[182] See infra, p. 201.

[183] The ???? is found in only a few of the editions of Hesiod. I have followed the text of C. Goettling, 1843. The author Herodotus, who wrote probably about 60 to 100 a.d., lived of course centuries after Hesiod, who is generally dated some 100 to 200 years subsequent to Homer. The account given by Suidas varies in several small details, for instance the riddle is rendered in prose as well as in metre. He definitely states that illness, not the riddle, was accountable for the poet’s death.

Since writing this Note, I have come across in the Oxford Homer, vol. v. (1912), edited by T. W. Allen, the ????, the Life of Homer by Plutarch, and by Suidas, all conveniently placed together. Mr. Allen, in the Jour. Hell. Studies, XXXV. (1915), 85-99, has an elaborate article on ‘the Date of Hesiod,’ which for astronomical and other reasons he now fixes as 846-777 b.c.

[184] “It is difficult to understand how the author could derive from Works and Days a reputation like that enjoyed by Hesiod, especially if we remember that at ThespiÆ, to which the village of Ascra, the birthplace and early home of Hesiod, was subject, agriculture was held degrading to a freeman” (Smith, Dict. Gk.-Rom. Biog. and Myth., s. v. “Hesiod”).

[185] When Pausanias came to ThespiÆ on his Boeotian round, the representatives of the Corporation who owned the land told him dogmatically that the Works and Days alone came from the Master’s hand, and showed him the ne varietur copy on lead, wanting the prooemium which we read at the head of the poem (Paus., 9. 31. 4).

[186] The passage, attributed by Euthydemus (in his Treatise on Pickled Fish) to Hesiod, which mentions seven fish, does not upset my statement, because the paternity of the work has long been deemed spurious. Even AthenÆus brands the verses as “the work of some cook, rather than that of the great accomplished Hesiod,” and concludes from intrinsic evidence, such as the mention of Byzantium, etc., and the Campanians, etc., “when Hesiod was many years more ancient than any of these places or tribes,” that they were written by Euthydemus. See Athen., III. 84.

[187] ???? ???? pa?d?? a????a f??a?a?. For other epigrammata, see Anth. Pal. VII. 1 to 7, and Plutarch, de vita Homeri, 1. 4.

[188] From Anth. Pal., IX. 448.

which may perhaps be rendered in rhyme,

[189] It suggests itself to me that in the answer to the riddle there is just possibly a play within a play, or a double latent meaning, for the word f?e?? denotes not only a louse, but also a fish of the Remora kind. Perhaps this humour is too subtle even for a class so noted for “calliditas,” or shrewd wit, as Greek fishermen are reputed to have been.

[190] Anth. Pal., VII. 3. ??s?t??a I prefer to translate “marshal,” its first meaning, rather than “adorner” adopted by Coleridge, as being far stronger, and more fitting for a poet who had “marshalled” on his stage of the Iliad so many heroes. Herodotus states that the people of Ios (not Homer) wrote the epitaph at a subsequent date.

[191] It was on the advice of Socrates that Xenophon consulted the oracle at Delphi, before he set forth for the campaign in Asia, which forms the story of his Anabasis. Tablets discovered in Epirus in 1877 by C. Carapanos (see Dodone et ses Ruines, Paris, 1878) give examples of questions addressed to the oracle at Delphi. Agis asks if some mattresses and pillows are likely to be recovered. Another pilgrim enquires whether the god recommends sheep-farming as an investment.

[192] Il., vii. 451.

[193] Plutarch’s account (Sept. Sap. Conviv., ch. 19) varies in many details; notably, (1) it acquits Hesiod of seduction, (2) the brothers of flight, (3) the maiden of hanging herself.

[194] Translated by C. A. Elton. In the last two lines occurs the solitary mention by Hesiod of fishing.

[195] From the fish (in old English daulphin) came apparently the title of the eldest son of the kings of France from 1349 to 1830. According to LittrÉ the name Dauphin, borne by the lords of the Viennois, was the proper name Delphinus (the same word as the name of the fish), whence the province subject to them was called DauphinÉ. Humbert III., on ceding the province, made it a condition that the title should be perpetuated by being borne by the eldest son of the French king. A. Brachet, An Etymological Dict. of the French Language³ (Oxford, 1883), p. 113, states that the title—peculiar to S. France—first appears in 1140: “the origin is obscure, though it certainly represents the Delphinus.”

[196] Lucian (Dialogues of the Sea Gods, VIII.) offers an unexpected explanation of this trait. On Poseidon’s commending the fish for the rescue of Arion, the Dolphin makes answer: “You need not be surprised to find us doing a good turn to Man: we were men before we were fishes.”

[197] Pindar (frag. 235 Bergk⁴, 140^b, 68 ff., Schroeder) likens himself to the dolphin,

Pliny (Delphin edition, 1826, which I use throughout), IX. 8. Suetonius, Nero 41.

[198] Herodotus, I. 24. Pausanias, III. 25. Plutarch, Sept. Sap. Conviv., 18. Cf. Lucian’s characteristic account, op. cit., VIII.

[199] S. Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints (London, 1897), vol. x. 385.

[200] Keller, op. cit., 347, confirms this habit of the fish, which, I suggest, is dictated by reason of food.

[201] Oppian, hab. V. 425 ff.; Pliny, IX. 9; Ælian, de nat. an., II. 8.

[202] The Mugil, especially Mugil saltator, vies with if it do not surpass the salmon in its power of leaping. It often (according to Oppian) jumps right over the surrounding nets. Our Dolphin a double duty pays, in (1) driving the fish, and (2) killing the successful saltatores.

[203] In Arist., N. H., IX. 48, the Dolphin “seems to be the swiftest of all the creatures, marine or terrestrial,” but in N. H., IX. 37, he credits the grey mullet as being “the swiftest of fishes.”

[204] Pliny, IX. 9: “Sed enixioris operÆ, quam in unius diei prÆmium conscii sibi opperiuntur in posterum: nec piscibus tantum sed et intrita panis e vino satiantur.”

[205] In Lapland the “sea-swallows” render great aid in the salmon season. For some cause these small marine birds elect to follow the inward and outward course of the fish, and are thus infallible guides to the fishermen, with whom they become so tame that they will light on their fingers, and take, if not “the choicest of the spoil,” scraps of fish. No wonder they are termed “The Luck-bringers.” See S. Wright, The Romance of the World’s Fisheries (London, 1908), p. 69.

[206] Oppian, hal., V. 447. In mediÆval times instances of dolphins aiding fishermen are related by Albertus Magnus, De Animalibus, VI. p. 653, and by Rondolet, Libri de piscibus marinis, etc. (Lugduni, 1554-5), XVI. p. 471. At the present day in Lake Menzalah porpoises shepherd the fish: the Egyptian, however, spares to his helpers their lives, but naught else. The natives of Angola were much more recognisant of service, as an interesting description by an old traveller of a fish drive there evidences: “They use upon this coast to fish with harping irons, and waite upon a great fish which cometh once a day to feed along the shoare which is like a grampus. Hee runneth very near the shoare, and driveth great skuls of fish before him; the negroes runne along and strike their harping irons about him, and kill great store of fish, and leave them in the sand till the fish hath done feeding and then they come and gather up the fish. This fish will many times runne himself aground, but they will presently shore him off again, which is as much as four or five men can doe. They call him Emboa, which is in their speech a Dogge: and will by no means hurt or kill any of them.” The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex. (Haklutus Posthumus or Purchas his pilgrimes (ed. Glasgow, 1905-7), vol. VI. p. 404.)

[207] The evidence is collected and discussed by K. Klement, Arion (Wien, 1898), pp. 1-64, and by H. Usener, Die Sintfluthsagen (Bonn, 1899), pp. 138-180.

[208] Aegyptiaca, book v. frag. 6 (Frag. hist. Gr., III. 510 f. MÜller).

[209] Pausanias, III. 25. 7, recalls that among the votive offerings at TÆnarum “is a bronze statue of the minstrel Arion. Herodotus tells his story from hearsay, but I have actually seen the Dolphin at Poroselene that was mauled by fishermen and testified its gratitude to the boy who healed it. I saw that Dolphin answer to the boy’s call, and carry him on his back when he chose to ride.”

[210] Noctes AtticÆ, 6. 8. 1-7.

[211] For instances in classical mythology of rescues from drowning, and of corpses brought ashore, see A. B. Cook, Zeus (Cambridge, 1914), i. p. 170, and for similar hagiographical instances, see S. Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints (London, 1873-82), passim. C. Cahier, CaractÉristiques des Saints dans l’art populaire (Paris, 1867), ii. 691 ff., gives an account full of interest, which is increased by his illustrations of Saints accompanied by fish.

[212] Brit. Mus. Cat., pl. XXI. 7. B. V. Head, Historia Numorum, 620 f. (ed. 2, Oxford, 1911). In Plutarch’s (de Sol. Anim., 36) the lad was thrown from the fish’s back by a terrible shower of hail and was drowned.

[213] Oppian, hal., V. 521 ff.

[214] B. V. Head, op. cit. p. 266 ff. As an emblem of the sea the dolphin is very general, from the rude sculpturings of Etruscan sarcophagi, the later mural adornments at Pompeii, down to the paintings of the walls of the Vatican by Raphael. In all, the striking dissemblancy to the actual dolphin of natural history can be remarked at a glance. In the case of Raphael, however, it must be remembered that the designs are modelled on the classical decorations which were discovered in the Baths of Titus, where the Dolphin had been with propriety introduced as a marine symbol (Moule, Heraldry of Fish, p. 8).

[215] De Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology (London, 1872), ii. 336.

[216] Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (London, 1910), ii. 636. W. A. Cork, op. cit., p. 96, states that the KarayÁs of the Amazon Valley, although eating nearly every other fish, abstain from the Dolphin.

[217] V. 16, Rawlinson’s Translation.

[218] See also I. 200, where three Babylonian tribes exist only on fish which they dried in the sun, brayed in a mortar, and strained through a linen sieve.

[219] Indica, 26.

[220] Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, III. 48.

[221] Xenophon, Anab., I. 4; Cicero, de nat. Deorum, III. 39; Ovid, Fasti, II. 473-4.

[222] Very different was the behaviour of the first generation of Man (who according to Philo’s Translation of Sanchuniathon, quoted by Eusebius, prÆp. ev., I. 9, 5), “consecrated the plants shooting out of the earth, judged them gods, worshipped them, but yet lived upon them” (Cf. de Brosses, Culte des Dieux FÉtiches). In Plutarch, Symp., VIII. 8. 4, Nestor states that “the priests of Poseidon never eat fish, for Poseidon is called the Generator; and the race of Hellen sacrificed to him as the first father, imagining, as likewise did the Syrians, that Man rose from a liquid substance, and therefore they worship a fish as of the same production and breeding as themselves, being in this matter more happy in their philosophy than Anaximander: for he says that fish and men were not produced in the same substance, but that men were first produced in fishes and, when they were grown up and able to fend for themselves, were thrown out and so lived on the land. Therefore, as fire devours its parents, that is the matter out of which it was first kindled, so Anaximander, asserting that fish were our common parents, condemneth our feeding upon them.” The belief in the descent of man from fish exists in the present day among the Ponapians of the Caroline Islands, and elsewhere (J. G. Frazer, Folk Lore in the Old Testament (London, 1918), i. 40). As regards the changes in our development which make the whole world kin, Empedocles, (?a?a???, frag. 117, Diels) sings,

[223] Symposium, VIII. 8, 3: ?????e? ???e?a? ???? ?p??? ??????. Elsewhere we read of more prosaic and practical reasons why the great majority of the Greeks abstained from certain kinds of fish, e.g. the fear in the case of the loach, of which the Syrian goddess was protectress, lest she gnaw their legs, cover their bodies with sores, and devour their livers.

[224] Herodotus, I. 62.

[225] Paulus Rhode, Thynnorum Captura (LipsiÆ, 1890). Had his exhaustive monograph come to hand earlier, this notice would have been worthier, and much time spent on Aristotle, Oppian, etc., have been saved.

[226] The real derivation of p??a??, which was probably a pre-Hellenic word, seems unknown: see É. Boisacq, Dictionnaire Étymologique de la langue grecque (Paris, 1913), p. 779.

[227] Their method was to let down by a rope from the boats blocks of wood (heavily weighted with lead) to which were attached great spikes and hooks, which on reaching the bottom were drawn to and fro, with the result that “here gasping Heads confess the killing Smart, " There bleeds a Tail, which quivers round the Dart.” Cf. a fragment from Menander’s The Fisherman, frag. 12 in the Frag. comicor. Graec., IV. 77, Meineke, “The muddy sea which nourishes the great Tunny.” Sophron’s Tunnyfisher seems the earliest mime, where this fish figures.

[228] O. Keller, Die Antike Tierwelt, vol. ii. 388, fig. 122. This work (published at Leipzig a year before the War) unfortunately came into my hands only when I had practically finished my book, and thus I have been precluded from the more copious use of the Fische portion, which I should have desired and which it would certainly have demanded. The seventy pages dealing with fish form a compact treasure-house of ichthyic literature, but owing perhaps to their scope lack piscatorial interest.

[229] Faber, Fisheries in the Adriatic, London, 1883.

[230] According to Pollux, VI. 63.

[231] Justin, XVIII. 3, 2.

[232] Cf. Ezekiel, XXVI. 5, 14.

[233] Cf. the allusion of Cervantes: dos cursos en la academia de la pesca de los atunos.

[234] Arrian (Ind., XXX. 1) and Strabo (XV. 12, p. 726) tell the same story of whales in the Indian Ocean.

[235] PersÆ, 424 ff.

[236] Plutarch, de Sol. Anim., ch. 29.

[237] Arist., N. H., VIII. 19.

[238] Ichthyol., II. p. 376.

[239] Pliny, N. H., IX. 20, on the say-so of Arist., N. H., VI. 16, “pinguescunt in tantum ut dehiscant.”

[240] Ælian, de nat. an., XIII. 16.

[241] Oppian, hal., III. 285.

[242] Byron’s view of fishing is not favourable—as his lines in Don Juan, Canto XIII. prove:

He bore, possibly from failure to catch his boyish Aberdeenshire trout, a grudge against Father Izaak,

Byron closes his note with “But Anglers! No Angler can be a good man.” Walton received many a shrewd blow, especially from his contemporary Richard Franck, whose Northern Memories, with its appreciation of the Fly and its depreciation of Izaak’s ground-bait, found less favour than the Compleat Angler. His worsting of Walton at Stafford runs, “he stop’d his argument and leaves Gesner to defend it: so huff’d a way.” Again, “he stuffs his book with morals from Dubravius—not giving us one precedent of his own experiments, except otherwise when he prefers the trencher to the troling-rod! There are drones that rob the hive, yet flatter the bees that bring them honey.”

[243] Deipn., VIII. 47. Rabelais would seemingly make Aristotle his own Proteus, for Pantagruel (IV. 31) discovers him with his lantern at the bottom of the sea spying about, examining, and writing. This lantern has long been coupled with that of the Sea-urchin, but as a few pages later on we find ourselves in the Pays des Lanternois, it is probably a reference to a philosopher’s lamp, like that of Diogenes.

[244] The Natural History (of which the text I use is Bekker’s) is practically the only work by Aristotle discussed here. For me, being no “Clerk” although “of Oxenford,” it is not, as—

[245] Aristotle’s Researches in Natural Science, by Thomas E. Lones (1912), from whose book I borrow and to whose kind advice I owe much. At last we have a really admirable translation of Hist. Anim., which is by Prof. D’Arcy Thompson, Oxford, 1910. The notes are those of an expert zoologist, thoroughly familiar with classical literature.

[246] Select Works, vol. i. p. 69. London, 1798-1801.

[247] “Die Altersbestimmung des Karpfen an seiner Schuppe,” in the R. Jahresber. des Schlesischen Fischerei-Vereins fÜr 1899.

[248] “The periodic growth of Scales in GadidÆ and PleuronectidÆ as an Index of Age,” in the Journal of the Marine Biolog. Assoc. (1900-03), VI. 373-375.

[249] Reports of Scottish Fishery Board, 1904, 1906, 1907.

[250] Cf. Anim. Gen., V. 3.

[251] d???? d’ o? ?????te? a?t?? t? e???e? t?? ?ep?d?? ?a? t? s?????t?t?. Professor D’Arcy Thompson, in his translation, renders this sentence “the age of a scaly fish may be told by the size and hardness of the scales.” It is most probable, though not a certainty, from contextual reasons, from Aristotle’s habit of casually harking back, and from Pliny in his translation of it (N. H., IX. 33) applying it generally, that this sentence applies to all fish, and not solely to the Tunny.

[252] V. 15. ? ??? p??f??a pe?? ?t? ??, ?a? ?a?’ ??ast?? ???a?t?? fa?e?? ?st?? ? a???s?? t??? d?ast?as? t??? ?? t? ?st???? t?? ??????. The translation above is taken from Professor D’Arcy Thompson (ibid.), to whose kindness I owe the following reference and much else in this chapter. Pliny, IX. 60, makes the Murex live seven years.

[253] In EpistolÆ physiologicÆ (Delft, 1719), IV. p. 401, he describes how the squamulÆ or scalelets of a herring (twelve years old) were found regularly superimposed, each year’s growth on that of the preceding year.

[254] AthenÆus, referring, however, solely to the Murex, “their growth is shown by the rings on their scales,” is simply quoting from Aristotle (as Dindorf’s text makes plain), whose term of six years he adopts: fa?e?? d? t’a???s?? ?? t?? ?? t? ?st????? ?????? (III. 37).

[255] Plin., Nat. Hist., VIII. 17; Athen., Deipn., IX. 58; Æl., Var. Hist., IV. 19.

[256] On the other hand, Abu-ShÂker, an Arab writer of the thirteenth century, makes Aristotle the material benefactor of Alexander by his present of a box in which a number of wax figures were nailed down. These were intended to represent the various kinds of armed forces that Alexander was likely to encounter. Some held leaden swords curved backwards, some spears pointed head downwards, and some bows with cut strings. All the figures were laid face downwards in the box. Aristotle bade his pupil never to let the key out of his possession, and taught him to recite certain formulÆ whenever he opened the box. This is only another use of magic, for the wax, the words of power, and the position of the figures all indicate that his foes would become prostrate and unable to withstand Alexander. See Budge, Life of Alexander the Great (one vol. ed.), p. xvi.

[257] See D’Arcy Thompson, Aristotle as a Biologist, Herbert Spencer Lecture, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1913, p. 13.

[258] Athen., VIII. 50.

[259] Cf. I. V. Carus, Prodomus FaunÆ MediterranÆ, vol. II., Stuttgart, 1889-93.

[260] Of the closeness of his observation may be instanced (1) the development by the cuttle fish during the breeding season of one of his arms for transference to the mantle-cavity of the female—a function of which Cuvier himself was ignorant, and which was not rediscovered till the latter end of the last century, and (2) the method of bringing forth of the shark—?a?e?? ?e???—which was forgotten, till Johannes MÜller brought it to light. See D’Arcy Thompson, op. cit., pp. 19-21.

[261] British Fish: SalmonidÆ (London, 1887), p. 19.

[262] Memories of the Months, Fourth Series (London, 1914), pp. 232-3.

[263] The experiments conducted by Alfred Ronalds and recorded in his famous Fly-Fisher’s Entomology, London, 1862, had similar results.

[264] “The belief, common later, that the soul of the dead was not admitted immediately to the realm of Hades, but wandered in loneliness on its confines until the body was either burned or buried, is clearly expressed only in this (Patroclus) passage, while possibly in only one other can it be assumed, in all the Homeric poems. The wish for speedy rites sprang from a simpler cause; men did not want to have the bodies of their friends, or of themselves, torn by wild beasts or vultures: nor does this even begin to show that they had inherited old beliefs with regard to the connection between the soul of the dead and the body, which this soul had once inhabited, leading to a certain treatment of the body. That in earlier times, and perhaps by many Greeks of Homer’s age, the soul was thought to maintain a species of connection with the body, and to care for it, cannot be doubted. But caution is necessary that it may not be assumed that the Greeks, who maintained certain customs, inherited also the beliefs on which those customs were originally based” (Seymour, op. cit., p. 462).

[265] Professor G. H. Nuttall, in Parasitology (1913), V. 253.

[266] Burton, Arabian Nights.

[267] Mackail, op. cit., p. 92. Cf. Strabo’s naÏve but curiously true phrase about her, “a marvellous creature” (?a?ast?? t? ???a).

[268] Anth. Pal., VII. 505:

Translated by T. Fawkes.

[269] In Anth. Pal., VII. 305, this epigram is headed in the MS. ?dda??? ??t????a???, which is obviously wrong, for either ??t????a??? should be ?a?ed????, or ?dda??? is a mistake. Bergk assigns it to AlcÆus of Messine—probably with reason, as it is not unlike his style, and his name is more than once confused with AlcÆus of Mitylene, the famous lyric poet. (For AlcÆus of Messene, see Mackail’s Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (London, 1890), p. 297 f.) StadtmÜller the latest editor of Anth. Pal. conjectures as author Alpheus of Mitylene, but unconvincingly to Mackail and other authorities. Translated by E. W. Peter—The Poets and Poetry of the Ancients, London, 1858.

Cf. Etruscus Messenius, Anth. Pal., VII. 381, 5 f.

[270] For this and other passages quoted or incorporated, I am greatly in debt to Dr. Henry Marion Hall’s Idylls of Fishermen, New York, 1912 and 1914, and to A. F. Campaux’s preface to his De Ecloga Piscatoris qualem: veteribus adumbratam absolvere sibi proposuit Sannazarius, Paris, 1859.

[272] Poll., Onomasticon, 10, 52, and 10, 45. In later literature references, etc., to fish are countless: one of the lost plays of Aristophanes bore, indeed, the title of The Eel, according to Keller, op. cit., 357.

[273] This name was applied, according to AthenÆus, XIV. 10, from the peculiar poetry made by those who kept cattle.

[274] The Faerie Queen, especially Books I., II., III. Of the other writers, I simply cite (A) Piscatorie Eclogs, 1633, and in a lesser degree Sicelides, 1631, of Phineas Fletcher, perhaps the most conspicuous writer of fisher Idylls in English, whom Izaak Walton terms “an excellent divine, and an excellent angler, and author of excellent Piscatory Eclogues”; (B) Nereides or Sea Eclogues (of which only one is strictly a fisher eclogue) published anonymously in 1712, but to be followed the next year by Dryades, by Diaper (translator with his fellow Fellow of Balliol of Oppian’s Halieutica), which Swift commends to Stella as the earliest book of its kind in English, a statement which has been amplified into “the only book of its kind in any literature,” for his Muse dives to a new Arcadia set in the coral groves of the deep sea, and thence evokes the characters of his Eclogues—“mermen and nereids who behave exactly like the personages in Virgil and in Sannazaro”; (C) William Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals (1613-1616), in which fishing, although but incidentally introduced, is well and truly described, notably the passage in Book I., Song 5, about the capture of the pike; (D) Moses Browne (who endeavoured to show that Angling comes fairly within the range of the Pastoral), the author of the most popular of all English fishing idylls, Angling Sports in Nine Piscatory Eclogues, 1729; (E) William Thompson’s Hymn to May (1758); (F) John Gay, whose Rural Sports (1713) is, however, more of an angling georgic than a piscatory eclogue.

The eclogue, piscatory or other, was severely criticised by Dryden, who complaining of its affectation that shepherds had always to be in love, roundly stated, “This Phylissing comes from Italy”; by Pope, who found fault with Theocritus because of his introduction of “fishers and harvesters”; by Dr. Johnson, whose denunciation (in his essay, The Reason why Pastorals Delight) of Sannazaro for his introduction into the eclogue of the sea, which by presenting much less variety than the land must soon exhaust the possibilities of marine imagery, and known only to a few must always remain to the inlanders—the majority of mankind—as unintelligible as a chart, dealt possibly the coup de grÂce to the English piscatory. See Hall, op. cit., 183.

[275] It is indeed a far cry from Idyll XXI. to Endymion; still here, even though it be no piscatory eclogue, the fisher Glaucus recalls his Sicilian prototype. In Book II. 337 ff., for instance,

and again,

[276] Moses Browne in the introductory essay to his Angling Sports in Nine Piscatory Eclogues asserts that Servius allowed only seven of Virgil’s Bucolics to be pure pastorals, while Heinsius for similar reasons rejects all but ten of Theocritus’s Idylls.

[277] I. 39 ff.; III. 25 f.; IX. 25 ff.; and especially in XXI.

