as those of the suppers recorded by the dozen in Athenæus, and given to and by the Emperor Vitellius, for which the fish were brought in ships of war from the Carpathian Sea and the Straits of Spain, it is no wonder that a modern author is driven to conclude that the ancients thought more of the edible than the sporting qualities of the fish. They ransacked the habitable globe for side-dishes, but did not trouble themselves about the precepts of Mrs. Glasse.

Apart from this ransacking of the globe, the Romans developed, as the demand for fish by rich and poor alike grew ever greater, the Egyptian and Assyrian vivarium to a marvellous extent.

Built at first (as Columella avers) simply for the purpose of supplying fresh fish for the table, they found such favour that no self-respecting Roman could afford to be without his vivarium. With the rich they were the occasion of most costly ostentation and extravagant expenditure.

Whether Sergius Aurata (or Orata) took or not his cognomen from the fish Aurata, all writers identify him as the first to build a vivarium for oysters. From their sale, from the income derived from the vapour baths (pensiles balineas), of which he was also the pioneer, and from the villas erected on his property, close to Baiæ, the baths, and the oysters, he amassed an enormous fortune. He posed as the Pontiff of the Palate; his was the final decision, from which lay no appeal, as to which sea or which part of what river produced the best of the various fishes.

From the not unnatural bias of owner and founder he adjudged the Lucrine oysters finest of all. Pliny’s words (IX. 79) that, when Orata “ennobled” the Lucrine, British oysters had not yet reached Rome convey a gratifying compliment to our insular pride, somewhat dashed by Pliny plumping for the Circeian.

Oysters throve with travelling and a change to new waters. The Brundisian oyster when planted in Lake Lucrinus not only kept its own flavour, but took on that of its new home.

Apicius, not our gourmet M. Gabius, but an initialless successor, would have proved an admirable Quartermaster-General. When “Trajan was in Parthia at a distance of many days’ journey from the sea, he sent him oysters, which he kept fresh by a clever contrivance of his own invention; real oysters not like the sham anchovies which the cook of Nicomedes, king of the Bithynians, made for him,” when far inland and yearning for oysters.

In a comedy by Euphron, a chef sings his teacher’s marvellous skill:—

“I am the pupil of Soterides Who when his king was distant from the sea Full twelve days’ journey and in winter’s depth Fed him with rich anchovies to his wish And made the guests to marvel. B.How was that? A. He took a female turnip, shred it fine Into the figure of the delicate fish.”

No wonder the king spake to his admiring guests thus:—

“A cook is quite as useful as a poet, And quite as wise, as these anchovies show it.”

To Fulvius Herpinus or Lippinus belongs the credit of being the first—just before the Civil War—to fatten the Cochlea, or sea-snail, in a vivarium. By careful collecting from Africa and Illyrica and skilful feeding, his cockles became renowned for size and number.

In the period between the taking of Carthage and the reign of Vespasian, the taste in fish became a perfect passion; for its gratification Proconsuls enriched, like our Clives from India, beyond the dreams of avarice by the spoils of Asia and Africa, incurred the most lavish expense. Thus Licinius Muræna, Quintus Hortensius, Lucius Philippus constructed immense basins, which they filled with rare species. Lucullus, like the Persian king at Athos, but with unlike motive, caused even a mountain to be pierced to introduce sea-water into his fish-ponds, and for the achievement was dubbed by Pompey, “Togatus Xerxes.”

But in many cases the huge outlay was repaid with interest. Varro avers that Hirrius (who first before all others designed and carried out the vivarium for Murænæ) received twelve million sesterces in rent from his properties, and employed the entire sum in the care of his fishes! At the death of Lucullus the fish in his stew-ponds realised over £32,000.

The rich Patricians were not satisfied with a single pond; their fish preserves were divided into compartments where they kept different kinds. In case any reader, like the Third Fisherman in Shakespeare’s Pericles,

“Marvel how the fishes live in the sea,”

I hasten to endorse the

First Fisherman: “Why as men do on land; the great ones eat up the little ones,”

and to add that the fish confined in these separate ponds found in the waters their business and livelihood from the testaceæ purposely planted.

This passion for piscinæ gradually impoverished the Mediterranean and other seas. Fish in the Tyrrhenian Sea had no time to come to maturity, because as Columella complains, “Maria ipsa Neptunumque clauserunt!” While Varro and Columella give careful directions as to the making and keeping of practical fish stews, they keep silence as to methods of capturing the inhabitants.

I have come across no notice of vivaria among the Greeks: their kinsman in Sicily erected at least one magnificent example. Diodorus Siculus (XI. 2) tells us that the Agrigentines (probably by the labour of the Carthaginian prisoners) “sunk a fishpond, with great costs and expenses, seven furlongs in compass, and twenty cubits in depth: in this water, brought both from fountains and rivers, fish were planted which soon supplied them with an ample stock both for food and pleasure.”

To the great Archimedes is due the unique achievement of a vivarium on board ship. It is impossible here to set forth all the glories of this wonderful vessel, intended for the corn traffic between Egypt and Sicily, and propelled by means of huge sweeps—every sweep worked by a team of twenty men (εἰκοσόρος).

Her Gymnasium, her three Baths, her Flower Garden, her trellised Vineyard, her Temple to Venus, her Library with its floor of mosaics exhibiting a series of subjects taken from the Iliad, and, lastly, in the bow by the side of the huge reservoir of 21,000 gallons, her water-tight well, made of planks lined with lead, and filled with sea-water, in which a great number of fish were always kept—if all these wonders of a ship, launched over 2200 years ago, do not cause us to think a little, and to abate our boasts over our Imperators and Olympics, then to the cocksure conceit of the twentieth century naught is of avail, not even the account given by Moschion.

