Fishing from the Earliest Times

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

We found, it will be remembered, that the Homeric poems make no mention of fish being served at a banquet of the heroes, or even appearing on the tables of people of position. Only poor or starving folk ate fish. Although fish became later an insensate luxury, the Greeks at first apparently abstained from all fish caught in fresh water, except the eels of Lake Copaïs, then as now far-famed.[459]

This abstention from fresh-water fish originated (according to Plutarch) in the belief that every spring and every stream was sacred to some god or nymph, to catch whose property or progeny—the fish in them—would be an act of impiety.[460] This sounds like a laboured explanation of a fact really due to other causes. One of these is brought out clearly in Geikie. When noticing the difference which existed between the Greek and the Roman interest in and feeling for the sea, he, or rather Professor Mackail, attributes it largely to a question of food supply.[461]

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

Whatever be the cause of the early abstention, three points arouse our interest. (A) The passages in Greek writers (previous to Ælian) that describe angling in Greek fresh waters, reach but a scant half-dozen, while those that depict fishing in such waters—sacred lakes, temple stew-ponds, and eeling in Lake Copaïs excepted—can probably be reckoned on both hands.[462]

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

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

The statement that the Romans abstained, like the Maeatæ or Celts[463] of North Britain, from fresh-water fish from similar, or any motives, cannot be established. It goes far beyond the evidence at our command, although some aversion may be possibly deduced from Ovid (Fast., VI. 173 f.), and as regards shellfish from Varro. Unlike the Greeks, however, they certainly in a very short period became great consumers of fish from the Tiber, the Po, the Italian Lakes, and afterwards from the Danube, Rhine, etc., but in their estimation, as in that of the Greeks, fish from the sea ever held the higher place.[464]

If cost be a true criterion, this preference for salt-water fish continued as late as the fourth century. In Diocletian’s Edict, 301 a.d., fixing the price of food, etc., throughout the Empire, the maximum allowed for best quality sea-fish was nearly double that of best quality river-fish.[465]

In both Greece and Rome fish became luxuries of the most expensive kind. Seas and rivers were scoured far and wide. No price was thought too extravagant for a mullet, a sturgeon, or a turbot; three mullets of historical celebrity even fetched in Rome the almost incredible sum of £240![466]

In spite of many laws and decrees made at Athens and at Rome (where the Censor often interfered[467] in cases of extravagance in dress, living, etc.) the prices, owing to the ingenuity of the sellers and the wild competition of the buyers, rose constantly higher. The plaint of Cato the Censor that things could not be well with a community, where “a fish fetched more than a bull,” was uttered in and of a generation, which in comparison with its successors looks frugal, even niggardly.

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

One would imagine that Nature had fallen in with the caprice of the Romans, for the fish seems to have grown larger in the decline of the Empire, as if to humour the extravagance of this degenerate people. Horace thought he had pretty well stigmatised the frantic folly of his glutton by a mullet of 3 lbs. (Sat., II. 2, 33); but the next reign furnished one of 4½ lbs., which presented to and sold at auction by the Emperor Tiberius was bought by Octavius for £40 (Seneca, Ep., XCV. 42), while in Juvenal, IV. 15 f., we have one of 6 lbs.[468]

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

Alongside of Pliny’s caustic comment[469] that the price of a victorious Triumph equalled that of a cook, or a fish, can be set the lament of the Greek comedians that for some fish one had to pay ἴσον ἲσῳ, i.e. for weight avoirdupois you handed over a similar weight in money or, as Mayor neatly renders it, “£ for lb.” This gibe at the public mania sprang from bitter personal experience. At Rome, too, we read “of those who sell rare fish for their weight in money.”

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

apply with greater force to “the men-eaters” who purchased mullets for £40 or £60 each?[470]

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

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

Thus Columella contrasts the custom of their ancestors of taking a cognomen from some great victory, e.g. Numantinus or Isauricus, with that of their decadent successors such as Licinius Muræna or Sergius Orata.[472]

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

Even Diogenes the Cynic came to an untimely end by eating with eager haste a polypus raw.[473] Philoxenus the Poet, when warned by his doctor, after “he had bought a polypus two cubits long, dressed it, and ate it up himself all but the head,” that he had but six hours left to live and to arrange his affairs, bequeathed his poems and the prizes of his poems to the Nine Muses:

The moralists of the Empire bewail “the costly follies of the patricians.” Juvenal, Martial, and other Roman Satirists lampoon the gluttony and extravagance connected with opsophagy, or the eating of fish. This limitation of the word is explained by Plutarch (Symp., IV. 4), “fish alone above all the rest of the dainties is called ὄψον, because it is more excellent than all the rest,” and characteristically defended by Athen., VII. 4.[475]

The banquets of the Greeks[476] seem to have outdone even those of Imperial Rome. Both must have weighed heavy, alike on table and on chest.

At these, writes Badham, “although all flesh was there, although quadrupeds mustered strong, and a whole heaven of poultry, still it was the flesh of fishes that ever bore away the palm; they were the soul of the supper, and the number of kinds brought together at one repast was surprisingly great. From the poetic bills of fare preserved by Athenæus I have verified twenty-six species of fish in one Attic supper, and not less than forty at another![477] On the fish course being brought in, the appearance of the banqueting hall soon became more splendid: hardware made way for solid silver: gold breadbaskets were now handed round: the flower of youth of both sexes entered bearing bits of pumice, drugs against drunkenness, and trays full of chaplets of Violets and Amaranth, while others hung up that mystic flower, the present of the God of Love to the God of Silence, to intimate that henceforth all things said or done at the feast were to be kept, inviolable and sub rosa, under which flower by the rain of myriads of petals all the guests literally soon were.”[478]

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

At one of the suppers to which it was the custom of Nero to invite himself—his meals, Suetonius (Nero, 27) tells us, were prolonged from mid-day to midnight or vice-versa—no less than £32,000 was expended on chaplets, and at another still more on roses alone. But it must be remembered that the Italian rose bloomed only for one day—witness the lines, “Una dies aperit, conficit una dies,” and “Quam longa una dies, ætas tam longa rosarum.”[479] The cost of an entertainment by his brother in honour of the Emperor Vitellius on his entrance to Rome was nearly £80,000!