[278] With the execrable taste of his age Sannazaro considered himself bound to produce still paler shades of those pale shadows, the Eclogues of Virgil, just as their author, the most precedent-loving of poets, rarely ventured to introduce an image or an incident without the authority of some Greek original (W. M. Adams, op. cit., p. 45). Moses Browne (ibid.) declares that it would have been far better if Sannazaro had never written his “sea eclogues, for the exercise of fishing appears so contemptible in him, that any that writes on a subject, that seems to be of a similar aspect, must suffer disadvantage.”

[279] They must, however, now according to the evidence of the Papyri be dated back some three centuries, i.e. from the usually accepted date of the sixth to about the third century a.d.

As regards some of the Romance writers, the Papyri are a revelation and compel apparently much revision of dates. Thus Chariton (whom “the critics place variously between the fifth and the ninth centuries a.d.”) is fixed by Pap., Fayum Towns, as before 150 a.d. Achilles Tatius, whose allotted span, owing to his imitation of Heliodorus (who hitherto has been dated about the end of the fourth century), was run “about the latter half of the fifth or beginning of the sixth century,” is now placed by Pap., Oxyrh., 1250, as living before 300, and thus Heliodorus is removed up to (c.) 250 a.d.

[280] In the Anthologia Palatina there are some 3700 epigrams, etc., dating from 700 b.c. and ending about 1300 a.d.; none of these, as far as I can recall, contradict the poverty note. I have chosen 500 a.d. as being a convenient date, because it includes all Greek and GrÆco-Roman writers as distinct from the Byzantine, and includes also the earlier and better prose writers, like Heliodorus and Longus. Epigrams, it is true, continued to be written until the fourteenth century, but there is little, and that of no poetical account, after the tenth, when the popular or “political” verse began, with a few exceptions, to supplant the classical forms.

[281] H. BlÜmner, RÖmische PrivataltertÜmer, p. 329. “It is noteworthy that as Virgil omitted all mention of fishermen in his Bucolics, his imitators have followed his example, and in consequence in classical Latin the fisherman has no place as a pastoral character. The hut and tackle in the Theocritean story of Asphalion was foreign to Virgil’s conception of the province of pastoralism” (Hall, op. cit., 1914, p. 28).

[282] Heliod, Æthiop., V. 18.

[283] De Apollonio Tyrio, 12.

[284] VII. 276, W. R. Paton’s Translation.

[285] Cf. Pausanias, III. 21, 5: “Men fear to fish in the Lake of Poseidon, for they think he who catches fish in it is turned into a fish called The Fisher.” In I. 38, 1, we find that only the priests were allowed to fish, because the rivers were sacred to Demeter, and in VII. 22, 4, that the fish at Pharae were sacred to Hermes, and so inviolate.

[286] In gratitude for the part played by certain fish in bringing to the banks of the Euphrates the egg, from which came Aphrodite, Zeus placed fishes among the stars—hence the Pisces. Diognetos of Erythrai ap. Hyg., poet. astr., 2. 30, make these “certain fish” Venus and Cupid. Cf. Myth. Vat., I. 86.

[287] Cf. Diod. Sic., II. 20.

[288] Some recent scholars hold that Poseidon was an early differentiation of Zeus, and that his fish-spear was developed from the three-pronged lightning symbol of that deity as soon as the former became himself specialised into first a river god, and second a sea god. From my friend Mr. A. B. Cook’s forthcoming work, Zeus, vol. ii. c. 6, s. 4, I learn that the commonly supposed Trident (in Æschylus, Septem., I. 31), “the fish-striking tool of the sea-god,” is more likely in pre-classical times to have been the three-pronged lightning symbol of the highest Deity of all, and observable not only in Greece, but also in Asia. Against this view lies the fact that only once in all the Greek art is Poseidon represented with an unmistakable thunder-bolt, and this is on a silver tetradrachm of Messana about 450 b.c. The name Poseidon merely equals, it is held, p?te?-?a?, or ‘Lord Zeus,’ the correlative of p?t??a ???, ‘Lady Hera.’

[289] See Oppian’s invocation of him in III. 9-28.

[290] Ibid. As Pan was worshipped as the god of animals, especially of herds, on land, so did the fisherfolk venerate him, ??? ??t??? (Theocr., Id., V. 14) or ???p?a??t?? (Soph., Aj., 695: cf. Anth. Pal., X. 10), as the god of the animals of the sea, and in especial for his service to them in netting Typhon, whose “winds wrought havoc to their boats, and when Auster with Sirocco breath prevailed, caused their catches to go bad.” At Athens the god was regarded with gratitude as a powerful benefactor, because of the aid vouchsafed in securing naval victories (Hdt., 6. 105. Simonides frag. 133, Bergk⁴)

[291] To Janus, however, the credit of being the first to teach the art of Fishing to the Latins is assigned by Alexander Sardus, De Rerum Inventoribus, II. 16. This in common with the belief that Janus invented boats is probably a mistaken inference from the fact that the early as libralis had a head of Janus on one side and the prow of a ship on the other (Roscher, Lex. Myth., II. p. 23).

[292] The description in Anth. Pal., X. 10, “Me, Pan, the fishermen have placed on this holy cliff, the watcher here over the fair anchorage of the harbour; and I take care now of the baskets and again of the trawlers off this shore,” and in Archias (Anth. Pal., X. 7, and 8) of the fishermen making an image of Priapus to be set up, just where the sea leaves the shore, are only three of very many similar passages. Among the Eleans Apollo was honoured as a God under the title of The Fish-eater (Athen., VIII. 36). In addition to Gods we read of Tritons who were half-men, half-fish, and of a still more wonderful being, an Ichthyocentaurus, whose upper body was of human form, and lower that of a fish, while in place of the hands were horses’ hooves!

[293] The Phigaleans (in Arkadia) worshipped an old wooden image, called Eurynome, which represented a woman to the hips, a fish below. This curious effigy was kept bound in golden chains and was regarded by the inhabitants as a form of Artemis: see Paus., 8. 41, 4-6. A large Boeotian vase at Athens shows Artemis with a great fish painted on the front of her dress, a clear indication that she was held locally to be a goddess of fishing (M. Collignon and L. Couve, Catalogue des Vases Peints du MusÉe National d’AthÈnes (Paris, 1902), p. 108 f., No. 462; cp. Ib., No. 463).

[294] It is probably the wisest course to admit that the unity of an ancient god or goddess was a matter of name, rather than of nature.

[295] De Dea Syr., ii. c. 14. The authorship is a matter of doubt. The author adds, “but the image in the holy city is all woman.”

[296] Diod. Sic., II. 1.

[297] On Greek and Italian vases, etc., women with fish bodies are occasionally represented. Cf. Keller, op. cit., ii. 349.

[298] See Brit. Mus. Cat. of Coins, Galatia, pl. 18, 14, or B. V. Head, Historia Numorum² (Oxford, 1911), p. 777.

[299] For Derketo, standing on a Triton, on coins of Ascalon, see G. F. Hill, Catalogue of The Greek Coins of Palestine (London, 1914), pp. lviii. f., 130 f., Pl. XIII. 21. The dove in the right hand of the goddess is her very usual attribute. The Triton on which she stands expresses her marine nature. Ovid, Met. IV. 44:

Although Roscher’s Dict. of Myth. does not in the long article devoted to Isis specify her as fish-tailed, Isis is distinctly identified with Atargatis of Bambyke in Papyrus Oxyr., 1380, line 100 f., ?? a???? ?ta???te?. Cf. also Pliny, V. 19: Ibi (Syria) prodigiosa Atargatis, GrÆcis autem Derceto dicta, colitur.

[300] De Superstitione, Bk. IV., quoted by Athen., VIII. 37.

[301] History of Asia, Bk. I., quoted ibid. VIII. 37.

[302] According to an inscription at Smyrna, H. Dittenberger, Sylloge inscriptionum GrÆcarum, (LipsiÆ, 1900), ii. 284 f., No. 584, a violator of the sacred fish was forthwith punished by all sorts of misfortunes and finally was eaten up by fish. If one of these fish died, an offering must on the self-same day be burnt on the altar. Cf. Newton, Gk. Inscript., 85.

[303] Keller, op. cit., 345.

[304] For discussion as to which was the “sacred fish,” see Plutarch, de Sol. Anim., 32, and Athen., VII. 20.

[305] To cite but one of the scores of intermediate authors as regards poverty, Ovid, Met., III. 586-91,

[306] The ???? pa?de? in the oracles’ warning to Homer, which seem at first sight antagonistic to the above, become in Homer’s own words of greeting, ??d?e?. Perhaps the employment of ???? pa?d?? by the Delphic priestess may be due (1) to the fact that they were “fish-boys” proper, (2) to an early and intelligent anticipation of the “juvenescent” tendency, or (3) to the exigency, not unknown to sixth form Hexameter-makers of the present, but (alas! if Oxford and Cambridge be obeyed) not of the future day, of scansion!

[307] Cf. Mus. Borbon., IV. 54, or Baumeister, DenkmÄler Klass. Altert. (Munich, 1885), i. 552, f. 588.

[308] The happiest, perhaps the only happy, fishermen are those shown at the bottom of drinking cups, etc.! In P. Hartwig’s (Die griechischen Meisterschalen (Stuttgart-Berlin, 1893), p. 37 ff.) collection of red-figured Greek vases representing fishermen at work, there is an Attic kylix (fifth cent. b.c.) with such a fisherman, who (the idea ran) was only in his element, when the cup was filled with wine. Cf. Theocritus, I. 39 ff., for another old fisherman in the bottom of a herdsman’s cup.

[309] Although the Papyrists have as yet unearthed only some six lines of a new poem by Theocritus (discovered by Mr. M. Johnson, and as yet unpublished), in Pap. Oxyrhynchus, XIII. No. 1618, we find parts of Id., V., VII., and XV.

[310] Translated by Andrew Lang, 1889. The question whether Leonidas of Tarentum was, and Theocritus was not, the author of this Idyll is exhaustively treated by R. J. Cholmeley, Theocritus, pp. 54, 55. Whatever conclusion be reached, constant are the references in those Idylls whose authenticity is undoubted to fish and fishing; even in his familiar comparisons Theocritus thinks of the sea. Mr. Lang writes, “There is nothing in Wordsworth more real, more full of the incommunicable sense of Nature, rounding and softening the toilsome days of the aged and poor, than the Theocritean poem of The Fisherman’s Dream. It is as true to Nature as the statue of the naked fisherman in the Vatican.”

[311] The meaning is as follows: Asphalion is complaining of wakefulness, and he compares his condition to two things; to a donkey in a furze-bush (as we might say), and to the light of the town-hall, whose sacred flame was perpetual (Snow).

[312] Mr. Lang adopts the reading ??t??, bread; Ahrens substitutes ???t??, bear, which seems to fit the context far better, as it keeps up the whole spirit of, “I dreamed of large-sized fish, and a lively fight, just as a sleeping dog dreams of chasing bears.” Cf. Tennyson’s Locksley Hall—

and his Lucretius—

passages alike inspired by the lines in which Lucretius (iv. 991 f.) proves that waking instincts are reflected in dreams—

[313] This is but one instance of anachronistic translation, or the use of terms, which, if true of our modern line, are inapplicable to ancient angling, for if, as I have shown in the Introduction, all ancient angling was with a tight line, the operation translated as “I took in line” should rather be rendered “I tightened on him.” The alternation of easing and tightening is a well-known device. It is a question of the degree of strain involved. If you want to keep a big fish quiet in a confined space or in difficult circumstances, you can generally do so by keeping a very light strain on him, so that, though the line is never absolutely slack, he hardly knows that he is hooked and is often landed without the angler having to yield a foot of his line. Thus the roach-fisher without a reel sometimes lands a 4 lb. chub or bream with a foot link of single hair, entirely by this method of suaviter in modo. There seems no particular reason why Asphalion should not have been cognisant of these secrets, which three lines in James Thomson’s The Seasons, although the fight is, I admit, with a running line, fairly disclose.

[314] To a practical angler this passage is not clear. How is it possible, after you have taken out the hook (the only apparent method of holding the big fish), to fasten round him ropes and drag him ashore, unless he were beached high and dry? Of this we have no evidence beyond ??e????sa, if used here in its nautical sense “to haul up high and dry.” The readings suggested by Wordsworth and others are numerous, but none seem quite satisfactory, even those preferred by J. M. Edmonds, The Greek Bucolic Poets, London, 1912, and R. J. Cholmeley, op. cit. Perhaps the least improbable text is that given by E. Hiller (Leipzig, 1881), ?a? t?? ?? p?ste?sa ?a??? ??e? ?pe???ta?, “and I really believed that I had him fairly landed.” This has the positive merit of sticking close to the manuscript reading, and the negative merit of refusing to admit the absurd ‘ropes.’

[315] Callimachus, whom Theocritus probably knew at Alexandria, calls the “chrysophrys” sacred—

See Athen., VII. 20.

[316] “Theocritus gives nature, not behind the footlights, but beneath the truthful blaze of Sicily’s sunlit sky. For it was here that the first vibrations of this spontaneous note were heard in their original purity, before art could distort them with allegory, or echo weaken them with imitation. This is all the more remarkable from the contrast which it offers to what Kingsley calls the ‘artificial jingle’ of the Alexandrian school. Simplicity, honesty, truth, and beauty recommend Theocritus as a genuine artist. His imitators, as compared with their model, were like—

as he himself describes (Id., VII. 47) Homer’s imitators.” Against this verdict by H. Snow on the Alexandrians must be set the more truthful appreciation of their work by Mackail, op. cit., pp. 178-207, especially p. 184: “They are called artificial poets, as though all poetry were not artificial, and the greatest poetry were not the poetry of the most consummate artifice.”

[317] Anth. Pal., VI. 4; VII. 295; VII. 504. While the last two in the MS. are headed ?e???d?? ?a?a?t????, and t?? a?t??, the first is simply ?e???d??. Hence this has sometimes been thought to be by Leonidas of Alexandria, but Professor Mackail informs me that all three epigrams are by the Tarentine, both by evidence of style, and because all three come in groups of epigrams taken from the Anthology of Meleager.

[318] The following translation by Mr. Andrew Lang is truer:

[319] In line 5 p??t??, which makes nonsense, should certainly be corrected to p??t??.

[320] Bk. I. 18.

[321] See Hall, op. cit. p. 22 (1914), and ibid., p. 35 (1912). Lucian, although a Syrian (to which nation fish was from the earliest times a forbidden food), frequently shows himself very conversant with fishes and avails himself of their characteristics: e.g. Menelaus, after witnessing some of the “turns” of that celebrated “lightning-change artist,” Proteus, exclaims frankly, “there must be some fraud!” The artist pooh-poohs him and bids him consider the everyday miracle of invisibility wrought by the Polypus, who having “selected his rock and having attached himself by means of his suckers, assimilates himself to it, changing his colour to match that of the rock. Thus there is no contrast of colour to betray his presence: he looks just like a stone” (Dialogues of the Sea Gods, iv. 1-3, Fowler’s Translation).

[322] Such in Fowler’s Translation, V. 48, is the rendering of ????, which is quite wrong for two reasons. First, ???? is almost certainly our dog-fish or its cousin. Cf. Aristotle, N. H., VI. 118. Second, the salmon is not found in Greek waters, and so could not be fished for from the Acropolis. Cf. infra, Chapter XIII.

[323] Heliod., Æthiop., 5, 18. Cf. Hall, op. cit., 1914.

[324] Anth. Pal., IX. 442. Trs. from the Greek Anthology as selected for Westminster, Eton, etc.

[325] Athen., VII., 48.

[326] Ovid has, I believe, more piscatory passages than any other poet, except professional writers, such as Oppian. His ten years’ banishment to Tomi at the mouth of the Danube and on the shores of the fishful Euxine no doubt added to his love and his mention of Fishing.

[327] Arist., N. H., IX. 13., Pliny, IX. 88. Hardouin suggests that Pliny may have learned this fact from the works of Nigidius Figulus.

[328] Cf. J. G. Schneider, Petri Artedi Synonymia Piscium, etc., LipsiÆ, 1789. This work is an excellent example of the learning and industry of this most versatile editor and commentator: in nearly all points that are matters of doubt or dispute I have followed him.

[329] Ibid., p. 76.

[330] Cf. Martial, Epist., X. 30, 17,

[331] Epist., V. 7.

[332] P. Lund, The Lake of Como (London, 1910), p. 23, refers to P. Giovio, De Piscibus Romanis, c. 38.

[333] Latin Literature (1906), p. 193. “Martial’s gift for occasional verse just enabled him to live up three pair of stairs in the city: in later years he could just afford a tiny country house among the Sabine hills.” This three-pair-back theory seems a bit strained, for he often speaks of his Nomentanus ager, a small farm at Nomentum, which yielded excellent wine. Cf. Ep., II. 38; VI. 43; XIII. 119. He owned, in addition to a house in Rome, apparently another small place at Tibur (IV. 80); so his complaints of being a “pauper” must be understood only in a relative sense. Thither he goes chiefly, he delicately insinuates, for the pleasure of seeing Ovid, who was his neighbour there. Cf. also VII. 93.

[334] The client had to be at his patron’s house in the morning and attend him, there or anywhere, all day if necessary. It was an act of disrespect to appear before his patron without donning the toga. Cf. Juvenal, VII. 142, and VIII. 49; also I. 96 and 119, and X. 45, and Martial, Ep., X. 10. In prose the most caustic description of the client-and-patron institution may be found in Lucian, Nigrinus, 20-26. In Ep., XII. 18, to poor Juvenal dancing attendance in Rome on his patron and sweating in the requisite toga he recounts the many delights of his home in Spain: among them “ignota est toga,” a blazing fire of oak cut from the adjoining coppice, and lastly the venator or keeper, whose attractions in lines 22-3 do not appeal to the modern sportsman. I draw attention to these lines, because they reflect quite casually, but quite clearly, the decadent vices of the age: remember, they are not quotations from some obscure, if obscene, versifier, but were written (and published!) by the second poet to the first poet of that generation. It has been pointed out that in the epigrams of Martial with which Juvenal is connected some obscenity usually creeps in. Cf. Ep., VII. 91.

[335] Ep., III. 58, 26,

[336] Cf. Ep. VI. 11, 5, and III. 60, 3, and XII. 48, 4.

[337] Ep., V. 37, 3.

[338] Pliny (XXXII., 21) and other writers show that epicures, then as now, were divided as to which was the best oyster. Mucianus awards the palm over all the other oysters to those from Cyzicus: “Cyzicena majora Lucrinis, dulciora Britannicis, suaviora Medulis, acriora Lepticis, pleniora Lucensibus, sicciora Coryphantenis, teneriora Istricis, candidiora Circeiensibus,” but Pliny in “Sed his neque dulciora neque teneriora esse ulla, compertum est,” evidently plumps for those of Circeii in Latium. The British oysters came chiefly from RutupiÆ (in Kent), now Richborough, not far from our Whitstable of oyster fame. The castle and camps of RutupiÆ and Regulbum were built by the Romans to command and secure the entrance to the Thames by the arm of the sea, which then separated Kent from the Isle of Thanet. These oysters find mention in Juvenal (IV. 141), “Rutupinoque edita fundo Ostrea callebat primo deprendere morsu.” Dalecampius says of them, “PrÆstantissima nutriunt.” Our modern rule that no oyster should be eaten in a month whose name lacks an r probably descends from the MediÆval

[339] Ep., X. 37, 7 and 8,

This is an attempt to show how large and plentiful the mullets were in Spain, and is just hospitable swagger, for Pliny, N. H., IX. 30, states that a mullet rarely exceeded two pounds.

[340] Nisard edition of Martial, Paris, 1865.

[341] Cf. Virgil, Geor., I. 139. Also Oppian, Cyneg., I. 65 f., where, as tools of the fowler, are specified, “long cords, and moist honey-coloured birdlime, and reeds which tread their track through the air.” Cf. also Ovid, Met., XV. 477, “nec volucrem viscata fallite virga.”

[342] Cantu seems to refer more naturally to the song of the call bird (Oppian, hal., IV. 120 ff.), rather than to that of the fowler, but cf. Cato (the poet of the third century a.d.), in Disticha, I. 27, “Fistula dulce canit volucrem dum decipit auceps”; and Tibullus, II. 5, 31, “Fistula cui semper decrescit harundinis ordo.” In addition to catching birds by rods and birdlime, a common practice according to Aristophanes was to confine doves, etc., with limbs tied up or with eyes covered, in a net, and thus allure other doves, etc., to the snare. Illex was the technical name for the decoy bird. For this purpose use was made both of kindred and of hostile species, such as the owl and falcon. The latter was also trained to catch the bird, which had been decoyed within its reach. Cf. Martial, Ep., XIV. 218. Aristophanes, Aves, 1082 f.

Ibid., 526 ff., trans. B. H. Kennedy:

Plautus. Asin., I. 3, 67 f.:

[344] A. Rich, Dict. of Rom. and Gk. Antiquities, London, 1874, s.v. ‘Arundo.’ I have been unable to trace this lamp in either Birch or Passeri. Daremberg and Saglio, op. cit., seem to collect most of the information on the subject, s.v. ‘Venatio,’ V. p. 694. The above and other methods of aucupium, “bird-catching,” prevail to a devastating extent in Italy at the present day.

[345] The best reeds for fowling purposes (harundo aucupatoria) came from Panormus, those for fishing (harundo piscatoria) from Abaris in Lower Egypt. Pliny, XVI. 66. For a legal decision as to the selling, etc., of reeds, see Digesta Justiniani, VII. 1, 9, 5.

[346] Possibly in the time of Aristophanes,

In the seventh century b.c. the Chinese mention the Ch’ih Kan or the “glutinous line for catching birds.” Cf. Apuleius, Met., XI. 8.

[347] The epitaph in Corpus Inscript. Lat., ii. 2335, is of interest:

Cf. Carm. Lat. Epig., no. 412.

[348] Ep., V. 18, 7 f.

[349] See infra, p. 155, note 6.

[350] See infra, p. 155, note 5.

[351] Schneidewin, Ed. I., 1842, and Ed. II., 1852, reads musca, as does Lindsay, 1903. Paley and Stone (1888) musco; W. Gilbert (Leipzig, 1886 and 1896) reads musca, and in his apparatus criticus remarks “vorata d. sc. musca cum libris Scrin. Schn. Glb.—vorato d. sc. musco BrodÆus Schn.”

[352] VII. 113. ?a??e? d? (sc. ? s?????) t? t?? f????? t??f? d?? ?a? t??t??? ???e?eta?, ?.t.?. AthenÆus mentions Aristotle as his source.

The references by ichthyologists to the bait used for catching the Scarus seem infrequent: I at least have only come across the following. “The fishing requires some experience: fishermen allege that there is necessary un individu vivant pour amorcer les autres, yet here we call to mind what Ælian and Oppian say as to the great number of fish attracted by following a female attached to the line.” See Cuvier and Valenciennes, H. N. des Poissons, vol. XIV., p. 150, Paris, 1839.

[353] IX. 29. Scarus solus piscium dicitur ruminare herbisque vesci, non aliis piscibus. See also Oppian, II. 645-650.

[354] The Oxford Dict. gives, “Alga, a seaweed: in plural, one of the great divisions of the Cryptogamic plants including seaweeds, and kindred fresh-water plants, and a few Ærial species,” and “Moss, any of the small herbaceous Cryptogamous plants constituting the class Musci, some of which form the characteristic vegetation of bogs, while others grow in crowded masses covering the surface of the ground, stones, trees, etc.” As “applied to seaweed rare”, I might venture to add either poetical, as in Tennyson’s Mermaid, “in hueless moss under the sea,” or loose and unscientific.

[355] Compare J. Britten and R. Holland, Dict. of English Plant Names (London, 1884), III. 576. Wright in his Dialect Dictionary, “Crow-silk, ConfervÆ, and other AlgÆ, especially C. rivularis.”

[356] Oppian, III. 421. ???? ?pe?t??e? ????t?? d????. These were traps of wickerwork, resembling our lobster pots or weels, in which the fish were caught as they flocked to suck at the seaweed, with which the stones (placed inside the traps to sink them) were covered. Cf. Ælian, XII. 43, who states that for this sort of fishing fishermen made use of f????? ?a?ass???.

[357] N. H., XIII., 3. Cf. also ibid., I, 2.

[358] Voyage of the Beagle, ch. 20: “Two species of fish of the genus scarus, which are common here (Keeling Island), exclusively feed on coral.” Sir R. Owen, “The anterior teeth are soldered together and adapted to the habits and exigences of a tribe of fishes which browse on the lithophytes, that clothe the bottom of the sea, just as ruminant quadrupeds crop the herbage of the dry land.”

[359] N. H., II. 17: ???? ????? d??e? ??????e??. Cf., however, N. H., IX. 50.

[360] VIII. 2, 13.

[361] Arist., N. H., II. 13. Pliny, XI. 61. “Piscium omnibus (dentes) serrati, prÆter scarum: huic uni aquatilium plani.”