Disregarding the practical directions of Varro (whom Schneider stamps, with regard to fish, etc., as a mere plagiarist of Greek authors), of Columella, and in a lesser degree of Pliny how to construct and conduct paying stew-ponds, and turning a deaf ear to Varro’s warning that “to build, stock, and keep them up was most costly,” the Romans thought no money, no time, too much to expend on vivaria. Possession and cultivation of fish in vivaria, which were sometimes made in the dining-room, became the one delight of these “Tritones Piscinarum,” as Cicero dubs two of his friends.

The primary cause for their existence, a ready supply of fresh fish in a hot climate, was forgotten. Other owners resembled Hortensius, who (according to Varro) “not only was never entertained by his fish at table, but was scarcely ever easy, unless engaged in entertaining or fattening them.” The death of “his friend,” the Muræna, between whom and himself such a close attachment existed, almost broke his heart.

Macrobius testifies that Crassus, “first among all the greatest men of Rome, mourned a muræna” (probably it of the earrings and necklace of precious stones) “found dead in his vivarium even as a daughter.” It was on the occasion of Domitius twitting him with “Did you not weep when your fish died?” that Crassus got back with “Did you not bury three wives and never weep at all?”

Of Hortensius Varro continues: “His mullet give him infinitely more concern than my mules and asses do; for while I, with one lad, support all my thrifty stud on a little barley, etc., the fish-servants of Hortensius are not to be counted. He has fishermen in fine weather toiling to procure them food; when the weather is too boisterous for fishing, then a whole troop of butchers and dealers in provisions send in their estimates for keeping his alumni fat. Hortensius so looks after his mullet as to forget his men; a sick slave has less chance of getting a draught of cold water in a fever than these favoured fish of being kept cool in their stews in Midsummer.”

The fish often answered to their names when called by their master, or their keeper. The latter, nomenclator, made a very handsome income from the admiring crowds, who flocked to see the fish perform their exercises with wagging tails or heads bedecked with rich jewels.

Antonia, to whom the lands and villa of Hortensius descended, even stripped herself of her earrings to put them on a muræna. This lady, apart from this anecdote, was no ordinary person. We find her passing from the positive of celebrated renown for her beauty, her virtue, her chastity (no mean feat in that day!), through the comparative of being the mother of Germanicus Cæsar and Claudius, and the grandmother of Caligula (which last, in slang parlance, “wanted a bit of doing!”), unto the superlative of deathless fame in Pliny’s “Nunquam exspuisse” (never spat!).

The savage use to which Vedius Pollio put his vivaria can be learnt from the pages of Pliny and Seneca. A slave, for breaking a crystal decanter at a banquet given to Augustus, was ordered to be thrown instantly into a piscina, there to be eaten alive by the nibbling voracious Murænæ. Escaping from his guards he threw himself at the Emperor’s feet, “beseeching nothing else except that he should die otherwise than as food for fish”. Cæsar moved “novitate crudelitatis” (he little knew that this was his host’s cheery custom) commanded the crystals of Pollio to be smashed on the spot, the slave to be freed, and all the fishponds to be filled up.

As conducive to la joie de vivre of the other slaves, the command was commendable, for the bite of the Muræna’s serrated teeth, according to Nicander’s Theriaca—that “nullius fidei farrago”—owing to its mating with the viper, dealt poisonous death and destruction to the fishermen driven by its pursuit “headlong from their boats,” and was only curable by a mixture made of ashes from its own burnt head! So dreaded was this fish—curious is it not, to read, although from its savage nature no other could inhabit the same vivarium, the many stories of its tameness and docility?—that one of the direst of imprecations ran that in the under-world your enemy’s lungs should be mangled by Murænæ!

In times preceding these infatuated extravagant ages, the purpose for which vivaria were first created was steadfastly kept in mind and wonderfully advanced by practical pisciculturists. From being a mere pond for keeping fish alive till needed for the table, vivaria developed in the course of time into spawning grounds.

The pisciculturists went even farther. They turned lakes and rivers into natural vivaria by depositing in them not only adult fish, but the spawn of all such species as are in the habit, although born at sea, of pushing some distance up estuaries and streams. Columella instances specially the rivers Velinus, Sabatinus, Ciminus, and Volsinius as examples of the great success of this experiment in fish propagation.

Comacchio on the Adriatic, from its extraordinary advantages of position and of fish-food, can hardly have escaped being utilised for similar purposes by the Romans. For many centuries, at any rate, its valli or breeding grounds have been renowned. Ariosto sings its speciality:

“La Città che in mezzo alle piscose Paludi del Pô, téme ambe le foci.”

Tasso hands it down as the place where the fish—

“finds itself within a prison swamp Nor can escape, for that seraglio Is aye to entrance wide, to exit barred.”

At the present day over twelve hundred tons of fish, eight hundred of them eels, are annually captured at Comacchio.

Since the above was printed, new and interesting evidence of the importance of fish, not only as an economic, but also as a hygienic, factor in the nation’s prosperity has been furnished by Prof. J. A. Thomson in his lecture before the Royal Institution, January 6, 1921.

He traced a connection between the decline of Greece and a shortage of little fishes. There was strong reason to believe that one of the causes for the decay of “the glory that was Greece” was that malaria was brought into the State.

The little creature, which caused malaria, lived on the mosquito by whom it was carried. The mosquito spent its larval life in the fresh waters. Little fish were the enemy of the mosquito—particularly the fish known as “millions”—which consumed the pest at a great rate.