[362] In VII. 113, we again find AthenÆus misrepresenting Aristotle.

[363] “This idea of rumination,” according to Mr. Lones, op. cit., p. 237, “by the parrot wrasse (Scarus cretensis), which is clearly the Skaros of the Ancients, probably arose from its grazing or cropping off marine plants, and grinding them down, assisted by its having a strongly walled stomach” (cf. the functions of the gizzard of a fowl) with which, out of the myriads of fishes, the scarus and his tribe alone are endowed. On p. 162, “The stomach of a skaros is without a cÆcum, and appears to be of far simpler form than that of most fishes.”

A trout often appears to ruminate, working its jaws quietly for a considerable time—perhaps this is merely to settle its last mouthful comfortably and to its liking. According to Banfield, in Dunk and other islands off Northern Australia, a fish, very similar to only even more brilliant in hues than the Pseudoscarus rivulatus, is able by the strength of its teeth (some sixty or seventy, set incisorlike) to pull from the rocks limpets (its chief food), which when steadfast can resist a pulling force of nearly 2000 times their own weight! It swallows molluscs and cockles whole, and by its wonderful gizzard grinds them fine. See Confessions of a Beachcomber (London, 1913), p. 156.

[364] “Dapping,” to which I miss allusion even in Dr. Turrell’s excellent Ancient Angling Authors, is so often regarded as a more or less modern method that, even at the risk of a portentous note, I must record my reasons for differing in toto from this view. Walton certainly employed it in the seventeenth century. Pursuing the device further back, it is distinctly enjoined in the earliest fishing treatise in English, the earlier version of The Boke of St. Albans (i.e. a MS. of about 1450 printed from a MS. in the possession of A. Denison, Esq., with Preface and Glossary by T. Satchell, London, 1883), and seems, although not clearly described, surely specified as follows: In “How many maner of Anglynges that ther bene ... The IIIIth with a mener for the troute with owte plumbe or floote the same maner of Roche and Darse with a lyne of I or II herys batyd with a flye. The Vth is with a dubbed hooke for the troute and graylyng....” This passage draws a decided distinction between baiting with a fly and a dubbed hook, or artificial fly. But no lead (plumbe) or float was to be used, therefore the method intended seems without doubt “dapping,” which warrants, to my mind, the assumption that this device is as old as the earliest instructions in English. This older form of the Treatise seems, it is true, to have differed slightly from the version used for The Boke of St. Albans in 1496. T. Satchell held that they both had a common origin in the “bokes of credence,” which are mentioned in the latter, and may, he suggests, have been French, but of this I am doubtful, principally because the French and English traditions appear to me to have marked points of difference.

[365] The two smallest perfect hooks scale about No. 10 and No. 11 respectively in the old, and 5 and 4 in the new numbering. They are considerably smaller than the Kahun (XII Dynasty) hook, which Petrie believes to be the smallest known in ancient Egypt. Cf. his Tools and Weapons (London, 1917), p. 37 f. But the Kahun hooks scale Nos. 9 and 6 respectively.

[366] Od., XVII. 383 and 386.

[367] “Il est peu de poissons et mÊme d’animaux qui aient ÉtÉ, pour les premiers peuples civilisÉs de l’Europe, l’objet de plus de recherches, d’attention, et d’Éloges que le Scare” (LacÉpÈde). On the family of the LabridÆ (of which the Scarus forms a genus) the same author asserts that Nature has not conferred either strength or power, but they have received as their share of her favours, agreeable proportions, great activity of fin, and adornment with all the colours of the rainbow. Of the two cousins of the Scarus, the Turdus and the Julis, his eulogy can not be omitted: “Le feu du diamant, du rubis, de la topaz, de l’Émeraude, du saphir, de l’amÉthyste, du grenat scintille sur leures Écailles polies: et brille sur leure surface en gouttes, en croissants, en raies, en bandes, en anneaux, en ceintures, en zones, en ondes; il se mÊle À l’Éclat de l’or et d’argent qui y resplendit sur de grandes places, les teintes obscures, les aires pÂles, et pour ainsi dire dÉcolorÉes.” Nicander of Thyatira (cp. Athen. 7, 113) states that there were two kinds of Scarus, one a????? of many diverse colours, the other ???a? of a dull grey tint.

[368] Pliny, IX. 79.

[369] See J. B. Du Halde, Description gÉographique ... de l’Empire de la Chine.... (Paris, 1735), vol. i. p. 36.

[370] Petron., Sat., 93, 2.

[371] Archestratus is constantly quoted and always praised by AthenÆus as “excellent,” “experienced,” etc. Archestratus the Syracusan in his work—variously termed “Gastronomy,” “Hedypathy,” “Deipnology,” “Cookery”—begins his epic poem, “Here to all Greece I open wisdom’s store”! (Yonge’s trans.). From delivering his precepts in the style and with the gravity of the old gnomic poets, Archestratus was dubbed “the Hesiod or Theognis of opsophagists.” The comic poets have many a gibe at him, e.g. Dionysius of Sinope sums up the author of Gastronomy, t? p???? d’ ??????e, ???d? ?? ???e? (Thesmophorus, frag. I. 26, Meineke)! Before publishing this work, the author travelled far and wide to make himself master of every dish that could be served at table. Known to us almost entirely as a supreme bon vivant, and as the earliest (except Terpsion) and certainly greatest Mrs. Glasse of the Greeks, his accuracy of description of the various fishes used for the table was so consistent, that we find even so high an authority as Aristotle making use of it in his Natural History. Archestratus in his travels concerned himself not at all as to the manners or morals of the countries visited, “as it is impossible to change these,” and held little or no intercourse with any but those, e.g. chefs, who could advance the pleasures of taste. Whatever the cause, whether too many sauces or too little nutritive food, he was so small and lean that the scales are supposed to have returned his weight as not even one obol! (Cf. Hayward, The Art of Dining). Hayward himself must have appreciated the limitation of guests, which Archestratus imposes for a proper dinner

The sentiment, if not the number, coincides with the Latin proverb—“Septem convivium, novem convicium.”

[372] I follow Wilamowitz in s??? for s???, the usual reading, partly because Epicharmus being a Dorian would use the Doric form, partly because being a comedian he is probably playing on the words s??? and s?????.

[373] Hedyphagetica (frag. 529, Baehrens). Suidas states that the Persians termed an exquisite dish ???? ????fa???.

[374] Another reading is adesus. Cf. Xenocrates, de Alimento ex Aquatilibus, c. 14, of the scarus, which was fresh-caught and not vivarium-kept, being p?????? ????t??? e?st???.

[375] See Liddell and Scott.

[376] VI. 718 (KÜhn).

[377] Athen., VIII. 51.

[378] Cf. Oppian, I. 590.

[379] Ælian, XVI. 19, writes that these sea-hares were so poisonous, that if a man touched one thrown up on the shore with his hand, he shortly died, unless medicine was at once administered. So poisonous indeed are they, that “if you touch them with but your walking stick, there is the same danger which contact with a lizard evokes,” which in II. 5 is described t?????e? ? ?????? t?? ?????! Nero, to “mak siccar” (like Kirkpatrick with the Red Comyn), employed the sea-hare as a dainty for friends whose deaths he earnestly desired. Cf. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, VI. 32.

[380] Nonnius, always the alert defender of his favourite fish, ingeniously suggests that the scarus of Pythagoras was not our famous scarus, because as this fish, even during the Augustan period, was extremely rare in Italian waters, there seems little necessity for its being banned by the “Hyperborean Apollo of the Crotoniates” in b.c. 540-510. Numa, apparently influenced by Pythagorean precepts, forbade (according to Cassius Hemina, Pliny, XXXII. 10) all scaleless fish being offered to the gods. Festus, p. 253, a. 20, however, states that in such offerings it was allowable to present all fish with scales, except the Scarus, which was sacrificiable, and most acceptable to the god of the peasants, Hercules, whose “swinish gluttony " Crams and blasphemes his feeder.” For squaram, MÜller suggests scarum, while Lindsay prints squatum, the skate.

[381] Mayhoff would read inertior.

[382] Ælian, I. 2.

[383] Aristotle and Pliny, supra; Oppian, I. 135-7; Ælian, II. 54.

[384] Aristotle (according to Athen., VIII. 3) states that the scarus and sea-hog are the only fishes that have any kind of voice, but in reality he (IV. 9) mentions five others, among which is the cuckoo-fish, who “whistle and grunt” (see Pliny, XI. 112; Oppian, I. 134-5). AthenÆus errs, for Aristotle (N. H., IV. 9, 8) asserts that the Dolphin when out of the water “groans and cries”; while Pliny (IX. 7) says of the Dolphin, “Pro voce gemitus humano similis.” Aristotle expressly differentiates between the five mentioned fish and the Dolphin—for the former possess no lungs, windpipe, or pharynx, and so can produce no voice, only “sound,” while “the dolphin has a voice and therefore utters vocal and vowel sounds, for it is furnished with a lung and a windpipe.”

[385] Someone may throw at me the sentence of Seleucus of Tarsus, who in the only English translation of AthenÆus (by C. D. Yonge) is made to say (VII. 113), “The Scarus is the only fish which never sleeps.” If Yonge had been faithful to the text (SchweighÄuser’s) which he expressly states he had adopted, he would have omitted the ??, because it is in brackets and the editor expressly puts against it the note “Deest vulgo negativa particula,” and his accompanying Latin translation is “unum hunc ex omnibus piscibus dormire.” Kaibel (Leipzig, 1887) also brackets the ??, while Dindorf (1827) has no ??, bracketed or other.

[386] Aristotle, N. H., II. 13; Pliny, XI. 61. Another instance of the carelessness of AthenÆus—induced perhaps by his omnivorous reading—is to be found in the first line of VII. 113, “The Scarus, Aristotle says, has sharp or jagged teeth,” whereas a reference to N. H., II. 13, discloses that all fish except the scarus have sharp or jagged teeth, a statement which is confirmed by Rondolet.

[387] Cf. Opp., IV. 40-64; Pliny, XXXII. 5; and Ovid, Hal., 9 ff.

[388] Ælian, N. H., 12, 42.

[389] Pliny, XXXII. 8.

[390] Ep., 3, 13.

[391] Cf. Suetonius, Augustus, c. 83.

[392] The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1806), I. 406. If Burton, “that universal plunderer” has cribbed from Dame Juliana Berners her eloquent eulogy on the secondary pleasures of angling, this book, in turn, till its resurrection in the eighteenth century was ruthlessly pillaged without acknowledgment. Warton, Milton, 2nd edition, p. 94, suggests that Milton seems to have borrowed the subject of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, together with some thoughts and expressions, from a poem prefixed to the book, while a writer in The Angler’s Note Book, March 31, 1880, believes that “Walton probably drew the inspiration of his Angler’s song from the wonderful storehouse of this quaint and original author.”

[393] t? ??? ??e???? ?a? ???a??? ???? ?a? ?p???????? a?t?? a?s???? ?a? ?????? ?a? ??e?e??e??? t?? ???a? pep????e. Holland’s Translation, published in 1657, if only on account of its quaint turns is preferable to another published in the last century.

[394] Milton wrote (1646) a Latin Ode on sending a book to the Bodleian, in which he addresses RoÜsius as,

[395] Two years after this was written, I find that Mr. G. W. Bethune in his edition of The Complete Angler (New York, 1891), p. 6, notes the Aristotimus point, but goes no farther in defence of Plutarch.

[396] De Sol. Anim., 24. (Holland’s Translation.)

[397] London, 1700. Dr. Turrell, op. cit., p. 157, believes Whitney to have been the first to recommend the use of the floating fly—not for the purpose of circumventing the wily trout, but to prevent the fly being gobbled by the minnows.

[398] Cf. R. B. Marston, Walton and some Earlier Writers on Angling, 1894, an informative and yet delightful volume.

[399] As to the various Guyets, see 6th series, III. 87, 5th series, V. 352, and Lawrence B. Philip’s Dict. of Biog. Reference, which gives “Martial Guyet, French poet and translator, 17th century.”

[400] The False One, Act I., Scene 2.

[401] Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act II. Sc. 5. Weigall, The Life and Times of Cleopatra, pp. 245-6, makes the locus the harbour of Alexandria, not the Nile, and the modus, Antony’s diver affixing fresh fish to his hook. Cleopatra, guessing Antony’s ruse, assembled next day a party of notables to applaud the angler, but instructed a slave to dive from the other side of the vessel and the instant the hook touched the water attach to it a pickled Pontic fish. Cleopatram “ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?”

[402] A century or so before Oppian, Demostratus, a Roman Senator, wrote also ???e?t???—a work on Fishing of twenty books—which, although often quoted by ancient writers, is now not extant. From the extracts given by Ælian (XIII. 21, XV. 4 and 19) we gather that Demostratus, who wrote in Greek, had even more than a Greek love of the marvellous and cared nothing for the sober scientific study of his subject. It is noteworthy that an alternative title of his work was ????? ???e?t????, or, say, Fishing Yarns.

[403] Suetonius, Augustus, c. 83, classes fishing as one of Octavian’s chief relaxations.

[404] W. Christ, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur, ed. 3 (MÜnchen, 1898), p. 629, decides for Marcus Aurelius.

[405] As there are 3506 hexameters, the reward was over 3506 guineas sterling, which, without allowing for the increase in value of money between the second century and the twentieth, contrasts remarkably with the fourpence halfpenny a volume of Martial. According to Suidas, however, Oppian received from the Emperor 20,000 staters, which would be a far larger reward than Octavia bestowed on Virgil for his Æneid. It has been suggested that this largesse was not paid on all the verses of the Halieutica, but only on those in which Oppian records the prowess and sport of the Emperor in “The Virginia Water” of the CÆsars—where we learn from Eutropius (VII. 14) that Nero fished with golden nets drawn by purple ropes. If so the total would be a mere fraction of either the 3506 guineas or of the 16,000 guineas. Great doubt exists as to whether or not there were two poets named Oppian; and if there were, to which does the anonymous Greek Life of Oppian refer, and which of the two was the author of Ixeutica, for possibly it was to the author of this poem that the Imperial payment of gold was made. See W. H. Drummond’s paper in Royal Irish Academy, 1818. Also A. Ausfeld, De Oppiano et scriptis sub eius nomine traditis, Gotha, 1876.

[406] Cf. Prof. E. Browne, Literary History of Persia, vol. II., pp. 128-138, and Sir Gore Ouseley’s Biographies of Persian Poets, for the various Firdausi versions.

[407] “De quibus Oppianus Cilix est, poeta doctissimus, 153 esse genera piscium, quÆ omnia capta sunt ab Apostolis, et nihil remansit incaptum, dum et nobiles et ignobiles, divites et pauperes, et omne genus hominum de mari hujus sÆculi extrahitur ad salutem.” Comment. in Ezechiel. Cf. Ritter, op. cit., p. 376.

[408] N. H., XXXII. 53.

[409] The great objection to this translation, owing probably to the difficulty of expressing—certainly of compressing—the “intractable” subject matter in the rhymed verse adopted by the translators, is its weary verbiage: for instance, one passage of three lines in the translation needs twelve, and another of nine needs thirty! Diaper was the author of Nereides, or Sea-Eclogues.

[410] N. C. Apostolides, La PÊche en GrÈce (AthÈnes, 1907), p. 31. The selection of Aristotle as the prototype of philosophical inveighers against Tobacco by Thomas Corneille (Act I., Sc. 1, of Le Festin de Pierre),

is hardly happy, for, as the weed nicotine only reached Europe some nineteen centuries after the philosopher’s death, his “dise” equals rien!

[411] With d??a? and ???t??, cf. the p?e?t?? ?fasa in Archestratus (frag. xv. 6). See pp. 147 and 176 ff. of Paulus Brandt’s Parodorum epicorum GrÆcorum et Archestrati ReliquiÆ, Leipzig, 1888. Brandt argues that the expression describes a nassa, qua retis loco piscatores utebantur, and on the analogy of the Dalmatian fishermen (cf. Brehm, Thierleben, IV., vol. II. p. 533) who, when the sea is not quite calm, drop from the bow of the boat pebbles dipped in oil to make smooth the surface, and so more easily detect the fish, explains d??e?? ??f??? in Frag. XV. line 8. Although Archestratus’s statement that the fish are not to be seen (o?d’ ?s?de?? ?ss??s??), except by those who resort to the p?e?t?? ?fasa, and e???as? d??e?? ??f???, gives some colour to Brandt’s ingenious identification, the lack of any mention of the essential factor in such a calming operation, the oil, seems to rule it out.

[412] IV. 640. Cf. Oppian, cyneg., 4, 140 ff. for a similar description.

[413] This method, originating from the curiosity of fish and their desire (in Shelley’s words) “to worship the delusive flame,” is especially successful in rivers at the spawning season. In the Rhodian Laws—a code for the government of mariners and fishermen originally promulgated by Tiberius—occurs a special proviso, re fishing by means of torches, forbidding fishermen to display lights at sea, lest thereby they should deceive other vessels. It has been suggested, prettily, but I fear not practically, that leistering was learnt from the hunting habit and natural endowments of the Halcyon or Kingfisher; just as to the brilliancy of its colours and splendour of its flash the fish are attracted, so to the brightness of the torches and the shimmer of their rays come the salmon, etc.

[414] Cicero, de Nat. deor., II. 50, 127.

[415] Perhaps the best prose description of the power of the Echineis is to be found in Cassiodorus, Var., I. 35. Pliny, XXXII. 1, solemnly asserts that the death of the Emperor Caligula was presaged by a Remora stopping his great galley, alone out of all the accompanying fleet, on his voyage to Antium. Not only did the Remora stop a ship, but according to Pliny, it could, from its power of checking the natural actions of the body under excitement, hasten or stay an accouchement as well as a lawsuit: hence plaintiffs seldom ventured into the fish market, because the mere sight of a Remora at such a juncture was most inauspicious! (Pliny, IX. 41, and XXXII. 1). Cf. Aristotle, H. A., 2. 14, “?a? ????ta? t??e? a?t? p??? d??a? ?a? f??t?a.” For an explanation of the myth of the Remora, see V. W. Ekman, “On Dead Water,” in the Reports of Nansen’s Polar Expedition, Christiania, 1904.

[416] For a profoundly interesting study of the extant portrait-busts of Socrates, see A. Hekler, Greek and Roman Portraits (London, 1912), p. xi. f., with plates 19, 20, 21.

[417] The Torpedo was one of the food fishes of the ancients, and is represented with other fish on several of the Campanian-ware fish plates to be seen at the British Museum, e.g. Cat. Vases, vol. iv., p. 121, F. 268, which shows the small well in the centre of the plate used for fish sauce.

[418] Anth. Pal., XI. 414.

[419] Athen., VII. 90.

[420] N. H., XXXII. 6.

[421] Oppian, V. 66 ff.

[422] Cf. Pliny, IX. 68; Ælian, II. 13; Plutarch, De Sol. Anim., 31. With this pilot fish must be mentioned that other, so famous in New Zealand waters, “Pelorus Jack.” A cetacean of the Dolphin tribe, he regularly met the coastal steamers between Wellington and Nelson. The old Maori chief, Kipa Hemi, claimed that this fish, Kai Kai-a-waro, was not only the embodiment of his tribal Mana and his family guardian angel, but had guided his ancestor eleven generations before in his exploring of Cook Sound, etc.

[423] See W. Smith, Dict. Gk.-Rom. Biog. and Myth., s.v. ‘AthenÆus.’

[424] Athen., III. 46. From Faber, op. cit., p. 94, we learn that “the pinnotherus finds refuse in the shells of living bivalves, living on the small animalculÆ contained in the constant stream of water, which flows in and out of these molluscs. The fancy of the ancients has attributed the status existing between the two species as arising from a friendly alliance, protection and board afforded on the one hand, and watching against and warning of the approach of an enemy on the other. These observations descend from so early a date that we find the pinna and the crab among the Egyptian hieroglyphs, bearing the interpretation of the duty of paterfamilias to provide for his offspring.”

[425] The rendering of passages from AthenÆus (Deipn.) and from Pliny (N. H.) are usually Bohn’s.

[427] ?e?? ???? ?d??t?t??.

[428] See Smith’s Dict. Gk. and Rom. Biog. and Myth., s.v. ‘Ælian.’

[429] Perizonius has proved that Ælian transferred large portions of the DeipnosophistÆ of AthenÆus to his Varia Historia, a robbery which must have been committed almost in the lifetime of the pillaged author: that Ælian extended such transference to his Natural History also, his story of the Pinna, and others would seemingly demonstrate. Sir J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, ed. 2 (Cambridge, 1906), i. 336, goes so far as to say: “He is the author of seventeen books On Animals, mainly borrowed from Alexander of Myndos (first century a.d.).”

[430] Dr. W. J. Turrell, op. cit., XI., states that a Latin poem written by Richard de Fournival, about the thirteenth century, alludes incidentally to fishing, and from this it appears that the fly and the worm were among the lures then used by anglers, but does not state expressly whether Fournival’s fly was natural or artificial.

[431] Cf. H. Mayer, Sport with Rod and Line, Barnet and Phillips, New York.

[432] Jacobs adopts ????, instead of Gesner’s ???s?, chiefly because it is written thus quite clearly in the Codex Augustanus. It also seems to fit the context better.

[433] Die rÖmischen PrivataltertÜmer (Munich, 1911), pp. 529-30.

[434] ?a? pte????, ???sta ?? ?e????? ?a? ??as?? ?a? p????????. ????ta? ?e ?? o? ???e?? ?a? f???????? ?????? ?a? ???????s?, ?.t.?.

[435] ?a? pte??? ????? ???st? ????st?? p??s??t?ta?.

[436] If Sandys (antea, 185, note 4) be right about Ælian’s work being “mainly borrowed from Alexander of Myndos,” first century a.d., the artificial fly was probably well known in Martial’s time.

[437] p????? ?? ??? ?a? e?’ ???a? ?a? ???t?? ?????p??? ????? ?a? da?e?? ?a? ??sa?.

[438] For size of hooks, see antea, p. 157 and note 1.

[439] Cf. Arist., N. H., V. 19. The s????? of Aristotle is an immature product of generation which grows and finally becomes a pupa, or (so Aristotle believed) an egg giving birth to the perfect animal.

[440] Ep., II. 2; Carmina, XIX. and XXI. Fortunately for Sidonius, Clermont was in the Auvergne, so he could be at once piscator and episcopus.

[441] IX. 32. “In Aquitania salmo fluvialis marinis omnibus prefertur.” To make this clear piscibus should be understood after omnibus. The salmon is the fish most frequently found in the dÉbris of the French caves, many of which are in Aquitania, so PalÆolithic and Plinian man at any rate ate tooth to tooth in their preference. See Introduction. It is somewhat amazing, considering their opsophagy and the excellence of the fish, that down to 500 a.d. no Greek, and no Latin writer, except Pliny, Ausonius, and Sidonius, Ep. II. 2, mentions the SalmonidÆ. I cannot forgo Ausonius’s epithet—mouth-filling yet appropriate—for us, who dwell in “this blessed Isle, this England,” Aquilonigenasque Britannos.

[442] Salmon appear but infrequently in representations, but Plate 8 in C. W. King’s Roman Antiquities at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, London, 1879, shows in colours a mosaic dedicated to the god Nodons by Flavius Senilis, an officer in command of the fleet stationed off the Severn: this mosaic includes a number of salmon. King, ib. Plate 13, 2, is a diadem of beaten bronze representing a fisherman with a pointed cap in the act of hooking with undoubtedly a tight line a fine salmon: cf. A. B. Cook’s discussion of these finds in Folk-Lore, 1906, XVI. 37 ff. Nodons was in fact, like Nuada, a fish god, indeed a Celtic understudy for Neptune. If salmon figure little in representations, they bulk large in laws, and in commissariats for campaigns, e.g. 3000 dried salmon were ordered by Edw. II. in his war with Bruce.

[443] From Professor R. C. Jebbs’ Translation, p. 176 (line 240 ff.).

[444] Cf. Plutarch, Symp., IV. 4. “The place where we live is to fish no less than Hell: for no sooner come they unto it, but dead they immediately be.” Holland’s Translation.

[445] For the story of Glaucus, see Æsch., Frag. 28; Paus., IX. 22, 6 and 7; Virgil, Æn., VI. 36; and Athen., VII. 47, 8. Ausonius follows the version according to which Glaucus had been metamorphosed by Circe, and then on tasting the herb regained his human form as the “Old Man of the Sea.” Ovid, Met., XIII. 898 ff.

[446] Mosella, 88. “Purpureisque Salar stellatus tergora guttis,” and ibid., 129 f., “Qui necdum Salmo, necdum Salar, ambiguusque Amborum medio, sario, intercepte sub Ævo.”