The professor suggested, therefore, that what had happened in Greece was that there had not been enough little fish to keep the mosquitos in check. Because of this, malaria had been brought into the country, and that plague helped, if it did not cause, the destruction of the wonderful civilisation of Greece.

Chapter XVI. Legal Regulations of Rome as Regards Fishing

Previous instances of taking fish belonging to another have so far only been attended by divine or superhuman punishment. I venture now a few sentences on what were the Roman (I have discovered no Greek) legal regulations—for there does not appear to have existed at Rome any special law on Fishing—and how the rights of fisheries and fishers were protected.

From the evidence available it is clear—

(1) That among Res Nullius, or things belonging to no one, were fish and wild animals in a state of nature. The Digest, 41. 1. 1, lays down that “omnia animalia, quæ terra, mari, cælo capiuntur, id est feræ bestiæ, volucres, et pisces, capientum fiunt.”

(2) That they became the property of the person who first “reduces them into possession,” i.e. captures them.

(3) That the sea and public rivers were not capable of individual ownership.

(4) That no citizen could be prevented from fishing in the sea and such rivers by any person. To this rule there are several exceptions; for instance, (a) a cove of the sea bordering on a man’s land—perhaps if enclosed with stakes, etc.—could be exclusively occupied for fishing (Digest, 47. 10, ss. 13 and 14); (b) a right of fishing in a recess or backwater of a public river could be acquired by prescription, and would then be protected by a possessory Interdict against any one who tried to fish this water (Ibid., 44. 3. 7).

It is hard to define precisely what constituted a public river and what a private river. Under the term “public” came all rivers of any size, not merely those that were tidal. Whether a river was public depended not only on its size, but also on the “opinion of those dwelling around it.” No river, periodically dry in summer, could be accounted public (Digest, 43. 12, ss. 1-4).

All streams not public, many lakes, and all piscinæ, etc., were private property, from which the owner could prevent any one taking fish. The legal remedy for such exclusion, based on the ground of trespass, was Interdict—a procedure very similar to that of Scotland, whose law is mainly modelled on that of Rome.

The further legal question—were the fish in such piscinæ res nullius or were they such individual property as to make any one taking them without permission liable for theft—was answered by the jurist Nerva in Digest, 41. 2. 3, s. 14, who held that they were individual property—“pisces quos in piscinas coiecerimus a nobis possideri.”

Thus the owner of vivaria could proceed against a poacher by (1) an interdict for trespass, and (2) a prosecution for theft, in case of a fish being caught with the intention of taking it away. On the other hand, a person prevented from fishing or navigating by another could only proceed by an action of Injuria, personal affront (Digest, 43. 8. 17, ss. 8 and 9; 41. 1. 30; 43. 14, s. 7).

Although I purposely limit myself to a very slight sketch of Roman regulations, the case reported by Pliny (N. H., IX. 85) seems, alike from legal and piscatorial interest, worthy of reproduction and examination.

As the Anthias is one of the shyest of fishes, special precautions and plenty of patience were necessary for a good catch. Thus fishermen wore clothes of the same colour as their boats. They sailed without fishing over the same stretch of sea. They merely went on “baiting the swim” on each tack, day after day, till some spirit, bolder than the rest, could be induced to take the bait. Still more days elapse before the fish, which has by this time been well identified, is followed by any of his mates. Eventually example proves so infectious that shoals innumerable, of which the Elder Brethren even eat from the fisherman’s hands, surround the boat.

Now is the accepted hour for “the fisherman to throw out a little beyond his finger tips a hook concealed in bait,” and (to prevent alarm) smuggle the fish out gently, one by one, by a very slight jerk. His mate receives the fish on pieces of cloth, so that no floundering about or other noise may scare their comrades. On no account must “the betrayer of the others” be captured, lest instantly the shoal take to flight and be no more seen.

But “there is a story that a fisherman, having quarrelled with his mate, threw out a hook to one of the leading fishes, which he easily spotted and with malicious intent captured. The fish was, however, recognised in the market by his mate, against whom he had conceived this malice: accordingly an action for damages (damni formulam editam) was brought, which the defendant, as Mucianus adds, was condemned to pay.”

Now, as shown above, (1) a fish is “res nullius,” (2) a fish becomes the property of him who first “reduces it into possession,” (3) the sea, with some exceptions which do not apply here, is not capable of individual ownership.

If “the betrayer of his kind” was till malicious capture admittedly and of set purpose left free in the sea, how could it have been reduced into possession, how could any title in it have been acquired, and, lastly—granted some kind of possession—by what actio or legal formula could such possession have been enforced?

These points were to me a stumbling-block, till Professor Courtney Kenny of Cambridge kindly came to my aid. As the extension here of Mansuefactio is apparently unique, and would possibly have been repudiated by jurists after Mucian’s time, we seem to be faced by a novel point, which on account of its intricacy and interest will appeal to people learned in the Roman Law.

The Professor’s letter runs: “Ownership in the Anthias must have been created by that form of Occupatio of a res nullius, which consists, not by the physical detention by angling, or by a piscina, but in mere mansuefactio. This form is familiar for birds (Dig., 41. 2. 3. 15: and for English Law, Bracton, 2. 1. 4): but for fishes I know of no other passage than the one cited by you. Perhaps jurists, not so early as Mucian, would have declined to admit that there had been a true occupatio of this Anthias. The partner, who sold this fish, which was partnership property, would be called on to account for it, and pay over, in damages, his partner’s share of the price by the contractual action Pro Socio. He might, in addition, be made to pay a penalty for his wrong-doing in the delictual Actio Furti. For, though there was a legal primâ-facie presumption (Dig., 17. 2. 51) in favour of the honesty of any partner in the sales of partnership-property, we are here expressly told that he acted ‘maleficii voluntate,’ i.e. his contrectatio of the fish was ‘fraudulosa,’ and therefore a Furtum. The defrauded partner might well have brought both actions at once (Dig., 17. 2. 45), but Pliny speaks only of his having brought the last named one.”