[447] Mosella, 122 ff. Polemius Silvius, Index Dierum Festorum, more than half a century later, seems the second—such is the infrequency of mention.

[448] C. Mayhoff here prints J. Hardouin’s conjecture isox, which was based on Hesychius’ gloss, ?s?? ????? p???? ??t?d??.

[449] Cuvier and Valenciennes Histoire Naturelle des Poissons, vol. XVIII., pp. 279-80 (Paris, 1846). See Introduction. If the Pike be late in literature, in heraldry it makes amends, for there is no earlier example of fish borne in English heraldry than is afforded by the Pike in the arms of the family of Lucy, or Lucius—a play on words not confined to heraldry but to be found in Shakespeare, Puttenham, and others. See Moule, op. cit., p. 49.

[450] For the attempt to identify the Esox with the Huso made by a French writer, apud Vincentium, XVII. 53, and with the Salmon by other writers, see J. G. Schneider, op. cit., pp. 24 and 126.

[451] Ælian, N. H., XVII. 32.

[452] The epigram on Pope Lucius III. (1181 to 1185 a.d.), who was banished from Rome for his tyranny and exactions, is, both as a comparison and a contrast, apt.

[453] Athen., VII. 86; “The ???a? has his name from his voracity, ?a??t??” (cf. Opp., II. 130). It is said also in shrewdness he is superior to other fish, being very ingenious in devising means to save himself, wherefore Aristophanes the comedian writes:

[454] Op. cit. II. 127 ff.

[455] Op. cit. I. 30.

[456] De Virtute B. Martini, III. 13.

[457] The biggest Pike ever caught in the United Kingdom seems to be the 72-pounder mentioned by Colonel Thornton in his “Sporting Tour.” Walton’s ring-decorated fish (see Gesner), three hundred years or so old, was no doubt heavier, if it were genuine. At any rate a Pike of 40-50 lbs. is very exceptional.

[458] The value of the herring (Clupea harengus) was unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and so remained generally till the Middle Ages. “Ignorance, presumably of the real nature of the Cetaceans betrayed our forefathers into breaking Lent, for under the impression that the whale, porpoise, and seal were fish, they ate them on fast days. High prices, moreover, were paid for such meats, and porpoise pudding was a dish of State as late as the sixteenth century” (P. Robinson, Fisheries Exhibition Literature, Pt. III. p. 42). Some laxity may, I think, be pardoned, for the very name “porpoise” (in Guernsey pourpeis)—derived apparently from porc-peis (porcum + piscem)—implies that the creature was regarded as a “pig-fish.”

[459] Cf. Chapter IV. Also Plutarch, Symp., VIII. 8, and Aristoph., Ach., 880.

[460] Akin to this we have the special prohibition—unique as far as I know—whereby priests at the temple of Leptis abstained from eating sea fish, because Poseidon was god of the sea, and owner and protector of its denizens. Plutarch, De solert. an., 35, 11. At other of his temples, e.g. in Laconia, the fate awaiting a violator of the sacred fish was that common to poachers of similar holy waters, death.

[461] The Love of Nature among the Romans (London, 1912), p. 300, n. 1.

[462] Passages which at first sight seem to conflict with this summary can often be ruled out from (A) geographical reasons, where (1) the fishing occurs in some non-Greek water, as in the Tiber (Galen, pe?? t??f?? d???e??, 3), or (2) the locality is not specified, as in Athen., VIII. 56, which is merely a quotation from a treatise of Mnesitheus, concerned with all kinds of fish from a digestive point of view; and (B) from the brackish nature of water.

[463] Dio. Cass. 76, 12, 2, speaks of the Scottish Seas as swarming and crammed with fish.

[464] Damm, p. 465, asserts that the order of eating of fish among the Greeks was (1) Fish from the sea, and then, but much later, (2) Fish from the rapids of a river. Daremberg and Saglio: “Pour les Grecs le poisson d’eau douce comptait À peine dans la consommation du poisson de mer: seules les anguilles du lac CopaÏs avaient quelque renom. Mais la pÊche maritime eut toujours beaucoup plus d’importance.” Pliny, XXXII. 10: Pisces marinos in usu fuisse protinus a condita Roma. Philemon the comedian makes the cook in his play, “The Soldier” (cited by Athen., VII. 32), bewail having for the feast mere,

[465] See infra, p. 287.

[466] Suetonius (Tib., 34), “Tresque mullos triginta milibus nummum.” A thousand sesterces, in the time of Augustus, equalled £8 17s. 1d., but later only £7 15s. 1d. For convenience I take 1000 sesterces as roughly equivalent to about £8 0s. 0d.

[467] An amusing instance of official interference is recorded in Apuleius, Metamorhp. I. 18. Lucius, the hero of the story, tries to buy some fish for dinner from a fishmonger at Hypata in Thessaly, who demanded 100 nummi (denarii): after much haggling, 20 denarii’s worth is bought and being taken home, when the local Ædile intervenes, seizes the parcel on account of the extravagant charge, and destroys the fish in the presence of the seller. The result, which Lucius bewails, was loss of both dinner, and denarii!

[468] See Mayor’s Juvenal and Gifford’s Trans., IV. 15. In Pliny, IX. 31, Mutianus speaks of a mullet which was caught in the Red Sea, weighing 80 lbs. The comment of I. D. Lewis (on Juv., IV. 15 f.) that this fish “is utterly fabulous,” is not the voice of one crying in the wilderness.

[469] IX. 31, “at nunc coci triumphorum pretiis parantur, et coquorum pisces.”

[470] Ep., X. 31 f.

[471] Sat., IV. 23 ff. (Gifford’s Trs.).

[472] VIII. 16. Cf. also Varro, De Re Rust., Bk. III. 3, 10; Ælian, VIII. 4; and Macrobius, Sat., III. xv. 1 ff.

[473] Athen., VIII. 26.

[474] Ibid. VIII. 26.

[475] Xenophon, in speaking of a man as “an opsophagist and the biggest dolt possible,” evidently does not subscribe to the pleasant theory that fish-food increases the grey matter of our brain. Holland’s translation of Plutarch is not complimentary: “hence it is we call those gluttons who love belly-cheer so well opsophagists.”

[476] In charity to the Greeks may I hazard the plea (the rules of even the Law Courts are now sensibly relaxed) that their delight in Brobdingnagian meals may have originated in the days when their gods walked with men on earth, or grew up later as the sincerest form of flattery? No one in Homer keeps his eye more skinned or his nose more active than a god, when hecatombs “are about.” The Olympians flit constantly to Æthiopia and are impatient of any business, mundane or heavenly, which interferes with a trip thither, when with the keen scent (or vision?) of vultures, they smell (or see?) hecatombs in preparation in the heart of the Dark Continent, where the inhabitants, as a scholiast tells us, kept a feast for twelve days, one for every god! See A. Shewan’s Homeric Games at an Ancient St. Andrews (Edinburgh, 1911), p. 116—a most delightful and destructive skit at the expense of The Higher Criticism of Homer!

[477] The greatest number of fish which I can count at any feast mentioned in AthenÆus (in Bk. IV. 13) amounts to only thirty-two! Badham (p. 587) omits to state that the whole poem is nothing but a parody, chiefly of Homer, by Matron, and is not a “Bill of fare of an Attic supper” in any sense.

[478] Sammonicus Serenus, a savant of the early third century a.d., states that the acipenser was brought to table to the accompaniment of flutes by servants crowned with flowers. Cf. Macrob. III. 16, 7 f. Cf. Athen. VII. 44, and Ælian, VIII. 28.

In describing this imaginary Attic supper, Badham certainly lets himself go. The allusion to “the present of the God of Love” he may have taken from an anonymous epigram in Burmann’s Anthologia (1773), Bk. V. 217.

These lines, of which several variants exist (notably that of the Rose Cellar in the Rathskeller of Bremen), are founded on the legend that Cupid bribed the God of Silence with his mother’s flower not to divulge the amours of Venus. Hence a host hung a rose over his table as a sign that nothing there said was to be repeated. A quaint and touching legend runs that in the beginning all roses were white, but when Venus walking one day among the flowers was pricked by one of their thorns, these roses “drew their colour from the blood of the goddess,” and remained encarmined for ever. Cf. Natal. Com. Mythol., V. 13. See also A. de Gubernatis, La Mythologie des Plantes (Paris, 1882), II. 323, and R. Folkard, Plant Lore, Legends, and Lyrics (London, 1884), 516 ff.

[479] Cf. Ausonius, Id., XIV. 39, and 43.

[480] Suet., Vitell. 13.

[481] For Vitellius’s habit, see Dion., 65. 2.

[482] Adrian had the good taste to melt it down.

[483] Thomson’s translation. The mania for expensive bowls obtained in either nation: the philosopher Aristotle owned 70, while Æsop, the tragic actor, paid £8000 for a single ewer. The histrionic, as Æsop and Roscius show, was a most lucrative profession. Cf. Pliny, XXXV. 46.

[484] According to Dion., 65. 4, and Tacitus, Hist., II. 95.

[485] Tac., loc. cit., “noviens milies sestertium paucissimis mensibus intervertisse creditur sagina.”

[486] Herodot., VII. 118-120, Athen., IV. 27.

[487] See AthenÆus (V. 46), who is so struck that he quotes the passage twice! The culinary accommodations must have been “prodeegeous!” At the birthday feast of a mere Persian grandee, an ox and an ass, and other animals that were his, even a horse and a camel, were roasted whole in stoves (or ovens). Herodot., I. 133.

[488] V. 25-35.

[489] “The Treatise we now possess is a sort of Cook-Confectioners’ Manual, containing a multitude of recipes for preparing and cooking all kinds of flesh, fish, and fowl. From the solecisms of style it is probable that it was compiled at a late period by one who prefixed the name of Apicius in order to attract attention and insure the circulation of his book.”—Smith’s Dict. Gk. Rom. Biog. and Myth.

Teuffel and Schwabe, History of Roman Literature (trans. G. C. W. Warr, London, 1892), II. 28 f., point out that Coelius Apicius, the traditional author of the work de re coquinaria, should rather be Coelii Apicius, i.e. “the Apicius of Coelius,” Apicius being the title and Coelius the writer. The book was founded on Greek originals.

In Seneca (ad. Helv., 10), “sestertium milies in culinam consumpsit.” See Martial, III. 22, who flays Apicius with biting scorn in his—

For C. Matius the earliest (in the time of Augustus) and for other Latin writers on Cookery, see Columella, XXI. 4 and 44.

[490] See A. Hayward, Art of Dining.

[491] Anaxandrides, Odysseus, frag. 1. ap. Athen., VI. 11. See also Athen., VI. 4-12; VII. 35-41; Livy, XXXIX. 6: “Tum coquus, vilissimum antiquis mancipium et Æstimatione et usu, in pretio esse, et quod ministerium fuerat, ars haberi coepta”; and Martial, XIV. 220.

[492] Porphyra, frag. 1. ap. Athen., VI. 6.

[493] ??? p??s?? s. 26. The opening (s. 1) of the auction is not unlike a modern one: “For Sale! a varied assortment of Live Creeds, Tenets of every description. Cash on delivery, or credit on suitable security!” While lot (in s. 26)—The Peripatetic—fetches £80 0s. 0d., the great Diogenes (in s. 11) is knocked down for threepence! Fowler’s Trs.

[494] Ausonius, Epist., 5 and 15. But, after all, our own Keats, addressing his favourite Moon, did not hesitate to write:

[495] Pliny, IX. 79: “Is (Sergius Orata) primus ... adiudicavit quando eadem aquatilium genera aliubi atque aliubi meliora, sicut lupi pisces in Tiberi amne inter duos pontes ... et alia genera similiter, ne culinarum censura peragatur.” See Horace, Sat., II. 2, 31 ff. Also Columella, R.R., VIII. 16, 4: “Fastidire docuit fluvialem lupum, nisi quem Tiberis adverso torrente defatigasset”; and also Juvenal IV. 139 ff.:

More of the same sort is to be read in Macrob., Sat., III. 16, 16-18.

[496] Robinson, op. cit., p. 45.

[497] Æsch., Proteus, frag., 211; Nauck², and Soph., Triptolemos, frag. 606, Jebb, ap. Poll. 6. 65 and Athen., II. 75.

[498] Pauly-Winowa, Real-Enc., VII. 841-9, has nine columns on the subject, ending with a bibliography!

[499] Horace, Sat., II. 4. 73; Martial, III. 77. 5; and V. ii., 94. The greatest delicacy of all these mixtures, the so-called Garum Sociorum, exported all over the Empire from Carteia, New Carthage, etc., was compounded of the intestines of the Spanish Mackerel. The absence of beard in the Mackerel is accounted for by this fish being convicted of treason against the reigning Monarch, and condemned to perpetual loss of beard. Keller, op. cit., 326, omits a reference to this Fischeprozess, but cites the habit of writers—especially Bucolic—explaining any natural curiosity by putting into poetic or other shape a legend or Volkslied dealing with the point, e.g. Æsop’s fable why the Camel lacks horns.

[500] Pliny, XXXI. 43: “singulis milibus nummum permutantibus congios fere binos.” Ibid., 44: “transiit deinde in luxuriam creveruntque genera ad infinitum, sicuti garum ad colorem mulsi veteris, adeoque suavitatem dilutum, ut bibi possit.” Cf. Martial, Ep., XIII. 82. 2: “Nobile nunc sitio luxuriosa garum, and CÆlius Aurelianus” (De Chronicis, II.; De Paralysi), on the liquor extracted from the Scomber.

[501] Cf. XXXI. 44, and XXXII. 25.

[502] If O. Keller, op. cit., 338, be right in his authorities, Blakey’s, “the praise of Caviare is frequent,” is far astray. Despite the view of Hullmann’s Handelsgesch. d. Gr., 149, AthenÆus deals merely with garum and oxygarum, while the classical cookery books maintain a uniform silence.

[503] Athen., III. 90.

[504] Fasti, VI. 239 ff.

[505] Agatharchides, frag. 1 ap. Athen., VII. 50. In these days of the Science of Comparative Curiosity and International Meddling the answer of the Boeotian to a foreigner asking how so singular a victim and sacrifice originated rings out pleasantly refreshing: “I only know one thing: it is right to maintain the customs of one’s ancestors, and it is not right to explain them to foreigners!”

[506] Athen., VIII. 8.

[507] Ælian, XV. 6.

[508] Athen., VII. 50, and Paulus Rhode, Thynnorum Captura (LipsiÆ, 1890), p. 71. Most of the major deities—e.g. Diana, Apollo, Mercury, Juno, Neptune, Ceres, and Venus—claimed a particular sacrificiable fish or fishes. Sometimes fishes were offered to two or more gods, e.g. the mullet to Ceres and Proserpine. Cf. J. G. Stuck, Sacrorum et sacrificiorum gentil. descriptio, ii. p. 72.

[509] ?????? d? ??s??? ??de?? ??d? ?e?e?s??? ?st??.

[510] Hermes (1887), XXII. 86. 100. The reason here stated for the Eel being sacrificiable was because it could be brought alive to the altar and its blood poured out on it. Stengel’s argument, especially in association with his remark that sacrifices of fish were as scarce as those of game, is not convincing, for why should not other fishes be kept alive in water till the hour of oblation? The belief in the sanctity of the Eel pertains even unto our day, for in the spring at Bergas (between the Dardanelles and Lapsaki) they are or were before the War inviolate.

[511] Fasti, III. 339 ff.

[512] Festus, p. 274, 35 ff. W. Lindsay.

[513] Plutarch, Symp., VIII. 8. 4.

[514] De Lingua Latina, 6. 20 (in his description of the Volcanalia).

[515] F. Boehm, De symbolis Pythagoreis (Berlin, 1905), p. 19, would connect the fish-offering of the Volcanalia with the belief that the soul took the form of a fish. G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der RÖmer,² (MÜnchen, 1912), p. 229, m. 13.

[516] Cf., however, Keller, op. cit., 348.

[517] Pliny, IX. 22, and XXXII. 8. Ælian, VIII. 5; XII. 1. Athen. VIII. 8, Plutarch, De soll. Anim. ch. 23. Hesych. s.v. Soura.

[518] Pliny, XXXI. 18.

[519] De Re Rust., III. 17, 4.

[520] Suetonius, Augustus, 96. The subject of oracular fish is dealt with by A. BouchÉ-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination (Paris, 1879), i. p. 151 f., and also by W. R. Halliday, Greek Divination, p. 168, n. 3.

[521] O. Keller, op. cit., 347.

[522] The cause, sympathy with their owners, mentioned by Robinson, op. cit., 88-9, hardly recommends itself.

[524] Nonnius, op. cit., p. 155. Apart from fashionable mania, the salsamentum was used for very practical purposes, e.g. as food for the Athenian soldier on campaign. Cf. Aristoph., Ach., 1101, 2. From the frequent notices and quotations in AthenÆus, Euthydemus the Athenian seems to have been the most prolific author on pickled fish. On him and his three treatises, see Pauly-Winowa, Real. Enc., VI. 1505.

[525] À propos of the fish-trade of Olbia, Koehler (in the MÉm. de l’Acad. des Sciences de St. Petersburg, VI^me sÉrie, tome 1, p. 347, St. Petersburg, 1832, as quoted by E. H. Minns, Scythians and Greeks, Cambridge, 1913, p. 440) concludes that preserved fish of every quality, from jars of precious pickle, corresponding to our caviare or anchovy, to dried lumps answering to our stock-fish were all sent to Greece, and later to Rome, from the mouths of DnÊpr and the sea of Azov. As regards some of the small copper coins of Olbia, Mr. G. F. Hill, A Handbook of Greek and Roman Coins (London, 1899), p. 3, writes: “If these are coins, they differ from the ordinary Greek coin only in the fact that, instead of putting a fish type on a flan of ordinary shape, the whole coin was made in the shape of a fish. Another explanation is suggested by the fact that a pig of metal was sometimes called de?f??. These fish-shaped pieces may be the degenerate representatives of similar-shaped pigs of bronze.” He refers to Ardaillon, Les Mines du Laurin, p. 111, who compares the French saumon with the meaning of “a pig of metal.”

[526] In Pitra, op. cit., pp. 508-512, will be found a list of 156 coins, gems, etc., illustrating the connection of various fishes with deities and places. For the coins of Carteia, see A. Heiss, Description gÉnÉrale des monnaies antiques de l’Espagne, Paris, 1870, p. 331 f., pl. 49, 19-21 (= my Fig. supra). The salsamentum of this town was in special request; its boasted excellence might be perhaps accounted for by Strabo’s statement that the diet of the Tunnies off Carteia consisted of acorns which grew in that sea, just as land acorns with an occasional truffle achieve, according to gourmets, for the Spanish pig the primacy of hams. Alas! for such conjecture, science shows that the Tunny throve on Fucus vesiculosus, not acorns. Cf. Keller, op. cit. 383.

[527] B. V. Head, Historia Mumorum, Oxford, 1911, p. 67: “These little coins formed the staple of the common currency in the Tarentine fish-markets, as well as in the rural districts subject to Tarentum, and even beyond its territories—in Apulia and Samnium for instance.”

[528] Some authorities (Preller, Griech. Myth., I. 191) believe the head to be that of Artemis, not only the protectress of Arethusa, but also the goddess of rivers and springs, and of the fish therein—one of her emblems was a fish. Some coins show her or Arethusa’s head with seaweed plaited in the hair, or the hair plaited in a sort of fish-net surrounded by little fish. The whole island of Ortygia was absolutely dedicated to Artemis—no plough could cut a furrow, no net ensnare a fish, without instantly encountering a sea of troubles. See Keller, op. cit., p. 343. The sacred fish were seen by Diodorus (V. 3) as late as Octavian’s reign.

[529] For an admirable account of Syracusan coin-types during the ‘fine’ period (413-346 b.c.), see G. F. Hill, Coins of Ancient Sicily (London, 1903), p. 97 ff., with frontispiece and pls. 6-7. On the widespread representation of the Tunny on vases and coins—Carthaginian, Pontic, etc.—see Rhode, op. cit., pp. 73-77.

[530] See G. F. Hill, op. cit., Pl. 7, 13.

[531] L. Siret, Questions de chronologie et ethnographie ibÉriques (Paris, 1913), Index, s.v. ‘Poulpe.’

[532] Cf. Tacitus, Annals, XII. 63.

[533] De Re Rustica, VIII. 16, “Our ancestors shut up salt-water fishes also in fresh waters. For that ancient rustic progeny of Romulus and Numa valued themselves mightily upon this and thought it a great matter, that, if a rural life were compared with a city life, it did not come short in any part of riches whatsoever.”

[534] “Orata,” according to Festus, p. 196, 26 ff. Lindsay, “genus piscis appellatur a colore auri, quod rustici orum dicebant.”

[535] See ante, p. 146. If he praise our oysters, he straightly condemns the pearls from them, as being “small and discoloured;” wherefore (IX. 57) Julius CÆsar, when he presented a thorax to Venus Genetrix, had it made of British “pearls,” a very poor requital to a goddess, who, if Suetonius is to be trusted, had so often stood him in good stead, both as a distant ancestress, and in other connections! Some really fine pearls have been found in Scotland and Wales: the best known of these, got at Conway in the eighteenth century, was presented to Catherine of Braganza, and is still preserved in the Crown jewels. Wright, op. cit., p. 220.

[536] Pliny, XXXII. 21.

[537] Athen., I. 13; cf. Suidas, s.v. ?st?ea.

[538] Euphron, incert. fab. frag. 1, quoted by Athen., I. 13.

[539] Cf. Varro, De Re Rust., 3. 12, 1, and Plin., 9. 82.

[540] Petronius, 120, 88, expelluntur aquÆ saxis, mare nascitur arvis.

[541] Lucullus, enriched by the vast booty captured from Mithridates and Tigranes, was the first who taught luxury to the Romans (Athen., VI. 109). Polybius (31, 24) writes that M. Porcius Cato denounced the introduction of foreign extravagances into Rome, citing as instances that for a jar of pickled fish from Pontus 300 drachmÆ had been paid, and that the price of a beautiful boy exceeded that of a field.

[542] De Re Rustica, III. 17.

[543] De Re Rustica, VIII. 16. Cf. also Juvenal, V. 94 ff.—

and Seneca, Ep., 89, 22—

[544] The explanation for this by Nonnius, op. cit., p. 75—that the Greek coasts, from being surrounded on all sides by seas, yielded ample supplies of fish, while the Romans, “whose seas were not so near,” were not as fortunate and were compelled to be more instant in pisciculture—is a statement at the best doubtful, and certainly not supported by the existence of vivaria in Sicily, lapped on every side by seas.

[545] The existence of such gigantic craft has been called in question, but is proved by an inscription from the temple of the Paphian Aphrodite in Cyprus, which commemorates a builder of an e???s???? and a t??a???t???? (W. Dittenberger, Orientis GrÆci Inscriptiones SelectÆ (LipziÆ, 1903), I. 64, no. 39). See also, L. Whibley, A Companion to Greek Studies (Cambridge, 1916), p. 584 f. Athen., V. 40-44. Caligula built two ships for cruising and fishing up and down the Campanian coast: their poops blazed with jewels. They were fitted up with ample baths, galleries, and saloons, while a great variety of vines and fruit trees were cultivated. Suetonius, Cal. 37. Divers have discovered at the bottom of Lake Nemi two imperial house-boats of enormous size, the timbers of which are decked with bronze reliefs of magnificent workmanship. See V. Malfatti, Le navi romane del lago di Nemi, 1905.

[546] Op. cit., p. 246.

[547] Cf. Tibullus, II. 3. 45.

[548] Pliny, IX. 81.

[549] Plutarch, De Sol. Anim., 23.

[550] De Re Rustica, III. 17. This abstinence on the part of Hortensius from eating his “mulli barbati” is the more to be appreciated, when we remember that, according to Sophron, the savour of the “barbati” was far pleasanter than that of any other mullet. Athen., VII. 126.

[551] Martial, Ep., IV. 30, 4.

and Martial, X. 30, 22.

Cicero, Ep. ad Att., XX. I., “Our leading people think that they attain unto Heaven if they own in their ponds bearded mullets, who will come to them to be stroked.” Cf. Lucian (De Dea Syria, 45-48). Ælian, VIII. 4, confirms these statements, and in 12. 30, tells of a spring in Caria sacred to Zeus, in which were kept eels decked with earrings and chains of gold, while Pliny, XXXII. 8, writes that at the Temple of Venus at Hierapolis, of which Lucian speaks as an eye-witness, “adveniunt pisces exornati auro.” This practice is, and has been, world-wide. “Fishes though little have long ears,” is an old Chinese proverb. “In Japan fish are summoned to dinner by melodious gongs. In India, I have seen them called out of the muddy depths of the river at Dohlpore by the ringing of a handbell, while carp in Belgium answer at once to the whistle of the monks who feed them, and in far away Otaheite, the chiefs have pet eels, whom they whistle to the surface” (Robinson, op. cit., p. 14). Cf. Athen., VIII. 3, “and I myself and very likely many of you too have seen eels having golden and silver earrings, taking food from any one who offered it to them.” The Egyptians similarly adorned their crocodiles with gold earrings. Herod. 2. 69.

[552] VII. 18.

[553] IX. 39.

[554] De Ira, III. 40.

[555] For eels devouring the flesh of a corpse, see Iliad, 203 and 353.

[556] Aristophanes, Frogs, 474 f., ?a?t?s?a ??a??a, a great dainty (Varro, ap. Gell., 6. 16. 5), is of course meant to suggest Tartarus. Contrast with this, the popularity of the fish, as attested by its frequent mention, especially in Plautus, and by the fact which Helbig (Camp. WandgemÄlde (Leipzig, 1868), Index, p. 496, s.v. “MurÄne”) brings out, that on the mural decorations of Pompeii no fish finds more frequent representation.

[557] De Re Rustica, VIII. 16, “Quamobrem non solum piscinas, quas ipsi construxerant, frequentabant sed etiam quos rerum natura lacus fecerat convectis marinis seminibus replebant. Et lupos auratasque procreaverunt ac siqua sint alia piscium genera dulcis undÆ tolerantia.”

What fish Columella meant by Aurata is not settled: it is certainly not the “gold-fish,” as some translate, for they are not sea-fish. Facciolati, after saying that the name came from the fish having golden eyebrows, goes on that “some folk deny that he can be identified with the ‘gilthead’ or ‘dory.’” Perhaps the fish is one of the SparidÆ group, which pass at certain seasons of the year from the Mediterranean into salt-water fish marshes, as observed by Aristotle, and confirmed by M. Duhamel. Or can it be the smelt?

Faber, pp. 37, 38, “of fresh-water fishes, twenty-one species, among them the fresh-water Perch, are also common to the sea: amongst the sea fishes, the flounder frequents brackish water, and sometimes enters the rivers: others only occasionally frequent the lagoons and brackish waters, among them the Gilthead,” a statement incidentally confirmed by Martial (Ep. XIII. 90) in his helluous pronunciamento, that practically the only really good Aurata was that whose haunt was the Lucrine lake, and whose whole world was its oyster! of which fish Martial (XIII. 90) seems only appreciative,

[558] Faber, op. cit., 86. Cf. Revue Contemporaine, June 30 and July 15, 1854, where the fisheries at Comacchio are described at length.

[559] Trans., by Diaper and Jones (London, 1722—see supra, p. 177), which I usually employ. Cf. III. 84: ???a d’ a???a t??a d?????af??? ???a ???p??. Fishing nets from Pompeii, even now almost entire, are to be found in Italian Museums. The best times for hauling up the nets were (according to Arist., N. H., VIII. 19) “just about sunrise and sunset. Fishermen speak of these as ‘nick-of-time’ (??a???) hauls. The fact is that at these times fishes are particularly weak-sighted” (D’Arcy Thompson, Trs.). Pliny, IX. 23, practically copies Aristotle.

[560] Alciphr., Epist., 1. 17.

[561] A terra-cotta relief of the type known as “Median,” c. 460 b.c., in Brit. Mus. Cat. of Terra-cottas, No. B. 372, Pl. 20, shows a fisherman holding two fishes, or a fish and a purse, and as if in the act of pulling in a net. This a very early exemplar of Greek Netting.

[562] Cf. the rod of Heracles on a black-figured vase published by C. Lenormant and J. de Witte, Élite des Monuments CÉramographiques, Vol. III., Plate 14. The Rod is 8 cm. and the Line is 6 cm.

[563] Od., 12, 251. Cf. the same phrase in Od., 10, 293, for Circe’s magic wand.

[564] Plutarch, de Sol., 24, commends those of a stallion as longest and strongest, of a gelding next, and of a mare least, because of the weakness of the hairs due to her urination.

[565] Ælian, N. H., XII. 43. See Introduction.

[566] Plutarch, de Sol., 24.

[567] It is of great interest to note that according to Langdon (see Jewish Chapter), probably in Sumerian, and certainly in Hebrew, the word equalling hook, in its primary sense equals thorn, which strongly suggests, if it do not absolutely prove, that the ancients employed, as do even now the catchers of flat fish in Essex, and the Indians in Arizona, a thorn as their primitive hook. In Latin hamus signifies hook and thorn. Cf. Ovid (Nux., 113-116).

[568] Waldstein and Shoobridge, Herculaneum (London, 1908), p. 95, “The only industry which has left much trace is fishing; hooks, cords, floats, and nets were found in much abundance.”

[569] See antea, p. 157, and note 1. According to Petrie, Tools and Weapons (London, 1917), p. 37 f.: “The European fish-hooks do not appear before the fonderia age: in Greece and Roman Italy hooks are common.” G. Lafaye, in Daremberg and Saglio, op. cit., III. 8. s.v. “hamus,” gives figure 3696, a simple bronze hook, figure 3697, a small double hook in the Museum at Naples, figure 3698, a quadruple hook (four bronze barbs attached to the angles of a square plate of lead), and figure 3699, a bronze hamus catenatus. H. B. Walters—Catalogue of the Bronzes, Greek, Roman, and Etruscan in British Museum (London, 1899), Nos. 38 and 39—describes, but does not figure, two hooks of the MycenÆan period from Rhodes, 2 inches and 2⁷/₈ inches long, which are dated about 1450 b.c. Petrie, loc. cit., states that the “usual pattern of the Greek-Romans is, as figured in No. 100, while 101 and 102 are the limits of size.”

[570] Op. cit., Pl. 378.

[571] Bk. II. 556.

[572] Bk. III. 138-148.

[573] Ovid, Hal., 38 f.; cf. Oppian, III. 482 ff.

[574] Pliny, N. H., XXXII. 5; Ovid, Hal., 44 ff.; Plutarch, De Sol. Anim., 25. This trick is also characteristic of the Armado of the Parana river, but its enormous strength enables it also either to jerk the paddle of the fisher away, or to capsize the boat. Cf. S. Wright, The Romance of the World’s Fisheries (London, 1908), p. 208.

[575] Pliny, IX. 67, taken totidem verbis from Aristotle, N. H., II. 17, and IX. 51.

[576] The fisherman on the Mosaic from the Hall of the MystÆ in Melos (R. C. Bosanquet, in the Jour. of Hellenic Studies (1898), xviii. 60 ff., Pl. 1) appears to have been using a glass bottle half-filled with wine as a lure. The inscription ????? ?? ??O? is generally taken to be late Greek for “Everything here except water” (which will be supplied by the next rainfall). But the words might be legitimately rendered: “Only let no water be used”—a natural exclamation from the devotees of the wine-god! Prof. Bosanquet, despite his fine sense of humour, has missed the double entendre.

[577] For the poisoning of the Tunny, cf. Aristot., N. H., VIII. Cakes made of cyclamen and clay were let down near the lurking places of the fish, according to Oppian.

[578] With one method of fishing the ancients (in common with nearly all the moderns) were unfamiliar. The locus is off Catalina Island, etc.: the modus is by kites with line and bait attached, to which last, moving over and on the surface of the water, the Tuna seems irresistibly attracted. See antea, p. 41, note 3.

[579] Cf. Apostolides, op. cit., p. 31.

[580] Bk. IV. 308 ff. Cf. Ælian, I. 23.

[581] Cf. Oppian, IV. 375 ff. I. Walton, citing the Sargus as an example of “the lustful fish,” quotes Dubartas, “because none can express it better than he does,” whose last two lines, as examples of this perfect expression, I cannot resist,

[582] But in confirmation of “this statement of Ælian,” Badham, had he taken the trouble, could have found several others by that and other authors. Thus Ælian, XVII. 18, of the Sea-roach. Ibid., VI. 31, of the Crab, which on hearing the flute and singing would not only quit the sea, but follow the retreating singer to dry land, and capture! Ælian, VI. 32, of the Thrissa states that it was caught by singing to it, and by the noise of shell clappers which induced the fish to dance itself into the Nets and boats. Cf. also AthenÆus, VII. 137, where the Trichias is so delighted with singing and dancing, that when it hears music it leaps out of the sea and is enticed on land! Cf. also Herodotus, I. 141, for the story of Cyrus likening the Ionians to dancing fish. Not only were there fish that delighted in music and singing, like the dolphin (Pliny, IX. 8, musicÆ arti, mulcetur symphoniÆ cantu, sed prÆcipue hydrauli sono), but according to Philostephanus there were others, that themselves made music, like the PoeciliÆ, who “sang like thrushes” (cf. Pliny, XI. 112). Of singing fish Pausanias, VIII. 21. 2, says, “among the fish in the Aroanius are the so-called spotted fish: they say that they sing like a thrush. I saw them after they were caught, but I did not hear them utter a sound, though I tarried by the river till sunset, when they were said to sing most.”

[583] The head of the ox was Thor’s bait when fishing for the monstrous Midhgardh serpent. See D. P. Chantepie de la Saussaye, The Religion of the Teutons (Boston, 1902), p. 242. C. A. Parker, The Ancient Crosses of Gosforth, Cumberland (London, 1896), p. 74 ff., describes and figures a relief representing Thor’s fishing. In this we see the line (below the boat) with an ox’s head, surrounding which are several enormous fishes.

[584] For ??a, “support,” perhaps we should read ???a, “protection,” i.e. against erosion.

[585] See Forest and Stream, Nov. 7, 1914.

[586] The shark finds great favour among the negroes; “you can swallow him in de dark,” is a commendation based on the absence of small tricky bones, such as the shad’s. But to the best black gourmets, the fish only attains its highest perfection in soup, after being buried for two weeks! The cook of the friend with whom I was staying in Jamaica only consented to cutting up my shark, on condition that if a gold watch was found in its belly, that was to be her perquisite—a condition postulated, I eventually discovered, because on a similar occasion one hundred years before, her grandmother did discover a gold watch. Alas for her! two ship-bolts of iron were her only treasure-trove.

[587] N. H., VI. 13.

[588] De Anim., VIII. 3, p. 262.

[589] Theodore Gill, “The Remarkable Story of a Greek Fish,” Washington Univ. Bull., Jan. 1907, pp 5-15.

[590] N. H., VI. 13.

[591] XIV. 8.

[592] Hal., IV. 450 ff.

[593] “Bobbing for eels,” with a bunch of worms on worsted is of like principle, but lacks the pneumatic touch. The eels seem to get their teeth caught in the worsted, and are pulled out before they can let go. See antea, p. 42, for the garfish of the Solomon Islands being caught from a kite by a hookless spider’s web.

[594] Equites, 864 ff.

[595] Fishing by “stirring up the mud,” is known in India. The agents employed for the trampling in the pools are elephants ranged in close order: the beasts enter thoroughly into the sport. Cf. G. P. Sanderson, Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts in India.

[596] Herodotus, II. 72, who states that it was sacred to the Nile.

[597] Ælian, VIII. 4; Plutarch, Mor., 976A. See Chapter XVI. ante.

[598] AthenÆus, VII. 50.

[599] Antiphan., Lykon frag. 1, 1 ff., ap. Athen., 755.

[600] Anaxandr., ???e??, frag. 1, 5 f.; ap. Athen., 7, 55.

[601] Contrast with the Greeks and Romans the abstention from the MurÆnidÆ by the Egyptians, Jews, Mussulmans, and Highlanders; in the case of the last, however, the abstention was due to no religious injunction but to physical loathing.

Fuller on the derivation of the Isle of Ely is too quaint to omit: “When the priests of this part of the country would still retain their wives in spite of what Pope and monks could do to the contrary, their wives and children were miraculously turned into eels, whence it had the name of Ely. I consider it a lie.” That Ely is derived from the abundance of Eels taken there has the ancient authority of Liber Eliensis (II. 53). J. B. Johnston, The Place-Names of England and Wales (London, 1915), p. 250, takes Ely to mean the “eel-island.” He adds, however, that Skeat regarded Elge, Bede’s spelling of the name, as “eel-region,” the second element in the compound, ge, being a very rare and early Old English word for “district” (cf. German, Gau). Isaac Taylor, Names and Histories (London, 1896), s.v. Ely, states that rents were there paid in Eels.

[602] Care must be taken to distinguish between the Eel, ???e???, of the Greeks, Anguilla of the Romans, and the so-called Lamprey, ??a??a, or MurÆna. Although both belong to the large family of MurÆnidÆ, the MurÆna is usually a much smaller fish, seldom over 2½ feet long. In shape and general appearance it closely resembles the Eel, but can be differentiated by its teeth and certain spots over the body. It becomes very corpulent, so much so that in late life it is unable to keep its back under water: it is easier to flay, and whiter of flesh than its relative. Apart from its mating with the viper, and its tendency (teste Columella) to go mad, its chief characteristics are greed and fierceness of attack. The second book of Oppian has two really spirited pictures of its fight with, and conquest of, the Cuttle fish, and of its rush at, but eventual defeat by, the Lobster. At Athens the Eel, at Rome the MurÆna, was the favourite.

[603] Menand., ????, frag. I. 11 ff., ap. Athen., 8, 67.

[604] Archestratos, ap. Athen., 7, 53.

[605] Eubul., Echo., frag. 1, 1 f., ap. Athen. 7, 56.

[606] Aristoph., Ach., 883. See F. M. Blaydes’s note on 880 ff.

[607] Eubul., Ion, frag. 2, 3 f., ap. Athen., 7, 56.

[608] Aristoph., Ach., 894. Pax, 1014.

[609] Bk. 7, 53.

[610] Bk. VII. 53.

[611] PhiletÆr., Oinopion, frag. 1, 4 ap. Athen., 7, 12.

[612] Badham, op. cit., 392.

[613] AthenÆus, XII. 15 and 20. If the fish found favour helluously, medically condemnation attended it. Hippocrates warns against its use; Seneca, Nat. Qu., III. 19, 3, terms it “gravis cibus.” If to the gastronomic virtues of the MurÆnidÆ both Greeks and Latins were more than kind, to other characteristics they were far indeed from blind—e.g. their slipperiness, etc., was proverbial. See Lucian, Anach., I, and Plautus, Pseud., II. 4, 57. Further, did the fish but hap in a dream, then good-bye to all hopes and desires, which slipped away, as surely as Alice’s “slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.” See Artemidorus, Oneirocritica, II. 14. The phallic character of the fish prevalent in ancient times continues in modern Italy, e.g. the proverbs (1) about holding an Eel by his tail, and (2) that when it has taken the hook, it must go where it is drawn. De Gubernatis, op. cit., II. 341.

[615] Aristotle, H. A., IV. 11.

[616] Pliny, IX. 23 and 74, and X. 87. In IX. 38 he asserts that Eels alone of all fish do not float when dead. Aristotle, who (N. H., VIII. 2) is, as usual, his authority, confines himself to noting this characteristic as not possessed “by the majority of fish,” and accounts for it by the smallness of stomach, lack of water in it, and want of fat; he states, however, that when fat they do float.

[617] Accuracy as to procreation was not Father Izaak’s strong point, as his theory that pike were bred from pickerel weed shows. It was on this point that Richard Franck, author of Northern Memoirs (written in 1658, but unpublished till 1694), with the invincible contempt of the fly-fisher for the bait-fisher, so jumped on Walton, that “he huffed away.” See Sir H. Maxwell, op. cit., IV. 123.

[618] Robinson, op. cit., 73. This seems a bit of bogus mythology. Perhaps Natalis Comes may be responsible.

[619] It is curious to find that a similar belief was held in Sardinia: according to Jacoby, the water beetle (Dytiscus roeselii) is there believed to be the progenitor of the Eel, and is accordingly called the “Mother of the Eels” (Turrell, op. cit., p. 37).

[620] Migrations of Fishes, London, 1916.

[621] J. Schmidt found the youngest known stages of Leptocephalus, the larval stage of eels, to the west of the Azores, where the water is over 2000 fathoms deep: they were one-third of an inch in length and so were probably not long hatched.

[622] It is believed that no Eels return to the rivers, and that they die not long after procreation. “They commence the long journey, which ends in maturity, reproduction, and death.” Presidential Address, British Association, Cardiff, 1920.

[623] There is in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington an excellent collection of specimens, illustrative of the development of the Eel.

[624] Any apparent resemblance in this list, or in this book, to Badham’s book is easily accounted for by the fact that both derive much from the same source, he without any, I with due acknowledgment to the little known volume by Nonnius (Antwerp, 1616), which itself draws largely from AthenÆus, Xenocrates, etc. The sequence of sentences, turns of expression, choice of epithets in Badham sometimes so strongly suggest Nonnius, that it is a case of yet another miracle of unconscious absorption—from a rare book written in Latin 238 years previously!—or of—well, Ælianism. I hesitated for a long time from even hinting such unacknowledged extraction by an author to whom two generations have owed much pleasure and more knowledge. Were it not for the inadequacy of his references and for his bursting, Wegg-like, into poetry, which doubles the length and sometimes obscures the sense of the original Greek or Latin, Badham would be delightful reading.

[625] Bk. IX. 29.

[626] Cf. Blakey, op. cit., p. 73.

[627] N. H., XXXII. 5.

[628] In Krause, op. cit., 237, Loki, originally god of Fire, changes into a salmon from his predilection for the red colour of the fish! The Icelandic Eddas attribute the invention of the Net to Loki.

[629] Var. epist., III. 48.

[630] Op. cit., p. 93.

[631] Matron, ?tt???? de?p???, 27 ff.; ap. Athen. IV. 13.

[632] Cf. Seneca, Nat. QuÆst., III. 18. Also Pliny, N. H., IX. 30.

[633] Archestrat., ap. Athen., VII. 44.

[634] Cf. Macrobius, Sat., II. 12, and AthenÆus, VII. 44.

[635] Horace, Sat., II. 2, 46.

[636] Macrobius, Sat., III. 16, 1.

[637] Pliny claims for the Acipenser that he “unus omnium squamis ad os versis contra aquam nando meat.” The reading of the last four words is however much disputed. C. Mayhoff prints contra quam in nando meant. Plutarch, De Sol. Anim., 28, of the Elops, “it always swims with the wind and tide, not minding the erection or opening of the scales, which do not lie towards the tail, as in other fish.”

[638] Athen., VII. 44; and Pliny, IX. 27.

[639] Ælian, VIII. 28.

[640] Cf. AthenÆus, VII. 139.

[641] Cf., however, Alciphron, I. 7, where among presents from fishermen, it takes premier place.

[642] Juv., IV. 37 ff.

[643] With this meeting compare that summoned post-haste by Nero in the Revolution (which led to his death), when to anxious and breathless senators he imparted the important news that he had just effected an improvement of the hydraulic organ, by which the notes were made to sound louder and sweeter. His ??e????a conflicts somewhat with the account in Suetonius (Nero, 41). The Emperor evidently had a bent and a liking for mechanical invention, for according to C. M. Cobern, New ArchÆological Discoveries, etc., 1917, in one of his palaces were elevators which ran from the ground to the top floor, and a circular dining-room which revolved with the sun.

[644] The part played by fish in recovering episcopal keys and rings has been dwelt on elsewhere. Sad it is that in the case of St. Lupus the rÔle is performed not by his namesake fish, but by a barbel, in whose belly was found, just previous to the return of the bishop to his See of Sens the self-same ring which on being exiled by Clothaire II. he had cast into the moat. Let us, disregarding all geographical habitats, trust that Barbel was here an ichthyic inexactitude for Lupus. Cf. S. Baring Gould, The Lives of the Saints, Vol. X. 7, Edinburgh, 1914.

[645] Pliny, IX. 28.

[646] Cf. Macrobius, Sat., II. 12: “Lucilius ... eum ... quasi ligurritorem catillonem appellat, scilicet qui proxime ripas stercus insectaretur.” À propos of ‘Catillo,’ there is a quaint remark in the Gloss. Salom., “Nomen piscis a catino dictus ob cuius suavitatem homines catinum corrodunt”—the fish was so delicious it made one fairly bite the dish!

[647] IX. 28.

[648] Epist., XI. 40.

[649] Hal., 41 f.

[650] N. H., IX., 88; Arist., H. A., IX. 3.

[651] Dorion, ap. Athen., VII. 99. Dorion was the author of a treatise much used by AthenÆus.

[652] IX. 25; N. H., IX. 36.

[653] IX. 25; N. H., IX. 36.

[654] Athen., VII. 99. Cf. Oppian, I. 151.

[655] De Ling. Lat., 5.

[656] Pliny, XXXII. 38.

[657] The Lamprey, Pride, and MurÆna are different fish. They are all engraved in Nash’s book, who lays down that the MurÆna is not the lamprey—as indeed a representation (from Herculaneum) of the former done with great exactness serves to establish. See T. D. Fosbroke, Encyl. of Antiq. (London, 1843), p. 1033, and p. 402, figure 3.

[658] Ap. Athen., VII. 91.

[659] The toga prÆtexta was worn by the higher magistrates, certain priests, and free-born children. Isidorus, in Gloss., “Anguilla est qua coercentur in scholis pueri,” and Pliny, N. H., IX., 39, “eoque verberari solitos tradit Verrius prÆtextatos.” Under the old law prÆtextati were unamerceable; non in Ære, sed in cute solvebant! Our Saxon forbears adopted the whip of eels; see Fosbroke, op. cit., p. 303. Rabelais (II. 30) continues the tradition—“Whereupon his master gave him such a sound thrashing with an eel-skin, that his own would have been worth nought for bagpipes.”

[660] Pliny, N. H. 35; 46; quoting from Fenestella.

[661] Philemon, ap. Athen., 7. 32.

[662] Hedyphagetica. The reading is most uncertain.

[663] In N. H., II. 13, and IV. 9. This cannot be our boar-fish which is marine, whereas Aristotle talks of it being in the river AcheloÜs. It may possibly be another name for the Glanis.

[664] In Athen., 7, 72.

[665] See Stephanus, Thesaurus GrÆcÆ LinguÆ, ii. 347 c-d.

[666] Badham (plagiarising Blaikie), on p. 364—in “Galen, Xenocrates, Diphilus speak disparagingly of the Sole,” is inaccurate. Xenocrates terms its flesh indigestible. Galen states that it is quite the reverse, and commends it highly as a diet. Diphilus does not hesitate to declare that the Sole affords abundant nourishment and is most pleasing to the taste. Cf. Nonnius, p. 89. In the case of a Sole with its customarily modest dimensions it is not easy to hearken unto the command, which was laid down in the twelfth century for the benefit of Robert, the so-called King of England, “Anglorum Regi scripsit schola tota Salerni,” by “the Schoole of Salernes most learned and juditious Directorie, of Methodicall Instructions for the guide and governing the health of Man”:

Cf. Regimen Sanitatis Salerni, London, 1617, but better still Sir A. Croke’s ed., Oxford, 1830.

[667] In Athen., 4, 13, line 76 ff.

[668] It is noteworthy that two of the Nymphs on the “Nereid Monument” are supported by fish (A. H. Smith, A Catalogue of Sculpture in the British Museum (London, 1900), ii. 35, Nos. 910, 911).

[669] Cf. Robinson, op. cit., 82.

[670] De Re Rust., 59.

[671] Terence, Eun., V. 7, 4.

[672] Plautus, Casin. II. 8, 59 ff.

[673] Deipn., VII. 77-80; cf. Pausanias, IV. 34.

[674] Arist., N. H., V. 10 and 11.

[675] Pliny, IX. 67.

[676] Arist., N. H., VIII., 19.

[677] Oppian, Hal., IV. 120-145; Arist., op. cit., V. 5.

[678] Op. cit., p. 45.

[679] Pliny, X. 89, and Ælian, IX. 7.

[680] Pliny, IX. 26.

[681] Aristophanes, and half a dozen other comedians cited by Athen., VII. 78.

[682] XV. 19.

[683] Sat., X. 317.

[684] Further details must be sought in Robinson Ellis, A Commentary on Catullus (Oxford, 1876), p. 46, and Schneider, op. cit., 69.

[685] Although these five must be reckoned in the first class everywhere, none of the five or other Mediterranean fishes can compare in taste with their northern representatives.

[686] A. de Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology (London, 1872), II. 329 ff. The latest luminary among the Solar Mythologists is L. Frobenius, Sonnenkultus, whose lengthy chapter in vol. I. on the world-wide Fish-Myth and its solar significance may be consulted by the leisurely.

[687] Cf., however, “The Story of the Deluge,” in the Catapatha Brahmana.

[688] P. Robinson, op. cit. (p. 18), to which I owe much, here and elsewhere.

[689] Op. cit., p. xi.