Chapter XVII

TACKLE—CURIOUS METHODS OF FISHING FOR THE SARGUS BY DRESSING IN A SHE-GOAT’S SKIN—FOR THE SKATE BY DANCING AND MUSIC—FOR THE SILURUS BY A YOKE OF OXEN—FOR THE EEL WITH THE GUTS OF A SHEEP. WHAT WAS THE SILURUS? WILD THEORIES AS TO THE PROPAGATION OF EELS

“Unseen, Eurotas, southward steal, Unknown, Alpheus, westward glide, You never heard the ringing Reel, The music of the waterside.” (A. Lang.)

The tackle, implements, and some curious modes of fishing apparently peculiar to, or handed down to us only from, Greek and Roman sources call for consideration and comment.

Nets, we have seen, were of all sorts and kinds in shape, make, and size. Their number and nature as disclosed by Julius Pollux, Plutarch, and Ælian indicate that the art of netting was well nigh perfected. Oppian, after enumerating many varieties and telling how the enormous

“Nets, like a city, to the floods descend And bulwarks, gates, and noble streets extend,”

excuses himself from further amplification:

“A thousand names a fisher might rehearse Of nets, intractable in smoother verse.”

Confirmation comes from Alciphron’s statement that scarce a fathom of the harbour of Ephesus but held a Net: on one occasion the sole haul, after much moiling and toiling, was the putrid carcase of a camel!

What and whence the Rod? It was certainly short: only from 6 to 8 feet (Ælian, XV. 1)—a length which is in the main confirmed, if assuming the height of some of the fishermen represented on vases, etc., in the Greek and Roman rooms of the British Museum to be as high as six feet, you then measure the rod. On the other hand, the sitting youth in the Agathemeros relief (Brit. Mus. Cat. Sculpture, I. 317, No. 648) measures 24 cm., the Rod 8 cm., the line 15 cm.

As we do not possess any relic of the Homeric rod, the length of the only one mentioned in either the Iliad or the Odyssey must be a matter of conjecture, especially as this is styled περιμήκης, or “very long” one.

The ordinary Rods were made of cane, hence Harundo and Calamus, which was imported usually from Abaris in Lower Egypt, or of some light elastic wood. For large and powerful fish, where something stronger was required, Ælian tells us that Tuncus Marinus and Ferula were preferred.

If the Rod were tapered, it was tapered probably by Nature not by art, at least so the Agathemeros relief, all the pictures of Venus and Cupid angling, and of many Amorini from Herculaneum would suggest. The question whether the Rods were jointed has been discussed in my chapter on the crescens harundo of Martial.

The line, ὁρμιά, or Linea, made from the strong bristly hairs of animals (seta) but most generally of horse-hair, of flax, of sparton out of the genista, perhaps of byssus, but never of gut, was very finely twisted, as the epithet εὐπλόκαμος shows. It was usually as long as the rod itself, although in the Agathemeros relief we find it nearly double the length. The colours of the line were grey, black, brown—sometimes red or purple. It was made tight to the top of the Rod and not let down to the butt, or running.

Plutarch prescribes that the hairs next to the hook should for deception’s sake be taken from a white horse, and adds advice, as pertinent now as then, that there “should not be too many knots in the line!”

To the line was fastened the hook (hamus) which was of one or two sharp barbs. From Herculaneum, Pompeii, and elsewhere have been collected hooks which vary extremely in form, size, and method of adjustment. Although sometimes of bone, they are mostly manufactured from iron or bronze. Cf. Oppian, III. 285: χαλκοῦ μὲν σκληροῑο τετυγμένον ἠὲ σιδήρου.

It strikes us moderns as strange to have the epithet hard applied to bronze and not to iron, till we are informed that the ancient bronze was made of tin and copper, not zinc and copper, as is our softer alloy, and was so hard that, Pliny tells us, it could be worked to represent the finest hair of a woman’s head.

The Pompeian hooks were almost exclusively adapted for sea fishing, and are thus generally large in size, long in shank, and flattened at the top to facilitate attachment to the line.

Plutarch’s statement that some hooks were straight, as distinct from the usual recurved sort, may possibly be indicative of a survival of the palæolithic gorge. Some of the Roman hooks are double-barbed, some are fixed back to back like eel-hooks, and fastened to wire to prevent erosion by the teeth. In the pursuit of large fish such as the Amia, hooks of a serpentine curve are recommended, “as these great fish manage to get loose from straight ones!”

To the hook was fastened the bait (esca), usually worms, flies, and other insects. For large fish the bait was often cooked, because the scent was believed to offer an additional attraction. By a clever contrivance of small pieces of lead equally balanced and carefully attached the lure was made to have the appearance of natural movement.

The Reel on a fishing Rod was certainly unknown to Ancient Nations. Wilkinson figures something resembling a Reel being employed when spearing hippopotami.

The Amia (mentioned by Pliny, IX. 19, alone of all the Latin writers) is according to Oppian a little smaller than the tunny, which reaches large proportions. Later, he recounts how the Amia furnishes sad labour and trouble to the fishermen from his habit, the moment he feels the hook, of instantly rising, of swallowing more line, and then of biting through the middle, “or even the topmost hairs of it.”

But successful cunning to avoid capture was no monopoly of the Amia. Ovid, Oppian, Pliny, Plutarch, Ælian, recount numerous devices which certain fish employ to nullify net or hook. I subjoin three of the chief tricks used to defeat the hamus.

The Mugil, whose greed is only saved by its guile, despite his foreknowledge of danger has madly grabbed the bait, but keeps thrashing it with his tail, till at last he shakes it free of the hook. “At mugil cauda pendentem everberat escam Excussamque legit.”

The Anthias on the first prick of the hook turns over on to his back and quickly severs the line with his dorsal fin, or spike, “of the shape and keenness of a knife.”

The Scolopendra, according to Aristotle, “after swallowing the hook, turns itself inside out until it ejects it, and then it again turns itself outside in,” and (in Pliny’s words) vomits up everything inside him till he has ejected the hook, and “deinde resorbet!”

Lines with floating corks and lead attached close to the hooks, partly to facilitate the throwing of the line, and partly, combined with a sliding cork, to regulate the position of the bait, were in regular use. Ground fishing, when the lure is leaded and thrown with or without rod, was well known and widely exercised.

Pastes and scents were also employed, either like myrrh dissolved in wine to intoxicate (see the accompanying drawing, which is, I believe, unique), or, like the cyclamen, or sowbread, to poison the fish. From Oppian’s description of the workings of the poison, IV. 658 ff., we take the lines:

“Soon as the deadly Cyclamen invades The ill-starred fishes in their deep-sunk glades, ... the slowly working bane Creeps o’er each sense and poisons every vein, Then pours concentred mischief on the brain, Some drugged, like men o’ercome with recent wine, Reel to and fro, and stagger thro’ the brine; Some in quick circlets whirl: some ’gainst the rocks Dash, and are stunned by repercussive shocks; Some with quenched orbs, or filmy eyeballs thick, Rush on the nets and in the meshes stick, In coma steeped their fins more feebly ply, Some in titanic spasms gasp and die. Soon as the plashings cease and stillness reigns, The jocund crew collect, and count their gains.”

In the simile—inevitable in Oppian—which ends the passage our author may indicate, though he does not name, the Germanic tribes (for over Rome in his day as over Europe in ours hung the barbarian menace) when he condemned the abhorred habit practised by the enemy of poisoning the springs and wells:

... “the brave defendants sink In thirsty pangs, or perish if they drink.”

In the number of methods, in the variety of devices, the fishermen of Oppian and Ælian are not behind their modern successors; it is indeed the reverse of

“John P. Robinson he Guessed they did not know everything down in Judee.”

We moderns are, in fact, merely the heirs to a piscatorial estate, which by scientific improvement or intensive culture we have rendered more serviceable and better adapted to the requirements of fish more harried, and consequently more highly educated.

The old devices, the old recipes were never entirely lost. They continued to be handed down through the Middle Ages, and may be found in most of the collections of household recipes, such as those of Baptista Porta, Conrad Heresbach, and others. They naturally in the course of some thousand years got rather split up, or fell into abeyance; it was not, in fact, till the seventeenth century that fairly full collections of them began to reappear.

But except just to mention “tickling,” an ancient device in both Oppian and Ælian, we have room here only for four methods, all very quaint, either unknown or uncommon among twentieth-century fishers.

The first, that by which the goat-herd annexes the Sargus, according to Oppian.

In hot weather it was, and still is, in Sicily the wont of the goat-herds to drive their flocks to some cool shallow of the sea. “Once upon a time” one of them noticed that the sargi came round the goats in vast shoals. The reason for this—whether grasped in a moment by one great brain, or evolved by two or three generations of speculating herdsmen—was discovered to be the attraction of the male sargus by the smell of the female goat.

So the reasoning goat-herd slays his nanny, puts himself inside her skin, and to perfect, I presume, the resemblance of the deception, “adjusts on his brows the horns!” Then he gently glides into the shallow, “scatters the food full shower” among the sargi hot on their amorous mission and, well! for the number that were slain by “The Sturdy Rod his latent Hand extends” I refer you to the fourth book of the Halieutica!

Ichthyologists declare that the male sargus is very uxorious, and has at least one hundred wives always in close-herded attendance on him. As the words “unhappy lovers” indicate that the sargi were present not a few, these multiplied by one hundred must have yielded quite a decent creel.

The second method owes its success to the love for music and for watching the dance, which Aristotle and Ælian assert to be characteristic of several fishes, but especially of the skate. The recipe of this method, far pleasanter, certainly less odoriferous than that of the last, demands 1 Boat, 1 Violin, 1 big Net, 2 Men, one of whom fiddles, while the other dances as he unwinds the net. Attracted to the spot, and, like Wagner-devotees, so entirely absorbed by the melody as to be unconscious of all else, the skates fall easy and numerous victims to the slowly drawn net.

This method seems “the limit.” It certainly trenched on even Badham’s credulity. He states that he would not have cited this statement of Ælian’s, unless it had been “singularly countenanced and confirmed by no less a person than the great French ichthyologist, Rondolet,” whose mere name in this musical context must presumably carry conviction, for (as is not unusual with Badham) no reference is given.

The third method, employed by the Mysians for capturing the Silurus in big rivers like the Danube and the Volga, is set forth by Ælian (XIV. 25) in words which describe with such charming naïveté the perfection of the Silurian palate, eye, and possibly nose, enabling it to discriminate instantly between “the lungs of a wild” and other “bull,” that we may venture upon quoting the whole passage:

“An Istrian fisherman drives a pair of oxen near the river-bank, not, however, for the purpose of ploughing.... If a pair of horses are at hand, the fisherman makes use of horses; and with the yoke on his shoulders, down he goes and takes his station at a spot which he thinks will make a convenient seat for himself, and be a good place for sport. He fastens one end of the fishing-rope, which is stout and capable of standing a good tug, to the middle of the yoke, and supplies the oxen, or the horses, as the case may be, with sufficient food, and the animals take their fill.