[690] On Iliad, I. 206, cp. on XX. 71: d?? t? d??e?? a???? a?t?a? e??a? t?s??, ?? ???? e?pe?? t??? se????a???????.

[691] Brit. Mus. Cat. Coins, Mysia, p. 18 ff. Nos. 1 ff. pl. 3, 8 ff.

[692] Brit. Mus. Cat. Coins, Mysia, p. 18, No. 1, pl. 30.

[693] A. Heiss, op. cit., pl. 45, 9.

[694] See Cohen, Monnaies Domitian, Nos. 227, 229, 236, and Pitra, op. cit., pp. 508-512. Although writing some sixty years ago he enumerates no less than 156 illustrations from coins and representations of fish association.

[695] For the fish-symbol in Judaism there is a good collection of facts in I. Scheftelowitz, “Das Fisch-Symbol in Judentum und Christentum,” in the Archiv. fÜr Religionswissenschaft (1911), XIV. 1-53, 321-392.

[696] Pitra, op. cit., has several plates bearing on this. Of the coloured, pl. 1 shows an eucharistic table with a fish and bread upon it, and at each side seven baskets full of the latter, while in pl. 3 a fish swims bearing on his head a basket with sacred loaves, both illustrative of the miracle. See also pp. 565-6.

[697] Keller, op. cit., p. 352. The latest and best monograph on the fish-symbol in Christianity is that of F. J. DÖlger, Das Fisch-symbol in frÜhchristlicher Zeit (Freiburg, 1910), whose conclusions are summarised in the Archiv fÜr Religionswissenschaft (1912), XV. 297 f.

[698] Cf. the many fascinating works of Dr. J. Rendel Harris, e.g. The Cult of the Heavenly Twins and Boanerges. Also Lowrie, Art and ArchÆology; and Miss M. Hamilton, Greek Saints and their Festivals.

[699] See C. Cahier, CaractÉristiques des Saints dans l’art populaire (Paris, 1867), Vol. II. 691 ff., for illustrations of Saints accompanied by fishes.

[700] Op. cit., II. 340. “The gemini pisces, the two fishes joined in one, were sacred to her, and the joke of the poisson d’Avril ... is a jest of phallical origin, and has a scandalous significance.”

[701] P. Robinson, International Fisheries Exhibition (London, 1883), Part III. p. 43. “The representations of the Virgin in a canopy or vesica piscis are supposed to have a specially Christian significance: if they have any at all, it is a very heathenish one.”

[702] Mundus Symbolicus, a rare folio, of which two editions, 1681 and 1694, exist, is a translation of Il Mondo Simbolico (written by Picinelli Filippi, and published at Milan 1653, 1669, and 1680), made by Aug. Erath. Cf. TrÉsor des livres rares et prÉcieux, tom. v. (Dresde, 1859-69), p. 282. The Bodleian possesses only the 1694 edition of Mundus Symbolicus, while apparently the British Museum lacks both.

[703] The bronze statuette found at Hartsbourg showing the Germanic god Chrodo, standing on a fish, while holding in his uplifted left hand a wheel, and in his lowered right a basket of fruit and vegetables, is not at all on all fours. Cf. Montfaucon, Antiquity Explained, trans. D. Humphreys (London, 1921), II. 261, pl. 56, 3.

[704] The construction of ‘Rosa, Piscis’ is not discernible. Perhaps (‘Rosa Piscis’) would be less obscure.

[705] To Galen alone 149 works are attributed.

[706] For a list of practitioners, medical authors, and quacks before Pliny, and the enormous fees sometimes paid them, see N. H., XXIX. 1, 7. Not inappropriate, and probably not infrequent, when we read of their number and their disagreements, was the epitaph—Turba se medicorum perisse. This attribution of death to too many doctors is accredited to Hadrian, but is probably a Latin adaptation of Menander’s p????? ?at??? e?s?d?? ’ ?p??ese?.

[707] It is with some surprise that we read of Galen being one of the original DeipnosophistÆ (I. 2), and with more still that we find the omnivorous and omniscient AthenÆus quoting but once from this most prolific author, and that a passage which lays down, let us trust from the experience of his patients, that Falernian wine over twenty years old causes headaches.

[708] Empedocles, albeit no doctor, is said to have delivered Selinus in Sicily from malaria by drainage, etc., and so roughly anticipated the triumphs of Ross and Gorgas over the mosquito by some 2400 years. See Diog. Laert. VIII. 70, s.v. “Empedocles.”

[709] De Alim. Fac., 3, 28. Cf. De Attenuante victus ratione, vol. vi. ed. Chartier, which confirms and amplifies the above.

[710] Athen., op. cit., VIII., chs. 51-56, which discuss various fishes from a health point of view.

[711] QuÆstiones MedicÆ et Problemata Physica.

[712] Blakey, op. cit., 73.

[713] Cf. Burton, op. cit., 1, 97, whose trs. is given above.

[714] The belief in fish as curatives of not only human but also animal ailments still lingers. In this very year, 1920, we read in The Field, Aug. 14, of a Ross-shire crofter begging for a live trout to push down the throat of a cow, that had just calved but was suffering from hÆmorrhage. In consequence, or in spite of the trout, the cow recovered.

[715] De Materia Medica, II. 33; I. 181, ed. (KÜhn).

[716] De Materia Medica, II. 22, 1, 176 (KÜhn). Cf. P. A. Matthiole, Commentarii in libros sex Pedanii Dioscordis Anazarbei (Venetiis, 1554), Bk. II. c. xix.

[717] VI. 9.

[718] Salpe the midwife recommends this prescription to disguise the age of boys on sale for slaves (Pliny, XXXII. 47). At the end of the chapter the author seems to awake from his trance of trustfulness, in the words, “in the case of every depilatory, the hairs should always be removed before it is applied!”

[719] Pliny, XXXII. 18. Belief in the efficacy of fish-nostrums continues unto this day: in the Middle Ages it permeated all classes, and all Europe, e.g. Charles IX. of France would never, if he could help it, drink unless a fragment of the tusk of the narwhal, or so-called sea-unicorn, were in the cup to counteract a possible poison.

[720] Badham, op. cit., 83.

[721] The influence of fish, wherever important, in commerce is noteworthy. They furnished, as we have seen, designs for a mint or cognomina for Roman Nobles. An interesting and probably very ancient instance occurs in the oath taken this very year (1920) by the Stipendiary Magistrate of Douglas, Isle of Man: “I swear to do justice between party and party, as indifferently as the herring’s backbone doth lie in the midst of the fish.”

[723] N. H., XXX. 49. Cf. Ælian, op. cit. passim, for aphrodisiacs.

[724] Fragment, Varro Sexagesis, ap. Man. Marc., p. 319. 15 ff., Lindsay.

[725] Cas., II. 8, 57; cf. also Aul., at the wedding of Euclid’s daughter.

[726] See ibid., Rudens, II. 1, 9.

[727] N. H., XXXII. 50.

[728] London, 1912. Note, however, that Hultsch in Pauly-Winowa, Real Enc. (Stuttgart, 1903), V. 211, says: ‘Damit war aus dem Silber-D., der noch unter Severus einen Metallwert von etwa 30 Pfennig gehabt hatte ... eine kleine ScheidemÜnze zum Curswerte von 1, 8 Pfennig oder Weniger geworden.’ On this showing the denarius had sunk to 1? pfennigs in 301 a.d.

[729] Fragments of the Edict in Latin and in Greek have been coming to light for the last two centuries from Egypt, Greece and Asia Minor—not the least important being found by W. M. Leake; see his Edict of Diocletian, 1826. See also Mommsen’s Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. III. pp. 1926-1953, the text of which was published by H. BlÜmner with a commentary in 1893 in his Der Maximaltarif des Diocletian. A convenient account of this famous Edict, together with a full bibliography, is given by H. BlÜmner in Pauly-Winowa, Real. Enc. (Stuttgart), V. pp. 1948-1957.

[730] Lactantius, de mortibus persecutorum, 7.

[731] See p. 337, postea.

[733] From p. 174 ff. of Abbott, who gives the prices in cents.

[734] Op. cit., p. 48.

[735] In the case of Trout, the ova can be successfully transported to South Africa or even to New Zealand, as the period of incubation is a long one. After hatching, the alevins, fry, or young fish can be utilised to stock fish ponds, or other waters.

[736] Cf. an article in the Revue des deux Mondes, for June, 1854, by M. Jules Haime.

[737] According to Magna Carta, c. 33, “all kydells [dams or weirs] for the future shall be removed altogether from the Thames and the Medway, and throughout all England, except on the sea-shore.”

It was for over 500 years held that this was a measure intended to safeguard the passage of fish, but W. S. McKechnie, Magna Carta (Glasgow, 1914.) pp. 303 ff., 343 ff., has shown that it aimed at removing hindrances to navigation, not to ascending fish.

[738] Op. cit., 376, but see Chinese chapter.

[739] History of the Chinese Empire (Paris, 1735), vol. I. p. 36.

[740] Leonard Mascall, owing to his recipes for preserving spawn in his Booke of Fishing 1590, “must be looked upon as the pioneer of fish-culture in England,” according to Mr. R. B. Marston, op. cit., 35.

[741] From a splendid vase-painting representing the two sides of a magnificent scyphos made by the potter Hieron and painted by the artist Makron. The original (now in Boston) is of the finest fifth-century (b.c.) art. See FurtwÄngler and Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei (MÜnchen, 1909), vol. II. 125 ff., pl. 85.

[742] See Chapter III.

[743] See antea, p. 200.

[744] Eurip., Hel., 34.

[745] Plat., Phardi., 243A; Isokr., Hel., 65; Pausanias, III. 19, 13.

[746] Op. cit., IV. 16. In his palinode, of which a few lines (frag. 32, Bergk⁴) are extant, Stesichorus asserts that it was not Helen herself, but only her semblance or wraith, which Paris carried off to Troy. Greeks and Trojans slew one another for a mere phantom, while the real Helen never left Sparta. Hdt., 2, 112 ff., gives a rather different turn to the story. According to him, Helen eloped from Sparta with Paris, but was driven back by a storm to Egypt, where Paris told lies and was punished by Proteus. Euripides in his Helena combines the two versions. Like Stesichorus, he makes the truant a mere phantom, an ‘eloping angel.’ Like Herodotus, he sends the real Helen to Egypt. Menelaus, who, escorting the phantom home from Troy, arrives in Egypt, is there confronted with the real Helen and is sadly puzzled. Just as he begins to think himself a bigamist, the misty Helen evaporates!

[747] The illustration is reproduced by the kind permission of Prof. Flinders Petrie.

The data for this essay had been collected and half of it written, when I heard of an article on Ancient Egyptian Fishing by Mr. Oric Bates, in Harvard African Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1917. While somewhat disappointed of not being the first to write in English on the subject, I was quickly reconciled by the fact that the task had fallen to an experienced Egyptologist, whose monograph, while making necessary the recasting of this chapter, bequeathed to me some new, if not always convincing theories, and much technical and other data, the frequent use of which I gladly acknowledge.

[748] Od., IV. 477, and XVII. 448. In Th. 338 of Hesiod, who, though not a contemporary, flourished shortly after Homer, ? ?e???? first appears. The Egyptians called it Hapi, but in the vernacular language Yetor, or Ye-or = the River, or Yaro = the great River.

[749] Papyrus Sallier, II. On the other hand, another hymn speaks of the unkindness of the Nile in bringing about the destruction of fish, but it is the river at its lowest (first half of June) that is meant. See Records of the Past, being English translations of ancient monuments of Egypt and Western Asia (ed. S. Birch, vols. I.-XII. 1873-81), IV. 3, and ibid., new series (A. H. Sayce), III. 51.

[750] The yearly sacrifice of a virgin at Memphis may be doubted—at least for the Christian age of Egypt, to which Arab writers wish to attribute it.

[751] The ?e???a are described by Heliodorus, IX. 9.

[752] J. H Breasted, A History of the Ancient Egyptians, 1908, p. 47, declares that the Egyptians discovered true alphabetical letters 2500 years before any other people, and the calendar as early as 4241 b.c.

[753] P. E. Newberry, Beni Hasan (London, 1893), Plate XXIX. Cf. Lepsius, Denk. Abt., 2, Bl. 127; J. G. Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (London, 1878), p. 116, pl. 371.

[754] Ibid., loc. cit., pl. 370.

[755] The Nile is the second longest river in the world (Perthes, Taschen Atlas). The Egyptians believed that it sprang from four sources at the twelfth gate of the nether world, at a place described in ch. 146 of the Book of the Dead, and that it came to light at the two whirlpools of the first cataract.

[756] Brugsch., Dict. Supplem., 1915. Cf. StÈle de l’an VIII. de Rameses II., by Ahmed Bey Kamal (Rec. trav., etc., vol. 30, pp. 216-217). The King, as an instance of how well his workmen are provided for, cites the fact that special fishermen are allotted to them.

[757] I. 36.

[758] N. H., X. 43, ??t?? ??????.

[759] Op. cit., 204 ff.

[760] N. H., XXX. 8.

[761] The Scribe on the Praise of Learning. Cf. Maspero, Le Genre Épistolaire chez les Égyptiens (1872), p. 48.

[762] Bates, p. 199.

[763] See Chinese Chapter.

[764] The ArchÆological Survey of Nubia for 1907-8 (Cairo, 1910), Plate LXV., b. 5.

[765] Naqada and Ballas (London, 1896), Plate LXV. 7; and Ancient Egypt (1915), Part I. p. 13, f. 3.

[766] Tools and Weapons (London, 1917), p. 37.

[767] Bates holds (244) that the bident was only used by the nobles, and never by the professional fisherman, who employed nets, lines, traps, etc., but never the bident. He sees an analogy in the throwing sticks used by the nobles in the Old Kingdom fowling scenes, “whereas the peasants appear to have taken birds only by traps or clapnets.”

[768] Bates, p. 239.

[769] F. Ll. Griffith, Beni Hasan, Pt. IV. p. 3, Pl. XIII. fig. 3, 4. See also Newberry, op. cit., Pl. XXXIV.

[770] A. M. Blackman, The Rock Tombs of Meir (London, 1914),vol. i. 28. Cf. also Steindorff’s Das Grab des Ti (Leipzig, 1913), Pl. 113.

[771] Cf. Introduction.

[772] Steindorff, Ibid.

[773] F. Ll. Griffith, Beni Hasan, Pt. 4 (London, 1900), Pl. XIII. 4. For kind permission to reproduce this and the next illustration I have to thank the Egypt Exploration Society.

[774] Cf. the Ø hieroglyphs in Griffith’s Hieroglyphs (London, 1898), Pl. 9, fig. 180, and text, p. 44. The more elaborate form is shown by Paget-Pirie, The Tomb of Ptahhetep, bound in Quibell’s Ramesseum, London, 1898.

[775] Bates, p. 242.

[776] N. H., XXVIII. 831. Perhaps he derived his information from the not-trustworthy Theriaca of Nicander, 566 ff.

[777] I. 35. He visited Egypt c. 20 b.c.

[778] P. 243. From Newberry’s Beni Hasan, there come, curiously enough, only two representations of Hippos and not one of a Hippo hunt. From Herodotus, II. 71, we gather that, if the beast was elsewhere hunted, at Papremis it was traditionally sacred.

[779] Mac Iver and Mace (London, 1902), Pl. VII. 1.

[780] T. E. Peet, The Cemeteries of Abydos (London, 1914), Pt. 2, Pl. XXXIX. 3.

[781] For twenty-five figures of hooks, see Bates, Pl. XI. For others curiously shaped, probably Vth Dynasty, see Lepsius, DenkmÄler, etc. (Berlin, 1849), II. p. 96.

[782] Petrie, Kahun, Gurob, and Hawara, p. 34.

[783] Bates, p. 249.

[784] F. von Bissing, Die Mastaba des Gem-Ni-Kai (Berlin, 1905), vol. I., Pl. IV. fig. 2.

[785] Op. cit., vol. III., Pl. VI.

[786] P. E. Newberry, Beni Hasan (London, 1893), Part 1, Pl. 29. Cf. Wilkinson, op. cit., vol. I., Pl. 371.

[787] Ibid., Pl. 370. This faces my introduction.

[788] Steindorff, op. cit., Pl. 110. Bates, p. 240, holds that “floats attached to Harpoon lines were probably in common use”: the infrequency—to say the least of it—of their representation lends but a slender support to his suggestion.

[789] Klunziger, Upper Egypt (1878), p. 305, states that the townsfolk hand-lined with these baits, but that the fish-eating Bedouins still employed the Spear.

[790] Budge, Trans. Book of the Dead, vol. II. p. 362.

[791] Yet compare the Scriptural prohibition, “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk,” which appears to have been one of the commandments included in the earliest Decalogue. Sir J. G. Frazer discusses this curious injunction in Folklore in the Old Testament, vol. III. p. 111 ff.

[792] Vol. I. pl. 10, f. 11.

[793] Petrie, Medum (1892), Pl. XI. A good example (Vth Dynasty) of a Net heaped up in a boat is found in N. de G. Davies, Ptahhetep (London, 1901), Pl. VI., in the right-hand column of the hieroglyphs.

[794] See my Assyrian Chapter, p. 368. The Gilgamesh representation dates c. 2800 b.c.

[795] N. de G. Davies, The Rock Tombs of Deir el Gebrawi (1902), Pt. II. Pl. V.

[796] P. 259. The reason assigned is not convincing: “No lead weights are depicted on the monuments, for by the time they were introduced the artist was devoting himself to mythological and religious scenes.” Petrie, Kahun, Gurob, and Hawara, p. 34, however, assigns some weights of lead from Kahun to XVIIIth Dyn.

[797] Cf. Petrie, Abydos (London, 1902), pl. 41.

[798] J. J. Tylor, The Tomb of Paheri (London, 1895), Pl. VI., probably XVIIIth Dyn.

[799] Petrie, Kahun, p. 28.

[800] Ibid., p. 34.

[801] Illustrations of both kinds can be found in Steindorf’s Das Grab des Ti, Pls. CX. and CXI.

[802] Diodorus Siculus, I. 36.

[803] Cf. G. A. Boulenger, Fishes of the Nile (London, 1907), and Pierre Montet, Les Poissons employÉs dans l’Ecriture Hieroglyphique. Bulletin de l’Institut FranÇais d’ArchÉologie Orientale. Tome XI., 1913.

[804] Egypt, Pt. II. p. 226. BÆdeker, Leipsic, 1892.

[805] Antea, p. 201.

[806] De Iside et Osiride, c. 8.

[807] II. 37.

[808] From the Trans. of S. Squire.

[809] Mnaseas, as quoted by AthenÆus, VIII. 37.

[810] W. Robertson-Smith, The Religion of the Semites (Edinburgh, 1889), p. 276.

[811] J. H. Breasted, Records of Ancient Egypt (Chicago, 1906-7), vol. IV., par. 882.

[812] See Hastings’ Ency. of Religion and Ethics, vol. X. pp. 796 and 482, and Zeitschrift fÜr Ägyptische Sprache, vol. 49, p. 51 (Leipzig, 1911).

[813] Their brawling in boats and carousing in drink are depicted. Cf. N. de G. Davies, Tombs of El Gebrawi, Pt. II. (London, 1902), Pl. V., and Newberry, Beni Hasan, Pt. II., Pl. IV., and Davies, Ptahhetep, Pt. II., Pl. XIV., and Pt. I., Pl. XXI. In the XXth Dynasty the chastity of their wives was not a striking characteristic.

[814] Op. cit., XXXII.

[815] Fish hieroglyphs are regarded by some as general determinatives for words meaning “shame,” “evil,” etc. (cf. Plutarch, op. cit., 32), and by others as merely phonetic determinatives (cf. Montet, op. cit., p. 48). That fish were regarded as either enemies or emblems of enemies of the gods and of the kings would seem to be borne out by the ceremony annually performed at Edfu, where the festival calendar contains the following: “Fish are thrown on the ground, and all the priests hack and hew them with knives, saying ‘Cut ye wounds on your bodies, kill ye one another: Ra triumphs over his enemies, Horus of Edfu over all evil ones.’” The text assures us that “the meaning of the ceremony is to achieve the destruction of the enemies of the gods and king.” Cf. Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion, trs. by Griffith (London, 1907), p. 216.

[816] Erman, Egyptian Life, Eng. Trs. (London, 1894), p. 239, basing himself on Mariette’s statement in Monuments divers recueillis en Égypte, pp. 151, 152.

[817] Op. cit., p. 284.

[818] El Bersheh, Pt. I. (London, n. d.), Pl. XXIII.

[819] Tombeau de Nakhti (MÉm. de la Mission franÇaise au Caire, vol. V. fasc. 3., Paris, 1893), Fig. 4, p. 480.

[820] Les Monuments des Hycsos, Bruxelles, 1914. Connected with these and somewhat confirming Capart appear to be two life-size figures of Amenemhat III., in one of which the king is seated between two goddesses holding fish.

[821] These offerings (15,500 dressed, 2,200 white fish, etc.) are named under the heading, “Oblations of the festivals which the King founded for his Father Amon-Re.” But in the summary of the good deeds wrought for the gods by Rameses III.—“I founded for them divine offerings of barley, wheat, wine, incense, fruit, cattle and fowl”—observe the complete silence as to fish, because these offerings were to the gods, not to the temples. Cf. Breasted, Ancient Records, IV., paragraphs 237, 243, and 363.

[822] Antea, p. 123.

[823] Mutilation was not invariable, even in the XIIth Dynasty, as Beni Hasan discloses.

[824] In the Book of the Dead, Chapter 154.

[825] P. Lacau, Suppressions et modifications des signes dans les textes funebraires, Zeitschrift fÜr Ägyptische Sprache, vol. 51 (1913), 42 ff.

[826] Petrie, Six Temples at Thebes (London, 1897), Pl. XVI., f. 15, fish from foundation deposit of Taussert, and Pl. XVIII., from Siptah.

[827] XVII. 1, 47. Latopolis is now Esneh.

[828] Wilkinson, op. cit., III. 343, f. 586.

[829] See Proc. Soc. Biblical ArchÆology, XXI. p. 82, for a picture of a bronze mummy-case containing remains of a small Lates.

[830] L. Loat, Saqqara Mastabas, I. Gurob. Plates 7, 8, 9, and Petrie and Currelly, Ehnasya, 1905, p. 35.

[831] Op. cit., p. 346.

[832] See Bates, p. 234, ff.

[833] Ahmed Bey Kamal, Annales du Service des AntiquitÉs de l’Égypte, 1908, IX. 23 f., Pl. 1.

[834] Actes du IV^e CongrÈs International d’Histoire des Religions, 1913, p. 97 f.

[835] II. 72.

[836] For a description, not a definition of Totemism, see Robertson Smith, loc. cit., or J. G. Frazer’s four volumes on Totemism and Exogamy. The Oxford Dictionary for once is not very helpful in, “Totemism, the use of Totems, with a clan division, and the social, marriage, and religious customs connected with it.”

[837] Op. cit., p. 37.

[838] The Mormyri, which number some 100 species, are peculiar to Africa.

[839] De Iside et Osiride, 18.

[840] Plut., 8.

[841] N. H., X. 46.

[842] The Mormyri, to which the Oxyrhynchus belongs, figure on the walls, and in bronzes, O. kannum and O. caschive being most frequent; but the Bana (Petrociphalus bane) and Grathonemus aprinoides also occur. The best delineations are found in the tombs of Ti and of Gizeh.—G. A. Boulenger, Fishes of the Nile, London, 1907.

[843] Plut., Ibid., ch. 72.

[844] The banishment is disputed by Franke and others. Cf., however, Sat., XV. 45. “Aegyptus, sed luxuria, quantum ipse notavi.”

[845] From Gifford’s Translation.

[846] Cf. AthenÆus, VII. 55, for the jests of Antiphanes, etc.

[847] N. H., X. 19.

[848] Op. cit., 7.

[849] Plato bears witness to the skill of the Egyptians in taming fish, and animals, even the shy wild gazelle. Polit. 532.

[850] Herodotus, II. 69, 70. Rawlinson’s Trans.

[851] The story of the trochilus, with which alone out of all birds and beasts our author states the crocodile lives in amity, because the little bird enters its mouth (when on land) and frees it from myriads of devouring leeches, is too well known for reference, were it not for the dispute (a) as to whether the bird—Pluvianus egyptius—performs any service except uttering a shrill cry on the approach of man and thus warning the crocodile, and (b) whether for leeches, we should not substitute gnats. Cf. W. Houghton, N. H. of the Ancients (London), pp. 238-244. The account of the connection between the bird and the beast given by Plutarch is far prettier and more spirited than that of Herodotus.

[852] Plutarch, ibid., 75. The beasts enjoyed both a hereditary transmission of holiness and a subtle discrimination as to the build of a boat, for fishermen who embark in one made of papyrus enjoy security from their attentions, “they having either a fear or else a veneration for this sort of boat,” because Isis in her search for the remains of Osiris used such a means of conveyance. Plutarch, ibid., 18.

[853] Op. cit., II. p. 14, Pl. 2, Register 3.

[854] Crocodiles and Papyri seem a curious juxtaposition! Some time ago Dr. Grenfell was excavating ground likely to yield important finds. Bad luck dogged his digging: only preserved crocodiles came to light. One day a labourer, incensed at work wasted on the beasts, jabbed his pick into the latest specimen, whose head disgorged a roll of papyrus. Similar head-smashings were fruitful of results, most of which belong to the Hearst Collection.

[856] II. 164. Cf., however, II. 47. It is not quite clear whether the order of the list is intentional. If so, it is certainly justifiable from the point of view of primitive or early society.

[857] See p. 65, antea.

[858] Herod., II. 149.

[859] Diodorus Siculus, I. 52. Twenty-two different kinds of fish existed in the royal fish ponds of Moeris. Keller, op. cit., 330.

[860] II. 98.

[861] See Grenfell and Hunt, Tebtunis Papyri, II. 180-1, and I. 49-50. Also Wilcken, Griechische Ostraka, I. 137 ff. The craft employed were usually primitive rafts or canoes made of papyrus canes bound together with cords of the same plant. Theophrastus, Hist. Plantarum, IV. 8, 2, alludes to them. Pliny, N. H., VII. 57, speaks of Nile boats made of papyrus, rushes and reeds, while Lucan, IV. 136, refers to them in

[862] II. 95.

[863] See Alan H. Gardiner, The Tomb of Amenemhat (London, 1915), Pl. II, and Petrie, Medum, Pl. XII.

[864] Onomasticon, VI. 48. A primitive method of curing prevailed in the last century among the Yapoos—“the fisher then bites out a large piece of the fish’s belly, takes out the inside, and hangs the fish on a stick by the fire in his canoe.” See Darwin, Voyages of Adventure, etc. (London, 1839), p. 428.

[865] Mish., Makhshirin, VI. 3. The Greeks and Copts of the present day, whose enjoined fasts are frequent, rarely split their fish before packing them in large earthen pots.

[866] Rechnungen aus den Zeit Setis, I. 87 ff.

[867] Quibell, The Ramesseum (London, 1898), Pl. XXXIII.

[868] J. de Morgan, Ethnographie PrÉhistorique (Paris, 1897), 193.

[869] Cuvier and Valenciennes, Op. cit., XI. p. 62.

[870] In Ridgeway, The Origin of Metallic Currency, etc. (Cambridge, 1892), p. 240, is illustrated a fine Kite weight from which one Kite would equal about 140 grains, corresponding to 9·08 grammes.

[871] The information as to the average prices and weights of the Mugil capito, on which the above calculations were grounded, was obtained from the Department of Supplies in Egypt. “In the markets of Alexandria the weight of the grey mullet varies from 8 to 3 to the oke (2·75 lbs.), say 5½ to 14½ oz. each. The pre-war retail price was for large fish, 3 or 4 to the oke, 8 Piastres; for small, 8 to the oke, 5 Piastres.” The prices in August, 1920, had increased to 20 and 16 Piastres respectively, or nearly two-thirds more.

[872] Cf. Pap. Oxyrh. 1430, Introd.

[873] Pap. Oxyr., III. 520, 21, a.d. 143.

[874] Berliner Griechische Urkunden, I. 14, col. IV. 18.

[875] Egyptian Exploration Fund Annual Report, 1906-7, p. 9.

[876] Bk. II. 93.

[877] N. H., V. 5.

[878] Aristotle (H. A., III. 11), states that the hair does grow in dead bodies. Since his time many descriptions of remarkable growth after death have been published, and many people believe that such growth does take place. Erasmus Wilson pronounces that “the lengthening of the hairs observed in a dead person is merely the result of the contraction of the skin towards their bulb.”

[879] Blakey, op. cit., 207, states an engraving was found at Herculaneum “representing a little Cupid fishing with the ringlets of her (sic) hair for lovers.” So far I have failed to track this hermaphroditic representation, nor is Sir C. Waldstein aware of its existence.

[880] Translated by Dasent. Frodi’s flour = gold.

[881] Professor Grenfell tells me that ?te here has no connection, unless the main verb came in line 16, where there is a lacuna, but the traces do not suggest any verb. He also approves my rendering of ???sa? having the sense of “baiting the swim” with bits of flesh from the corpses.

[882] Aristophanes, Thesm., 928. Cf. also Wasps, 174-6.

[883] Wiener Studien, XXVII. (1905), pp. 299, ff.

[884] Or early Gnostics, also called Ophites, who honoured serpents.

[885] But as one of the earliest instances of imitative magic the story is notable. In the tale of Overthrowing Apep, based on the XXXIXth Chapter of The Book of the Dead, the priestly directions for destroying this enemy of Ra, or the Sun, run as follows: “Thou shalt say a prayer over a figure of Apep, which hath been drawn upon a sheet of papyrus, and over a wax figure of Apep upon which his name has been cut: and thou shalt lay them on the fire, so that it may consume the enemy of Ra.” Six figures in all, presumably “to mak siccar,” are to be placed on the fire at stated hours of the day and night. Cf. Theocritus, Id., II. 27 ff., where the slighted damsel prays, “Even as I melt this wax, with the god to aid, so speedily may he (her lover) by love be molten.”

[886] III. 40 ff.

[887] Some recent scholars have suggested that in the stories of Polycrates throwing his ring into the sea, and of Theseus proving his parentage by a like sacrifice, we should detect traces of an early custom, by which the maritime king married the sea-goddess—a custom perpetuated in the symbolical union between the Doges of Venice and the Adriatic. This ingenious hypothesis was first worked out by S. Reinach, “Le Mariage avec la mer,” in Revue archÉologique (1905), ii. 1 ff. (= id. Cultes, Mythes, et Religions, Paris, (1906), ii. 266 ff.).

[888] The term Assyrian in this chapter usually includes the Sumerians and Babylonians.

[889] Lest Forlong’s sentence (Rivers of Life (London, 1883), II. 89), “A beautiful Assyrian cylinder exhibits the worship of the Fish God; there we see the mitred Man-God with Rod and basket,” etc., be quoted in opposition, I would point out that this so-called Rod is merely a cut sapling, like the one in the hands of Heracles, but without a sign of any line, which in the Greek vase in the British Museum is obviously attached. Cf. Élite des monuments CÉramographiques, vol. III., Plate I.

[890] From the find (made during the war by a Sikh regiment on the Tigris above Samara) of an alabaster vase (now in the Ashmolean Museum), which from archÆological reasons must be placed among the very earliest remnants of Sumerian civilisation, it is evident that—given the discovery was in situ—the frontiers of the Sumerian Empire must have extended much farther north than has been hitherto generally supposed. Owing to the deposits of the two rivers, the sea has receded some hundred and twenty miles.

[891] The Sumerians made extensive use of music, especially in their religious ceremonies; they were the founders, according to Langdon, of liturgical music, which unfortunately it is impossible to reconstruct, as the notes themselves have not survived.

[892] The Sumerian language was not well adapted to express peculiarly Semitic sounds.

[893] Petrie (Egypt and Israel (London, 1911), p. 15): “The Turanian race akin to the modern Mongols, known as Sumerians, had civilised the Euphrates valley for some thousands of years and produced a strong commercial and mathematical culture. The wandering Semite had at last been drawn into this settled system of life.”

[894] S. Langdon, Babylonian Magic, Bologna, 1914.

[895] The carved ivory handle of a flint knife in the Louvre proves (according to Petrie) that the art of slate-palettes in Egypt originated from Elamite civilisation, which flourished before its rise. It must be of prehistoric age, yet shows a well-developed art with Mesopotamian or Elamite affinities earlier than the sculptured slate-palettes and maceheads. M. G. BÉnÉdite (Monuments Pict.) holds that in this knife-handle we have the most tangible evidence yet found of a connection in very early times between the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisations. King (Jour. Egypt. ArchÆology, vol. IV., p. 64) suggests that there was a connection with Babylonian-Elamite seals from Susa.

[896] Thus the general conception of pictographic writing might perhaps be borrowed from the Euphrates valley, but not a single sign taken from the Babylonian script can be found (W. Max MÜller, Encly. Bibl., p. 1233). Dr. Alan Gardiner, on the origin of the Semitic and Greek alphabets, concludes that the evidence does point to the alphabet being Semitic in origin and based upon acrophonic picture signs (Journal of Egyptian ArchÆology, vol. III., p. 1).

[897] History of Sumer and Akkad (London, 1910), p. 322.

[898] Egyptian ArchÆology (1902), p. 366.

[899] Historical Studies (London, 1910), II. p. 22. Others would make the invasion about 2466.

[900] The Babylonian legend of Adapa is thus known to have circulated in Palestine and Egypt before the Hebrew Exodus. The story of Adapa is thought by some to have influenced the Hebrew version of the story of Adam and Eve and the loss of Paradise. See the excellent discussion in T. Skinner, Genesis (in the International Critical Commentary (1912), p. 91 ff), and Langdon, The Sumerian Epic of Paradise (University of Pennsylvania, Publications of the Babylonia Section, 1915), vol. X., pp. 38-49.

[901] Rameses II. was held in high esteem as a rain-maker—perhaps rain-god—as is evidenced by the sacrifices offered by the Hittites that their princess should on her journey to Egypt to marry Rameses enjoy fair weather, despite that it was the season of the winter storms. In consequence of this power over the elements, the Hittite chiefs strongly advocated friendship with Egypt, as otherwise Rameses II. would probably stop rain and cause a famine in their country (Breasted, Ancient Records, III. 423, 426).

[902] Layard, Nineveh (London, 1849), vol. II. p. 438.

[903] “Fishing, fishing everywhere” is the key-note of the picture; the crab in the top left-hand corner is also well into his fish. The picture facing p. 349 comes from the Assyrian sculptures in British Museum: in Mansell’s collection, No. 430.

[904] We sometimes find with an army crossing a river, as delineated in the sculptures, each soldier with the skin beneath his belly and paddling with his legs and arms, but retaining in his mouth one of the legs of the skin, into which he blows as into a bagpipe. The act of paddling across a big river, like the Euphrates, would of itself need all his breath; but King points out that the sculptor, in the spirit of primitive art, which, diffident of its own powers of portrayal or distrusting the imagination of the beholder, seeks to make its object clear by conventional devices, wishes to indicate that the skins are not solid bodies, and can find no better way of showing it than by making his swimmers continue blowing out the skins.

[905] Five Great Monarchies (London, 1862-67), vol. I. p. 99.

[906] In each case Esarhaddon “cut off his head.” Both heads were sent to Nineveh for exhibition. Asur-bani-pal was a greater specialist in heads than his father: the head of any foe whom he particularly hated or feared, such as Teumann of Elam, was preserved by some method, and hung conspicuously in the famed gardens of the palace. A sculptured representation hands down the scene to us. The king reclines on an elevated couch under an arbour of vines: his favourite queen is seated on a throne at the foot of the couch: both are raising wine cups to their lips: many attendants ply the inevitable fly-flappers, while at a distance musicians are ranged. Birds play and flutter among the palm and cypress trees; from one dangles Teumann’s head on which the eyes of the king are gloating. Such is the picture drawn by de Razogin, Ancient Assyria (London, 1888).

[907] See The Fishing Gazette, January 6, 1917.

[908] See The Field, March 15, 1919. The fish is said to attain a weight of over 300 lbs.

[909] See Planche I. of Restitution de la StÈle des Vautours, by Leon Heuzey.

[910] Civilisation of Babylonia and Assyria (Philadelphia, 1915), p. 387.

[911] A History of Sumer and Akkad, op. cit. (1910), p. 131. The scene is shown in the Plate which fronts this section.

[912] A. Ungnad, Hundert AusgewÄhlte Rechtsurkunden, No. 56.

[913] Two contracts (in 5th year of Darius II.) contain provisions that in case “of any fish being lifted,” i.e. stolen, the keeper has to pay a fine of 10 shekels, and in second case to compensate owner. Revue d’Assyriologie, vol. IV., pp. 182-183, by V. Scheil.

[914] Orientalistiche Literaturzeitung (Berlin, 1914), p. 482. This was published by Clay in Publications of the Babylonian Section of the University of Pennsylvania, vol. II., Part I., No. 208. We find a receipt in the XXth century b.c. for salt used for fish supplied by a grocer, sealed by the official controller. Cf. M. Shorr, Urkunden des Altbabylonischen Civil und Processrechts, No. 256.

[915] In the Neo-Babylonian period the word, which makes its first appearance in this contract, employed for net appears to have been salitu or litu. The word is written sa-li-tum, and the first syllable (sa) may be either part of the word, or else the determinative riksu, which is written before things made of cordage. If the word be read salitu, it may perhaps be derived from the root, salÛ, to immerse. The rendering of the word as net is not quite certain, but, as will be seen from the translation of the text, the context points to this meaning. It is clearly some sort of tackle used by fishermen, and the most obvious meaning would be net.

[916] See antea, 333 f., and Tebtunis Papyri, vol. II. pp. 180-181. B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, 1907.

[917] See antea, p. 99, n. 1.

[918] See W. Hayes Ward, Seal Cylinders of Western Asia (Washington, 1910), p. 217, figs. 658, 659, 660, 661.

[919] Ward, op. cit., p. 214, in fig. 249, gives apparent confirmation.

[920] In noting the attributes ascribed to various gods, we are confronted by the problem as to what suggested to the Babylonian his precise differentiation in their characters. These betray their origin: they are the personification of natural forces: in other words, the gods and many of the stories told of them are the only explanation the Babylonian could give, after centuries of observation, of the forces and changes in the natural world. In company with other primitive peoples he explained them as the work of beings very similar but superior to himself. See King, Babylonian Religion (London, 1889). This inevitable tendency of anthropomorphism was tersely expressed by Xenophanes of Colophon (frag. 15):—

[921] For the Nimroud sculpture, see Monuments of Nineveh, op. cit., 2nd Series, Plate 6, while for the agate cylinder, see Nineveh and Babylon (London, 1853), p. 343, where in a note Layard writes, “It is remarkable that on this cylinder the all-seeing eye takes the place of the winged human figure and the globe in the emblem above the sacred tree.”

[922] For the data and authorities available in 1855 and examination into Oannes and Dagon, see J. B. Pitra, Spicilegium Solesmense, III., pp. 500, 501, 503.

[923] Nineveh and Babylon, op. cit., pp. 343, 350. See also Le Mythe de Dagon, by MÉnant; Revue de l’Hist. des Religions (Paris, 1885), vol. II. p. 295 ff., where a great variety of Assyrian fish-men may be found. Forlong (op. cit., I. 231) instances a cornelian cylinder in the Ouseley collection depicting Oannes or the Babylonian god or demi-god, attended by two gods of fecundity, on whom the Sun-god with a fish tail looks down benignantly. Forlong’s obsession detects in every representation, Indian or Irish, Assyrian or Australasian, some emblem of fecundity, while his ever-present “King Charles’s head” is some phallic symbol. We are almost reminded of the witty quatrain current some years back:

[924] The goat-fish god dates as far back as Gudea, c. 2700 b.c. He was like the man-fish or fish-god, a symbol of Ea, the god of water, and probably derives from Capricorn. See Ward, p. 214, fig. 649; and p. 249, figs. 745, 747.

[925] Cf. Ezekiel, VIII. 10, “Every form of creeping things and abominable beasts pourtrayed upon the wall round about.”

[926] Paradise Lost, I., 462.

[927] There was a Babylonian god Dagan whose name appears in conjunction with Anu and often with Ninurta (Ninib). Whether the Philistine Dagon is the same as the Babylonian Dagan cannot with our present knowledge be determined. The long and profound influence of Babylonia in Palestine in early times makes it quite possible that Dagon, like Anath, came thence. Ency. Bibl., p. 984. No evidence suggests Dagan as a Babylonian fish-god.

Some authorities now hold that Dagan came to Babylonia with the Amoritic invasion towards the latter half of the third millennium.

[928] For Derceto, see antea, p. 124, and for Atargatis, antea, pp. 127-8.

[929] Oannes of Berosus is identified with Enki (otherwise Ea) by Langdon, PoÈme SumÉrien, etc. (Paris, 1919), p. 17. Tradition generally makes the earliest founders or teachers of civilisation come from the sea. Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, the children of the sun god, rose, however, not from the sea, but from Lake Titicaca, when they brought to the ancient Peruvians government, law, a moral code, art, and science. Their descendants styled themselves Incas.

[930] See G. F. Hill, Some Palestinian Cults in the Greek and Roman Age, in Proceedings of the British Academy (London, 1911-12), vol. V. p. 9.

[931] Cf. Heuzey, Sceau de GoudÉa (Paris, 1909), p. 6; also W. Hayes Ward, Seal Cylinders of Western Asia (Washington, 1910), figs. 288-289; see also figs. 199, 661. The large number of seals, almost entirely cylinder, which have been found in the excavations is probably owing to every Assyrian of any means always carrying one hung on him. The use to which they were put was precisely similar to that of our signet ring. An Assyrian, instead of signing a document, ran his cylinder over the damp clay tablet on which the deed he was attesting had been inscribed. No two cylinder seals were absolutely alike, and thus this method of signature worked very well. The work on the cylinders is always intaglio; the subjects represented are very various, including emblems of the gods, animals, fish, etc.

[932] RÉcherches ArchÉologiques, vol. XIII. of DÉlÉgation en Perse, by Pottier, Paris, 1912, figs. 117, 204, etc.

[933] L. Heuzey, Revue d’Assyriologie, VI. 57, and Hayes Ward, op. cit., p. 74, fig. 199.

[934] Cf. Langdon, op. cit., 72. Ea or “Enki est gÉnÉralement reprÉsentÉ sous la forme d’un animal ayant la tÊte, le cou, et les Épaules d’un bÉlier, et qui rampe sur les pattes de devant: le reste du corps est celui d’un poisson.”

[935] See the Nippur Poem, op. cit., p. 84, note 3.

[936] From Karl Frank, Babylonische BeschwÖrtunge Reliefs, p. 80. The South Wind was specially dreaded, because it caused destructive floods in the low-lying regions of the Euphrates valley. In Langdon’s Sumerian Epic of Paradise (op. cit., 1915), p. 41, we find that “Adapa sailed to catch fish, the trade of Eridu,” a pretty and simple touch identifying the god with his worshippers, and his pursuit with their trade; and one which supports the theory that to the Babylonian his god, in early times, was a being very similar to himself, if more powerful.

[937] See the Nippur Poem.

[938] Ea’s command sprang from the fear of losing the worship, etc. of his devotee, when once he had acquired immortality by eating and drinking of the Bread and Water of Life.

[939] Adapa stands out as a pathetic and cruelly-punished figure. In this, one of the prettiest of the clumsy legends by which mankind tried to explain the loss of eternal life, Ea forbids for selfish reasons his eating or drinking of the Bread or Water of Life, while Anu’s offer of immortality springs from his desire to deprive Ea, whom he suspects of having betrayed to Adapa the celestial secrets of magical science, of his devotee and fish-gatherer.

[940] Keller, op. cit., p. 347, is astray in stating that Ea was regarded “als Fischgott.” As god of the waters, he was the protector of the fish therein, but apart from this, there is no evidence that he was termed, even with a wide use of the word, a Fish God.

[941] For the omission of fish from the cargo of Noah’s ark, Whiston in his philosophic A New Theory of the Deluge (London, 1737), accounts by the fact, that fish, living in a cooler, more equable element, were correcter in their lives than beasts and birds, who from the heat or cold on land engendered by the sun or its absence were prone to excesses of passion or exercises of sin, and so were saved!

[942] The length of the flood varies greatly from the above seven days, to eight months and nine days of the Nippur Poem, to the nine months and nine days of Le PoÈme SumÉrien, during which Tagtug is afloat, and to the one year and ten days which is the total duration in the Bible.

[943] See Poebel, Historical Texts (Publications of the Babylonian Section of the University of Pennsylvania), vol. IV., Part I., pp. 9 ff. In Langdon’s Le PoÈme SumÉrien (Paris, 1919) is to be found much, which is not written in the later account of Adapa and of the Flood, and of Paradise, and many details which are different. In it there is no woman, no temptress, no serpent. But it does record that the survivor of the Flood was placed in a garden and apparently forbidden to eat of the fruit of a tree, growing in the centre of the garden. He does eat, however, and thereby loses immortality.

[944] The myth of the Deluge is practically world-wide, except in Africa (including Egypt), “where native legends of a great flood are conspicuously absent—indeed, no clear case of one has yet been reported.” J. G. Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament (London, 1918), vol. I. p. 40. Maspero seems quite wide of the mark in treating the semi-ritual myth of the Destruction of Man as “a dry deluge myth,” Dawn of Civilization (London, 1894), pp. 164 ff. For various accounts of the Deluge, see Hastings, EncyclopÆdia of Religion and Ethics, article Deluge (Edinburgh, 1911).

[945] Annals of the Kings of Assyria, by Budge and King (1903), p. 138. ‘Dolphin’ is the translation of Nakhiri, doubtless from the same root, which in Arabic is Nakhara, to spout, and occurs in the same sense in Syriac and Ethiopic. In view of the evidence of Pliny and other authors as to the former existence of the whale in the Mediterranean, I suggested to Professor King an alternative rendering of nakhiri as ‘whale,’ and he informed me he accepts my suggestion as the more probable of the two.

[946] Another translation (R. Asiatic Proc., XIX. pp. 124-5) renders these lines “creatures of the Great Sea which the King of Egypt had sent as a gift, and entrusted to the care of men of his own country,” either as carriers or permanent attendants. But see p. 53 of the Introduction to The Annals of the Kings of Assyria, op. cit. Dr. St. Clair Tisdall writes: “If Nam-su-hu (Budge and King’s translation) be right, it is evidently the Egyptian name ’msuhu = crocodile, with the plural Na prefixed. Egypt in Arabic is still Misr.”

[947] Op. cit., Introduction, pp. 372 ff.

[948] The Assyrians, probably from having no admixture of the softer Sumerian blood, from living in a less enervating climate, and from Hittite influence, stand out as more virile, fiercer fighters, and crueller foes than the Babylonians.

[949] W. Hayes Ward, op. cit., p. 418, states the dog appears in cylinders very early—chiefly as guardian of the flock. Cf. Figures 391, 393, 394, 395. He is seen in the late Babylonian: cf. Figs. 549, 551, 552, and later still in hunting scenes, Figs. 630, 1064, 1076 and 1094, which last shows in a very spirited manner four dogs in a fight with two lions. The dog running away is fairly “making tracks!”

[951] Layard Monuments of Nineveh (op. cit.), vol. II. p. 438.

[952] The identification, which is avowedly more of a philological than a scientifically zoological nature, is in the cases of Nos. 2 and 3 a “terminological inexactitude,” for as Dr. Boulenger’s lists show, neither the turbot nor the sole occur in the Persian Gulf. Cf. Proc. Zoological Society, 1887, p. 653; 1889, p. 236, and 1892, p. 134.

[953] Monograph, Kleine BeitrÄge zum assyrischen Lexicon (Helsingfors, 1912).

[954] Sumerian Grammar (London, 1917), p. 60.

[955] Proc. of Soc. of Biblical ArchÆology (London, May, 1918), p. 83.

[956] Lewysohn’s (Zool. d. Talmud, 248, as quoted by Keller, op. cit., p. 330) “Euphrat heisst etymologisch der fischreiche” is far from generally accepted. The river in Babylonian is Purattu, pronounced by the Persians Ufratus, which became when borrowed by the Greeks, Euphrates. So far from meaning rich in fish, Langdon traces the name to the Sumerian buranna, burnuna, meaning great basin.

[957] Diod. Sic., III. 22.

[958] See General Marshall’s Report on Mesopotamian Campaign in The Times, Feb. 21, 1919.

[959] History of Sumer and Akkad (London, 1910), p. 268.

[960] The hiatus probably may be filled by the word “recall,” or“ bring away.”

[961] Letters of Hammurabi (London, 1898-1900), vol. III. pp. 121-3, L. W. King.

[962] N. H., V. 27.

[963] N. H., VI. 31.

[964] Ibid., XXXI. 19.

[965] N. H., XXXI. 22.

[966] N. H., XXXII. 7.

[967] Hibbert Lecture (London, 1887), p. 57.

[968] On the ancient goddess NinÂ, see Langdon, Tammuz and Ishtar (London, 1914). There is no known representation of NinÂ. Of BÊlit, or Ishtar, many exist; of Ishtar arma ferens that on a seal in Tammuz and Ishtar, Plate I., No. 1, is perhaps the best.