“To the other end of the rope he fastens a strong and terribly sharp hook, baited with the lungs of a wild bull; this he throws into the water as a lure—a very sweet lure—to the Istrian silurus, having previously fastened a piece of lead of sufficient size to the rope above the place where the hook is bound on, to serve as a support for the pull.

“When the fish perceives the bait of bull’s-flesh, he immediately rushes at the prey, and, meeting with that he so dearly loves, opens wide his great jaws and greedily swallows the dreadful bait; then the glutton, at first turning himself round with pleasure, soon finds that he has been pierced unawares with the aforesaid hook, and being eager to escape from the calamity shakes the rope with the greatest violence.

“The fisherman observes this, and is filled with delight; he jumps from his seat, and, now in the character of a fisherman, now in that of a ploughman, like an actor who changes his mask in a play, he urges on his oxen or horses, and a mighty contest takes place between the monster and the yoked animals; for the creature, foster-child of the Ister, draws downward with all his might, while the yoked animals pull the rope in an opposite direction. The fish can make no headway. Beaten by the united efforts of the team, he gives in, and is hauled on to the bank.”

Siluri, according to common report, have been caught weighing over 400 lbs. and of more than twelve feet in length.

There is good ground for us moderns patting ourselves on the back, when we realise that owing to the many improvements effected in our tackle, and not least in the Rod, an angler off Catalina has often landed a heavier fish than a yoke of oxen on the banks of the Ister, e.g. Mr. A. N. Howard (in 1916) caught the record Black Sea Bass in Californian waters, weighing 493 lbs.

Even this big fellow is quite a dwarf beside the Tuna of 710 lbs. taken in Canadian waters by Mr. Laurence Mitchell, which still holds, I believe, the record of the world as the very largest fish ever taken on a rod.

I myself have seen a sword fish of over 300 lbs. killed on a rod off Santa Catalina. When in 1909 out for Tarpon in Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, I had the good luck to secure after a fight of two and a half hours, and after being towed almost down to Port Royal and back, a distance of some five miles, a shark weighing 116 lbs., with a rod only 8 foot long, with a light salmon line, with a No. 4 hook, and with a bit of piano wire, faute de mieux, attached to prevent erosion.

From the time of the earliest authors the identification of the Silurus has been a vexed question.

Aristotle writing of the Glanis, a large fresh-water fish (his only account of actual fishing, it may be remembered, is a fight with a Glanis), attributes to it characteristics and habits, which Pliny totidem sententiis, if not verbis, transfers to the Silurus, although he thrice mentions the Glanis. Ælian, in addition to XIV. 25, declares in XII. 14, that the Glanis a species of, and very like, the Silurus, while Athenæus treats them as separate fish.

As late as the time of Scaliger, the problem gave rise to discussion which led to no elucidation of what fish exactly corresponds to the classical Silurus. Perhaps the sentence of Albertus Magnus, “a river fish which was called by the Greeks Glanis, but by us Silurus,” seemed, although only a conjectural compromise, as near as we could get to the identity.

Agassiz, however, reluctant to accept Cuvier’s identification of the Glanis with the Silurus glanis, came to the conclusion (after examining six specimens of a Siluroid new to Ichthyologists, which he obtained from the Acheloüs in Western Greece) that from agreement in the form of the anal fin, the position of the gall bladder, the connected spawn, etc., they were the same as Aristotle’s Glanis. To this Siluroid Agassiz gave the name Glanis aristotelis: it is, perhaps, better known as Parasilurus aristotelis.

If the Silurus be the Scheid of Germany, his strength, habits, and ferocity, as set forth in our authors are indeed very credible. From Aristotle we learn that this “river fish” is easy to hook (as we should suspect from its rapacity, which has been tersely summarised in “pisces pisci præda at huic omnes”), but from its huge powers and hard teeth very hard to hold.

The passage in Pliny, IX. 75, which he extracts from Aristotle —“Silurus mas solus omnium edita custodit ova, sæpe et quinquagenis diebus, ne absumantur ab aliis”—has by a wrong rendering accorded to the male Silurus the proud distinction of being the only male fish that guards its eggs. This is absurd, for other instances, e.g. Chromis simonis, exist.

Where fish, however, pay any regard whatever to their ova, it is usually, but not always, on the father that the duty falls. “Omnium” in Pliny is to be read not with “solus” but with “edita ova.” This reading advances the quite different claim that the Silurus is the only male that includes in its watch and ward not merely its own but promiscuously also the eggs of other fish. Perhaps the same start of surprise awaits him, on the pentecostal and last day of his vigil, as that of the hen when she first beholds a mixed brood of chickens and ducklings emerging from under her breast.

Pliny reveals some fabulous uses of the Silurus. In XXXII. 28, fresh caught Siluri are an excellent tonic for the voice. In 46, by the smoke and scent of a burnt Silurus, especially one hailing from Africa (!), the pangs of childbirth are said to be greatly eased. In 40, for curing “ignes sacros” or the malady of St. Anthony’s fire, the application of the bellies of living frogs, or of ashes from a Silurus, were two of the nostrums recommended.

The fourth and last method, for the capture of Eels, given by Ælian, although almost certainly cribbed from Oppian, but with a local habitation and a name carefully thrown in to suggest originality, reads much as follows:

The eeler from a high bank of the “river Eretaenus, where the eels are the largest and by far the fattest of all eels,” lets down at a turn of the stream some cubits’ length of the intestines of a sheep. An eel, seizing a bit of it at the nether end, tries to drag the whole away, on which the fisher applies the other end (which is fixed to a long tubular reed serving the place of a fishing rod) to his mouth, and blows into the sheep’s gut. This presently swells; the fish receiving the air in his mouth swells too, and unable to extricate his teeth is lugged out, adhering to the inflated intestines.