[969] See Nikolski, Documents de la plus ancienne Époque chaldÉenne, Nos. 265 and 269; this last tablet (c. 2900 b.c.) records the delivery of large numbers of fish of various kinds by fishermen for two great festivals.

[970] Cf. antea, p. 217, as regards Rome.

[971] Postea, p. 427.

[972] See Greek-Roman section, Chapter XVI.

[973] Op. cit., p. 358.

[974] Semitic Magic (London, 1908), pp. 181, 186.

[975] Babylonian Magic (Bologna, 1914), pp. 237-8.

[976] “In Israel not to be buried was a terrible disgrace which one could hardly wish for one’s enemy: the spirits of the unburied wandered restlessly about. Burial alone so bound the spirit to the body that it had rest and could harm no one.” Cheyne’s assertion in Encyl. Bibl. (op. cit.), p. 1041, seems to me hardly warranted, at any rate by the O.T. passages which he adduces in support of this statement, in attributing to Israel the idea of the unburied dead being condemned to miserable wandering. For the Greek conception see inter alia the Antigone of Sophocles.

[977] See Egyptian Book of the Dead (London, 1910), ch. LIII., with reference to the deceased being obliged, from lack of proper food in the under-world, to eat filth—“Let me not be obliged to eat thereof in place of the sepulchral offerings.” To provide food for the dead, asphodel was planted near tombs (Odyssey, XI. 539 and 573) by the Greeks. From Hesiod (Op. 41) we learn that the roots of the asphodel were eaten as a common vegetable, as was the mallow. Merry states that in the Greek islands, where customs linger longer than on the mainland, this “kind of squill is still planted on graves.” If the Homeric ‘mead of asphodel’ turns out, as some editors maintain, to have had a strictly utilitarian significance, how many poets and poetasters have mistaken ‘greens’ for ‘greenery!’

[978] King, Babylonian Religion (op. cit.), p. 45, and Babylonian Magic and Sorcery (London, 1896), pp. 119 ff., where the incantation appropriate for exorcising demons is set out.

[979] Gilgamesh here learns how infinitely better is the condition of those to whom the rites of burial have been paid, compared with that of those who have been unburied. R. F. Harper, Assyrian and Babylonian Literature (New York, 1901), 363 ff.

[980] The Hebrew conception of Sheol coincides in regarding it as “a land whence none return,” Job vii. 9-10; as “a place of darkness,” Job x. 21-22; as a place of “dust,” Psalm xxx. 9, and Job xvii. 16.

[981] Priests dressed as fish or with some fish-like raiments often attend the Sacred Tree (see Ward, op. cit., Nos. 687, 688, 689). These are held by some to be genii of the deep. In Ward, No. 690, two fish-men are guarding the Tree of Life.

[982] Compare the exorcism by Tobias of Sara’s demon in Tobit. Langdon, Babylonian Magic and Sorcery (op. cit.), p. 223, commenting on the difficulty, which Semitic philology does not clear up, as to whether a wizard is one who cuts himself (as Robertson Smith and most scholars suppose), or whether he is one who casts his spell by whispering or ventriloquy, holds that “from the Sumerian word and the Sumerian ideogram of the word uhdugga which means one who whispers as he casts saliva, we can settle at once the most primitive method of sorcery known to us.”

[983] Cf. with those of Moses and Sargon the stories of Gilgamesh King of Babylon (Ælian, XII. 22), of Semiramis Queen of Assyria (Diodorus Siculus, ii. 4), and of Karna in the Indian Epic of Mahabharata (Cheyne’s Traditions and Beliefs of Ancient Israel London, 1907), p. 519. “It has been conjectured,” writes Frazer (op. cit.), II. p. 454 ff, “that in stories like that of the exposure of Moses in the water (in this case, unlike most others, all supernatural elements are absent) we have a reminiscence of the old custom as practised by the CeltÆ on the Rhine, and according to Speke by some Central African tribes in the last century, of testing the legitimacy of children by throwing them into the water to sink or swim; the infants which sank were rejected as bastards. In the light of this conjecture it may be significant that in several of these stories the birth of the child is represented as supernatural, which in this connection cynics are apt to regard as a delicate synonym for illegitimate.” On p. 454 he touches on the question whether Moses, the son of Amram by his (Amram’s) paternal aunt, was thus the offspring of an incestuous marriage, and therefore exposed on the Nile.

[984] See Rogers, Cuneiform Parallels to the Old Testament (London, 1912), pp. 135 ff.

[985] From Astronomy many Assyrian dates have been ascertained. Kugler by stellar researches has settled the vexed question of the date of Hammurabi, and probably that of Abram, at about 2120 b.c., which unites within one year the latest conclusions of King, Jastrow, and Rogers, and so establishes an important degree of accord among Assyriologists on events subsequent to 2200 b.c. as regards which they have hitherto been wide apart. Then again modern astronomers have worked out that there was a total eclipse of the sun at Nineveh on June 15, 763 b.c. The importance of the fixing of this date can as regards Assyrian chronology hardly be exaggerated. The Assyrians, rejecting the Babylonian system of counting time, invented a system of their own, by naming the year after certain officers or terms of office, not unlike the system of the Archonates at Athens, and the Consulates at Rome. These were termed limus: a list of these functionaries during four centuries has come down to us. In the time of one of them, Pur Sagali, there is a mention of the eclipse of the sun. As this eclipse has now been fixed for the year 763 b.c., we possess an automatic date for every year after of the limus.

[986] Apollo to the Greeks was at once archer-god and god of divination. The word ??e??e, “he gave as his oracular response,” means literally “he picked up” (the arrows). Indeed the curious fact that ???? in Greek denotes “I say” and in Latin “I read” is best explained by O. Schrader, who points out that it meant originally “I pick up” or “collect” (the arrows of divination) and so both read and declare the will of heaven. See O. Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, trans. F. B. Jevons (London, 1890), p. 279.

[987] Koran, Sur. v. 92.

[988] Proverbs, vii. 23.

[989] See, e.g. C. Thulin, Die GÖtter des Martianus Capella und der Bronzeleber von Piacenza, Gieszen, 1906.

[990] Ency. Bibl., p. 1118.

[991] According to Langdon, Tammuz and Ishtar (op. cit.), p. 47, “NinÂ, a water deity, was identified at an early date with the constellation, Scorpio; for this reason her brother Ningirsu, also a water deity, was identified with one of the stars of Scorpio.”

[992] The Biru or Kasbu represented the distance walked by an ordinary man in one Sumerian hour, which, as they divided their whole day into twelve, equals two of our hours. The prehistoric Sumerians, like other nations, reckoned the year by the Moon, not by the Sun. The historic calendar-makers endeavoured to bridge the hiatus and correlate the solar with the lunar year by inserting an intercalary month. They combined the decimal and the sexagesimal in their scheme of numbers—hence, though curiously, their multiplication was always by six, not ten. Cf. W. Zimmern, Zeit und Raumrechnung, who instances the twelve—6 × 2—signs of the Zodiac, etc.

[993] Aquarius.

[994] Capricorn.

[995] Similarly in the Gigantomachy as figured on the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, Æolus, god of the winds, helps the deities against the giants by deflating two bags of wind. He is represented by an Ionian sculptor as working his wind-bags with all the concentration of a Hun working his machine-gun. See G. Perrot—C. Chipiez, Histoire de l’Art dans l’antiquitÉ (Paris, 1903), VIII. 368 and 375, fig. 172.

[996] Cf. Babylonian Religion (op. cit.), pp. 62-85.

[997] Throughout my pages the words, Jews and Jewish, are generally used in the popular sense, and not as merely signifying members of the tribe of Judah. To my friend Dr. A. R. S. Kennedy, Professor of Hebrew at Edinburgh University, my thanks are due for advice and for reading the proof-sheets of my section on the Jews.

[998] In this chapter the word Assyrian generally stands for Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian proper.

[999] Remains of the Hyksos kings are far-scattered; e.g. an alabaster vase-lid of very fine work, bearing the name of Khian, was discovered in the palace of Cnossos in Crete, while a granite lion bearing the king’s cartouche on his breast, unearthed many years ago at Bagdad, is to be seen in the British Museum. J. H. Breasted, History of Egypt, p. 218 (London, 1906).

[1000] The verse is not conclusive that they were called Israelites during their sojourn in Goshen. The name used by the older sources is Ibrim, probably identical with the Egyptian word Aperu or Apriu.

[1001] This is probably a shortening of the Sumero-Babylonian Abara-rakku, equalling seer. H. de Genouillac was the first to connect the word with the Hebrew Abrek, in his Tablettes SumÉriennes Archaiques.

[1002] See p. 94, Flinders Petrie, Israel and Egypt, of which in this section I frequently avail myself. Inscriptions of c. XXVIth Dynasty, or c. 600 b.c. disclose that there was an actual priesthood dedicated to the god YHW, which word is clearly spelt out.

[1003] ArchÆology and the Bible, p. 109 (London, 1916).

[1004] The Civilisation of Palestine, p. 33.

[1005] The Biblical World, Feb., 1910, p. 105. Inscriptions of Sinai (published in 1913 by the Egypt Exploration Fund) furnish much evidence as regards the intercourse between Egypt and Israel. For the trade between Solomon and Egypt, see 1 Kings x. 28, etc.

[1006] See Plates 370 and 371 in Wilkinson, and antea, p. 314.

[1007] See antea, pp. 355-9.

[1008] In Singer, Jewish Ency., V. p. 404. “Fishing implements such as hook and line, sometimes secured on shore to need no further attention (Shab. 18A), and nets of various constructions” are practically all that are given.

[1009] After acknowledging (Notes and Queries, Dec. 2, 1916) that there is no mention in either Old or New Testament of a Rod, Mr. Breslar goes on, “Yet there are places such as Job xl. 31 (xli. 7) where the Hebrew words are translated barbed irons and fish spears, and in Job xl. 26 (xli. 2) a thorn. A fishing-rod in the modern sense no one could reasonably demand, though I opine that in agmoun (Isaiah lviii. 5), used in that sense in Job xl. 26, we have the nucleus of one.” Mr. Breslar is evidently not aware or does not realise that fish spears, bidents, etc., were of the earliest weapons of fishing, long anterior to the Rod, and that these are the weapons referred to in Job. A reference to the Jewish EncyclopÆdia edited by Isidore Singer, would have shown him that ?il?al dagim in Job xli. 7 was in all probability a harpoon. Then, “that this phrase (Klei metzooda) or a similar one is not found in the Bible is merely an accidental omission like, I believe, that of the name of Jehovah from the Book of Esther.” This is hardly helpful: let us grant that the omission of a name from a short book like Esther was an accident. How can this be “like” the omission of all mention of or allusion to the Rod in the vast literature of the Old and New Testaments and of the Talmud, especially when we find in all three numerous passages dealing with fishing and the tackle employed for fishing?

[1010] At the beginning of the world (Buddha tells the Monk of Jetavana) all the fishes chose Leviathan for their King. No hint as to what fish this Leviathan represented is given us: but the Leviathan conceived by the Talmudists seems to have been an indefinable sea-monster, of which the female lay coiled round the earth till God, fearing that her progeny might destroy the new globe, killed her and salted her flesh and put it away for the banquet which at the end awaits the pious of the earth. On that day Gabriel will kill the male also, and make a tent out of his skin for the Elect who are bidden to the banquet (Robinson, op. cit., p. 8). As Robinson is somewhat misleading, especially as regards the word Leviathan, I give the story as told by Buddha with reference to Anqulimata from Jataka, nv. 537, vol. V. p. 462. A certain king had been a Yakkha, and still wanted to eat human flesh. His commander-in-chief tells him a tale to warn him. “Once upon a time there were great fishes in the Ocean. One of them, Ananda, was made king of all the fish, ate the other fish, and finally ate his own tail thinking it was a fish. The remaining fish smelling blood, devoured Ananda’s tail until they reached his head, and all that was left of Ananda was a heap of bones.” Leviathan is a gloss of Robinson’s, because the only word in the text which could in any degree correspond to Leviathan is Maha Maccho = great fish. For the election of a King of fish, see also the Nacca Jataka, and the Ubrida Jataka.

[1011] Bk. II. 70.

[1012] See, however, an article in The Spectator, Feb. 14, 1920, which asserts that the existence of crocodiles in the Nahr-ez-Zerka, or the River of Crocodiles of the Crusaders, cannot be questioned, and also H. B. Tristram, Land of Israel (London, 1865), p. 103, to similar but unconvincing effect.

[1013] Cf. Isaiah xxxvii. 29, “Therefore will I put my hook (?o?) in thy nose, and my bridle in thy lips,” and 2 Chron. xxxiii. 11, “Which took Manasseh with hooks” (R.V. margin).

[1014] In a letter to A. Dalziel, Sept. 3, 1803, Porson states that these lines were an effort made to English an epigram by an Etonian friend, in imitation of Phocylides’s saw (Strabo, X. p. 487):

[1015] Op. cit., p. 53.

[1016] The inscription mentions the existing conditions of foreign affairs with neighbouring countries as satisfactory. It is in this connection that the “people of Israel” come in. Their Exodus, according to Pharaonic fashion, would have been described by the King as an expulsion and not as an escape against his will. The author of the inscription, who wrote from a point of view which was not that of the Biblical account, seems not unsupported by Exodus xii. 39, “Because they were thrust out of Egypt and could not tarry.” Even stronger is the Revised Version marginal rendering in Exodus xi. 1, “When he shall let you go altogether, he shall utterly thrust you out hence.” Sir Hanbury Brown, Journal of Egyptian ArchÆology (Jan. 1917), p. 19.

[1017] In connection with, perhaps even helping to fix, the date of the Exodus, it is in the victorious hymn of Menephtah that the earliest written reference to Israel appears: “Israel is desolated: her seed is not. Palestine has become a (defenceless) widow of Egypt” (Breasted), or “The Israelites are swept off: his seed is no more” (Naville). Petrie’s translation, “The people of Israel is spoiled: it has no corn (or seed),” does not for various reasons seem to find favour. The majority of Egyptologists now identify Aahmes I. with the “new king who knew not Joseph,” c. (1582), Rameses II. as the first Pharaoh of the Oppression, and of Exodus ii. 15 (c. 1300), and Menephtah the son of Rameses II. with the Pharaoh of the Plagues and the Flight from Egypt (c. 1234).

[1018] Egyptian ArchÆology (1902), 3-4. Erman, op. cit., 417. The English translators state that the bricks were usually unburnt and mixed with short pieces of straw.

[1019] If the Egyptian Rod was unknown, “the Egyptian fish (probably salted) that came in baskets” were regularly imported. Mishna Makhshirin, VI. 3.

[1020] See 1 Kings iv. 33, “And he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes.” Some authorities hold that this mention of Solomon’s natural history researches is quite late, and meant to be a set off against Aristotle’s.

[1021] Herod seems, from notices in Josephus, to have been quite a sportsman, for he kept a regular stud (Ant., XVI. 10, s. 3), and hunted bears, stags, wild asses, etc., with a record bag of forty head in one day (ibid., XV. 7, s. 7; and B. J., I. 21, s. 13).

[1022] It is fair to record that some of the Assyrian monarchs preferred a battle mid safer surroundings, for in representations the head keepers are seen letting the lions, etc., out of cages for their royal master to pot! Parks (pa??de?s??) and districts were strictly preserved by both Assyrian and Persian rulers; in England for several reigns the penalty for poaching in the New and other Royal Forests was death.

[1023] E. B. Tylor, Anthropology (London, 1881), p. 220.

[1024] M. G. Watkins, Gleanings from Natural History (London, 1885), ch. 10.

[1025] The classification, if unscientific and incorrect—e.g. Eels possess rudimentary scales—had as its practical purpose the elimination of the SiluridÆ—i.e. the Catfish Clarias, Bagrus, Synodontis, etc.—which even if, as with the Catfish, pleasant to the taste were very unwholesome, causing diarrhoea, rashes, etc. Doctors inform me that even in our day Jews who eat crustaceÆ, especially lobsters, are far more liable to these diseases than Christians—presumably from an abstention of centuries. The ban on Eels from their infrequency in Palestine was almost superfluous, but on the Clarias, which abounds in and near the sea of Tiberias, very practical. The abstention, whether originating from supposed reasons of health or from some obscure tabu, was and still is prevalent in Asia, Africa, and South America. A curious trace of it at Rome is discoverable in Numa’s ordinance that in sacrificial offerings no scaleless fish, and no scarus should figure (Pliny, N. H., XXXII. 10). The abstention is sometimes merely partial, as with the KarayÁs in the Amazon valley, see W. A. Cook, op. cit., p. 96.

[1026] 700! according to the Talmud, Hul., 83^b.

[1027] Cf. Nidda, 51^b. For authoritative decisions regarding clean and unclean fish, see Hamburger, vol. I., Art. Fisch, Die jÜdischen Speisegesetze (Wien, 1895), p. 310 ff.

[1028] Forlong, in his Rivers of Life, asserts that even at the present day the Eastern Jews do not eat fresh fish, but at marriages they place one on the ground, and the bride and bridegroom walk round or step over it seven times as an emblem of fecundity.

It is curious to note the mistake of Pliny in XXXI. 44: “Aliud vero castimonarium superstitioni etiam, sacrisque JudÆis dicatum, quod fit e piscibus squama carentibus.” C. Mayhoff’s edition (LipsiÆ, 1897), however, runs, XXXI. 95: “Aliud vero est castimoniarum superstitioni etiam sacrisque JudÆis dicatum, quod,” etc.

[1029] Sir Thomas Browne, in his Miscellaneous Writings, discourses of fish mentioned in the Bible.

[1030] Walton (in his Introduction) makes Piscator, after speaking of these four Apostles as “men of mild and sweet, and peaceable spirits (as indeed most fishermen are),” continues, “it is observable that it is our Saviour’s will that his four Fishermen Apostles should have a prioritie of nomination in the catalogue of his Twelve Apostles. And it is yet more observable that at his Transfiguration, when he left the rest of his Disciples and chose only three to accompany him, that these three were all Fishermen.” As a contrast to the excellent character given to the four fisher Apostles by Walton, a learned divine of Worms, J. Ruchard, found it incumbent in 1479 to defend Peter from the charge of instituting abstinence from flesh, so that he could profitably dispose of his fish! Keller, op. cit., p. 335.

[1031] B. J., III. 10, 18. “It is watered by a most fertile fountain. Some have thought it to be a vein of the Nile, as it produces the Coracin fish as well as that lake does, which is near Alexandria.”

[1032] Smith’s Hist. of the Bible (1890), and Singer’s Jewish EncyclopÆdia, V., p. 403, however, mention the Tunny, Herring, Eel, etc.

[1033] See, also, E. W. G. Masterman, Studies in Galilee, Chicago, 1909.

[1034] Dr. Boulenger points out, however, that the affinity between the two rivers is restricted to a few species of the Silurids and Cichlids, whose importance is outweighed by the total absence from the Jordan of such characteristic African families as the PolypteridÆ, MormyridÆ, and CharacinidÆ.

[1035] This statement of Tristram’s is controverted by Masterman, op. cit., p. 44, note 1, who writes, “This is impossible. They leave the shelter of their fathers’ mouths when about the size of a lentil, and apparently never return.” The male Pipe fish Syngnathus acus not only carries the eggs, but also the young fish in a pouch, in a manner similar to the kangaroo. The young, even after they have begun to swim about, return when alarmed to the parental cavity. There are only one or two instances of a female fish taking sole charge of the ova: of these is Aspreto batrachus, which by lying on the top of her eggs presses them in to her spongy body and carries them thus, till they are hatched.

[1036] In islands off Northern Australia are found walking and climbing fish, Periophthalmus koelreuteri and P. australis, which ascend the roots of the mangrove by the use of ventral and pectoral fins, and jump and skip on the mud with the alertness of rabbits (The Confessions of a Beachcomber, p. 204, London, 1913).

Ktesias, a possible contemporary of Herodotus, writes that in India are little fish whose habit it is now and then to have a ramble on dry land.

[1037] Wilkinson, op. cit., II. p. 118.

[1038] Encyl. Bibl., ii. col. 1528, from Thomson, The Land and the Book, p. 402.

[1039] Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis, vol. I., Digest, 41, 1, 1.

[1040] Op. cit., supra, p. 405.

[1041] Goldschmidt’s Der Babylonische Talmud, vol. VI. p. 1005.

[1042] “The first fisherman has already bestowed labour on the fish, and regards them as his property.”

[1043] Zuckermann, a leading Jewish authority, in Das jÜdische Maassystem, p. 31, gives, it is true, the following equivalents: 1 Parasang = 4 Mil. (Lat. mille = 30 Ris) (stadia)—8000 Hebrew cubits. Reckoning the cubit at, in round figures, 18 inches, we get a parasang of 4000 yards, or about 2¼ miles. Later authorities, however, are agreed that the Persian parasang was at least 3½ miles, or more.

[1045] Talmud, Ned. 20^b.

[1046] Many hold that Deuteronomy was written not earlier than the seventh century, or even as late as 550 b.c., previous to which there had taken place a large influx of foreigners, especially from N.W. Mesopotamia and Babylon, where gods were represented by scores.

[1047] Egypt and Israel, pp. 60, 61. Objection to the use of images in Israel was not apparently general till the latter half of the eighth century B.C. Their existence may, perhaps, be explained by (A) the universal existence of such worship among the Canaanites, (B) the proportion of Israelites to Canaanites being about as small as that of the Normans to the Saxons in England.

[1048] Of the fate of this and other temples erected by Solomon we read in 2 Kings xxiii. 13, “and the high places which Solomon had builded for Ashtoreth, the abomination of the Zidonians, and for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom, the abomination of the children of Ammon, did the king defile,” i.e. King Josiah some three centuries and a half after.

[1049] For data on Atargatis and Derceto, and for various Syrian coins bearing fish, see J. B. Pitra, Spicilegium Solesmense, III. pp. 503-4 (Paris, 1855).

[1050] Ency. Bibl., p. 379.

[1051] In Some Palestinian Cults in the Greek and Roman Age (Proceedings of British Academy, vol. V. p. 9), Mr. G. F. Hill, speaking of the worship in the two cities, concludes that the one at Ascalon is identified by Herodotus with that of Aphrodite Urania, and that at Gaza with Derceto, or Atargatis. Lucian (if he wrote De dea Syria) distinguishes the goddess of Ascalon from her of Hierapolis, who was worshipped in human not semi-human form, but there is little doubt of the connection between them. The Greeks identified both with Aphrodite. Other writers state that the Canaanite Ashtoreth, pre-eminently the goddess of reproduction and fecundity, became the goddess of fish (which, as sacred to her, were forbidden food) and of the pomegranate, both of which from their thousands of eggs or seeds are striking emblems of fertility.

[1052] Graf Wolf von Baudissin in Hauck’s Protestantische Realencycl., 3rd ed., vol. II., p. 177, s.v. Atargatis, “If Atargatis be, as we suppose, originally identical with Astarte, and if the latter be the representative of the generative night-sky—in particular of the Moon—then the representation of the former as a water and fish deity will be connected with the conception, so widespread in antiquity, of the Moon being the principle of generative moisture.”

[1053] 1 Sam. v. 4.

[1054] Frazer, The Golden Bough, I. pp. 14 and 70, gives many instances similar to the periodic offering by the Scape-Goat among the Chinese, Malayans, and Esquimaux.

[1055] Pitra, op. cit., p. 515 (who refers to Buxtorf, Synag. Jud., chapter XXIV.), is incorrect, according to the Jewish Ency. (New York, 1906, vol. XII. 66 f.), which states the Tashlik—the propitiatory rite referred to—does not occur in the Talmud or the geonic writers. Fish illustrate man’s plight and arouse him to repentance, “As the fishes that are taken in an evil net,” Eccl. ix. 12; and, as they have no eyebrows and their eyes are always open, they symbolise the Guardian of Israel, who slumbereth not. See R. I. Harowitz, Shelah, p. 214.

[1056] Psalm cvi. 36 ff.

[1057] Semitic Magic, 1908.

[1058] See Bennett, Exodus, p. 178, where he cites Baentsch, and E. Meyer. Other writers, who admit the sacrifice, deduce its cause from some very early rite by which the bride was deflowered by some god or his representatives, the Holy Men: hence what the deity had given, the deity claimed. See infra, p. 435, n. 2, where this view is brought out.

[1059] Hosea, iv. 12. Cf. Herodotus, IV. 67.

[1060] 1 Sam. xiv. 41-2. Urim and Thummin seem pebbles kept in the Ephod.

[1061] Isaiah, xlvii. 13.

[1062] Gen. xxxi. 10-13; Judges, vii. 13.

[1063] Petrie, op. cit., p. 49.