“Gin these be joys of artful eeling, oh! gie me Essex Flats,” with their “sniggling for eels with a needle,” or “banding“ for fish with whitethorn hooks!

In addition to this pneumatic method of Ælian others were employed for taking eels. Stirring up the mud, in which they were wont to lurk was a common device; hence the proverb ἐγχέλεις θηρᾶσθαι, to fish in muddy waters. Thus Aristophanes makes the sausage seller, whom the Whigs of Athens had hired to outbawl the demagogue Cleon, shout, “Yes, it is with you as with the eel-catchers; when the lake is still, they do not take anything, but if they stir up the mud, they do; so it is with you, when you disturb the State.”

Even at the risk of being likened to Mr. Bouncer of Oxford fame, who in every answer of his Divinity paper dragged in his sole and cuff-attached bit of Old Testament knowledge with “and here it may not seem inappropriate to subjoin a list of the Kings of Israel and Judah,” I venture some comments on the Eel.

The frequent allusions in our authors to the Eel, (A) as a sacred fish, (B) as the delight of the epicure, and (C) as a propagator of its species in a variety of surprisingly erroneous ways, must be my excuse.

(A) It was held as a god, or at least as a sacred creature, by the Egyptians, as sacred to Artemis in the spring of Arethusa, and semi-sacred by the Bœotians.

Antiphanes ridicules the Egyptians for the sacred honour paid to the fish, wrongly termed by the Greeks the Eel. Contrasting the value of the gods with the high prices paid for the fish at Athens he gibes; “they say that the Egyptians are clever in that they rank the Eel equal to a god, but in reality it is held in esteem and value far higher than gods, for them we can propitiate with a prayer or two, while to get even a smell of an Eel at Athens we have to spend twelve drachmæ or more!” Anaxandrides’ makes a Greek say to an Egyptian:

“You count the Eel a mighty deity, And we a mighty dainty!”

Juvenal in Satire XV. (written probably after his return from semi-exile in Egypt) lashes with ridicule the compatriots of his butt Crispinus. The enumeration of their animal and vegetable gods is a fine specimen of dignified humour. By piscem in line 7, may be indicated the Oxyrhynchus, the Lepidotus, or the Phagrus, the so-called Eel—three sacred fishes of the Nile.

“Illic æluros, hic piscem fluminis, illic Oppida tota canem venerantur, nemo Dianam.”

(B) As a delicacy, the Eel by the Greeks was rated very high. But the reverse held good at Rome. Unlike its cousin the Muræna it gets little commendation by the Latin comedians—Terence’s in Adelphi, 377-381, is the solitary exception I can recall—and by the gourmets. Apicius deemed it worthy of but one recipe.

“Vos anguillæ manet longæ cognata colubræ” (Juvenal, V. 103) is often quoted as stamping the low position of the Eel at Rome, but in reality, as the whole context bears out, this particular “cousin of the snake” was condemned not because of its kinship, but because it was Cloaca-bred and drain-fed.

The passage in Menander’s, Drunkenness which makes one of the characters declaim that, were he a god, he would never allow a loin of beef to load his altars, unless an Eel were also sacrificed, testifies to the preference for the Eel to meat. Numerous are the pæans of praise rendered by Greek writers to the superlative excellence of the fish.

The Eel is dight “the King of fish”; he, or rather she, was “the white-skinned Nymph”; was “chief of the fifty Virgins of Lake Copaïs”; was a very “Goddess,”

“Then there came Those natives of the Lakes, the eels, Bœotian goddesses, all clothed in beet,”

(with which, or majoram, on beech leaves, Aristophanes tells us they were often served); and, the very last word in laudation, was “the Helen of the Feast.”

Whether this was applied because the fish was the personification of all delicate dainties, as Helen was the fairest of all the fair, or because every guest strove like Paris to supplant his neighbour and keep her all to himself, the reader must choose. Athenæus certainly leans to the latter view.

Philetærus would seem to have no doubt in identifying what is the sting of death and what is the victory of the grave,

“For when you’re dead, you cannot then eat eels.”

To the sense of smell as well as that of taste the Murænidæ appealed strongly, to judge by the eulogy that their bodies when being cooked exhaled an odour fragrant enough to restore the sense of smell in the nose of a dead man! while, if boiled in fine brine, they “changed the human nature into the divine!”

The luxurious and lazy Sybarites, who felt they had broken their bones if they but saw another digging, and suffered not a cock in the whole country, lest he should mar their slumber, were so passionately addicted to Eels that all persons catching or selling them were exempt from taxes and tribute.

(C) The propagation of Eels: This has given birth to more theories—all of them till some twenty years ago quite erroneous—than any other ichthyic question. From Aristotle downwards nearly every zoologist, nearly every writer on fish, has advanced his view as to how and whence eels are bred.

Only a few of them, and they all divergent, can find space here. Aristotle held that Eels had never been found with milt or roe, that when opened they did not seem to possess generative organs, and that apparently they came from the so-called entrails of the earth, seemingly referring to certain worms formed spontaneously in mud and the like.

Oppian (I. 513 ff.)—

“Strange the formation of the eely race That know no sex, yet love the close embrace. Their folded lengths they round each other twine, Twist amorous knots, and slimy bodies joyn; Till the close strife brings off a frothy juice, The seed that must the wiggling kind produce. Regardless they their future offspring leave, But porous sands the spumy drops receive. That genial bed impregnates all the heap, And little eelets soon begin to creep.”

Pliny, after making the assertion (taken, as usual, from Aristotle) that among fish the females are larger, and often the more numerous, goes on, an echo once more of “His Master’s Voice,” to deny to the Eel sex, either masculine or feminine: according to him, Eels when they had lived their day, rubbed themselves against the rocks, and their scrapings came to life: “they have no other mode of procreation.”

Von Helmont attributed the birth of Eels to the dews of May mornings! other authors deduced their parentage from the hairs of horses! others again from the gills of fish! while the great Izaak Walton insisted on spontaneous generation!

To solve the insoluble, recourse was, as usual, had to the gods: thus Jupiter and a white-armed goddess yclept Anguilla (the Latin for Eel) were accounted parents of the countless “cousins to the snake.”

Theory was piled upon theory, false conclusions were drawn from falser data. Even as late as 1862 appeared an author, not one whit less certain of the truth of his discovery based “on a series of observations extending over sixty years,” or one whit less active in asserting it, than any of his numerous predecessors.

In The Origin of the Silver Eel, Mr. D. Cairncross propounded the following assertion: “The progenitor of the silver Eel is a small beetle: of this I feel fully satisfied in my own mind, from a rigid and extensive comparison of its structure and habits with those of other insects.” “The beetle in the act of parturition” is represented on the frontispiece!

The fact that this beetle is evidently a dead one would not, as the Bibliotheca Piscatoria rather wickedly puts it, even if known to the writer, cause him to alter his opinion one jot!

It was only in 1896—strange, indeed, that a problem which so many keen intellects had attacked should remain unelucidated for over two thousand years!—that the mode of reproduction and development of the Eel was first surmised, and then for the most part ascertained by Professor Grassi and Dr. Galandruccio. But not till 1904 were most of the surmises of the Italian investigators placed beyond question, and the mode of reproduction, etc., established beyond doubt by Johann Schmidt of Copenhagen.

The now accepted view (stated shortly) is as follows: fresh-water Eels approach maturity when about six years old, and then change their colour from browny-yellow to silver, whence “Silver Eels.” In this bridal attire and with eyes enlarged, they find their way from the rivers to the sea, and far out into deep waters of the ocean. The pace at which they travel on their way to the sea cannot be computed exactly, but two marked Eels have been caught whose record was nineteen kilometres in two days. Meek states that neither the exact locality nor the approximate depth of the spawning is as yet known, but that there can be no doubt that the spawning region lies deep and far out in the Atlantic beyond the Continental shelf.

The Times, Sept. 25, 1920, announces that Dr. J. Schmidt has just discovered the spawning place of fresh-water Eels to be not far S. of Bermuda, or about 27 deg. N. and 60 deg. W., much farther W. than he anticipated. Of the many marvels of the ichthyic world this is, perhaps, the greatest. It taxes, it transcends, our powers adequately to conceive the hereditary instinct or gauge the enduring strength which impels fish—as yet sexually undeveloped—of only moderate size to traverse 3000 or 4000 miles of an ocean full of foes, and to seek, especially to find, the only area which contains the requisite depth, temperature, and currents favouring the procreation and the return home of their minute but parentless progeny.

The conclusion is now clear that the Eels of Europe at any rate have a spawning area in common; the two Italian doctors were wrong in supposing that Eels spawned in the Mediterranean. In such ocean depths certainly below, probably far below, the one hundred fathoms line the generative organs of the Eels develope, and in due though protracted time the females spawn.

Their eggs float for a time; the young, when hatched out, pass through a metamorphosis and are known in one stage as Leptocephalus brevirostris. This larval form, which is flat and transparent and has a very small head, drifts with the ocean currents towards the coasts of Europe, where it passes through a series of metamorphoses into the Elver or young Eel, which in March and April swims up English rivers. The fecundity of the Eel, were it not for the system of check and countercheck devised by Nature, would in time become a danger; for the ovary of a female thirty-two inches in length has been estimated to contain no fewer than 10,700,000 eggs!

But however legitimate or illegitimate their methods may seem, all praise should be rendered to our ancient anglers. Especially so, when we call to mind that, as they possessed not running lines, reels, gut, nor probably landing nets, the playing of large fish must have required more delicate manipulation and the landing presented far greater difficulties than to us, armed as we are with all these and many other appliances.

Chapter XVIII. The Nine Fish Most Highly Prized

I subjoin a list of the nine fish which found most favour in Greece and Rome. This, although necessarily rough and tentative, can (I believe), be justified by an examination of our authors. To anyone who on the strength of one author may be dissatisfied with the place allotted to a particular fish, I would point out that since the oracles of taste vary with the ages, it is essential to hold in mind the exact date at which a passage was written.

Then, again, the Greek saw not eye to eye, or ate not tooth to tooth, with the Roman. The verdict of the opsophagists or, as these often differed, of the plain people of one century not infrequently reversed that of the last.

As with us at the present day it is hardly feasible to adjudge definitely to what fish belongs the primacy of palate, so was it with the ancients. In the case of the Greeks the task is impossible. Every one of our nine can boast at least half a dozen champions. Then, again, as regards the epoch of individual supremacy we are without any guiding statement, such as Pliny’s that in his time the Scarus was reckoned the king of fish.

Palæmon

Mullus.... Chrysophrys

Torpedo ocellata

Mugil.... Scorpæna

Labrus.... Scyllium Catulus

....Lolligo vulgaris

Octopus vulgaris Murex

Palinurus vulgaris....

Balanus ut videtur.... ....Serranus scriba

Coris julis Murena belena

Scyllium canicula.... ....Engraulis encrasicholus