But of Vitellius himself let Suetonius[480] speak: “He was chiefly addicted to the vices of luxury and cruelty. He always made three meals a day, sometimes four—breakfast, dinner, supper, and a drunken revel afterwards. This load of food he bore well enough, from a custom to which he had inured himself, of frequently vomiting!” No wonder Seneca lashes the gluttons of Rome with “Vomunt ut edant, edunt ut vomant!”[481] For each of these meals he would make different appointments at the houses of his friends for the same day. None ever entertained him at less expense than 400,000 sesterces (or £3200). But the most famous entertainment—given in his honour by his brother—commandeered no less than 2,000 choice fishes, and 7,000 birds.

Yet even this supper he himself outdid at a feast to celebrate the first use of a dish fashioned expressly for him, and from its extraordinary size yclept “The Shield of Minerva.” In this dish[482] costing £100,000 and capable of feeding one hundred and thirty guests “were tossed together the livers of charfish, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingos, and the entrails (or rather the milt) of lampreys, brought in ships of war from the Carpathian Sea, or the Spanish Straits.”[483]

In order “satiare inexplebiles libidines,” etc., Vitellius is believed to have squandered in a few months[484] no less than seven million two hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds (£7,265,000)![485]

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

The fabulous sums spent on entertainments by the Greeks and Romans were equalled, even surpassed by the Persians, the Sybarites, the Egyptians, and other nations. But the cost, though prodigious, of Cleopatra’s four-day entertainment to Antony and his captains (in the menu of which fishes from the Nile and the Red Sea figured conspicuously), pales before that of a supper given in honour of Xerxes and his captains by Antipater of Thasos, i.e. 400 (presumably Attic) talents or some £100,000! No wonder Herodotus mournfully adds, “Wherever Xerxes took two meals, dinner and supper, that city was utterly ruined!”[486]

Nor at the feasts, which the invader of Media made “for a great multitude every day,” was it a case of taking up of the fragments that remained but twelve basketsful, because, as Posidonius (in the 14th book of his History) continues, “besides the food that was consumed and the heaps of fragments which were left, every guest carried away with him entire joints of beasts, and birds, and fishes, which had never been carved, all ready dressed,[487] in sufficient quantities to fill a waggon. And after this they were presented with a quantity of sweetmeats,” etc.

The prize, however, for mad lavishness must be adjudged even in a race of such strenuous competitors, to “that most admirable of all monarchs,” Ptolemy Philadelphus. It is “Eclipse first, the rest nowhere,” if the description of the coronation feast given by Callixenus in his History of Alexandria be faithfully rendered by Athenæus.[488]

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

M. Gavius Apicius, after squandering half a million sterling on the indulging his passion for creating new dishes and new combinations of food from materials collected in Europe, Asia, and Africa, one day balanced his accounts. Finding that but barely £80,000 remained, and despairing of being able to satisfy the cravings of his hunger from such a miserable pittance he poisoned himself. He is possibly the author of a Treatise (in ten books!) of recipes for new dishes and new sauces for fish; for one of the latter more than twenty-five ingredients were necessary.[489]

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

To these Attic cordons bleus in succeeding generations not only Italy but Persia were glad to send pupils, and pay exorbitant fees for tuition. The Attic cook gave himself the same airs of superiority over his Roman brother, as the French chef over the Anglican—him “of a hundred sects but only one sauce.” Carême, the chef of Talleyrand (the author of this mot), never abated his claim that to the success of the Congress of Vienna he contributed no less than his master.[490] His salary, however, does not begin to compare with that of Antony’s cook, £3000 a year and “perquisites” galore.

Anaxandrides[491] compares the beauteous work of portrait painters unfavourably with the beauty of a dish of fish. Xenarchus[492] contrasts poets with fishmongers, much to the detriment of the former:

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

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

Lucian, in his witty Dialogue,[493] makes Hermes act as auctioneer at the sale of the different creeds as personified by their founders or by philosophers, and dilate on the exceptional merits of the lot then under the hammer, “because he will teach you how long a gnat will live, and what sort of soul an oyster possesses.” Mr. Lambert states that Ausonius wrote a poem on the oyster! To be more accurate, he wrote two,[494] and lengthy ones to boot!

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

Greek and Roman writers frequently poke fun at the gourmets who asserted that they could instantly tell from the flavour whence the fish came: from what sea, and what part of that sea, from what river, and even from which side of that river.[495]

Either these ancient connoisseurs were blessed with a more exquisite and developed sense of taste than we moderns, or the whole pose was an intolerable affectation, for “they drenched their subtly-conceived dishes with garum, alec, and other sauces, which were so strong and composite that it would have been hardly possible to distinguish a fresh fish from a putrid cat—except by the bones!”[496]

This assertion is none too strong, if the receipts for these sauces be duly pondered. Mention of garum, which gets its name from being made originally from the salted blood and entrails of a fish called garon or garos by the Greeks, is in classical writers very general: we find it even in Æschylus and Sophocles.[497]

The various sauces known in Latin are too numerous to recite.[498] The two best, although the authorities are far from unanimous, seem to have been made out of the gills and entrails of the Mackerel and Tunny. The components of one recipe justify Robinson. In addition to other odds and ends, its outstanding feature was the gore and entrails of the Tunny, crammed in a vessel hermetically closed, and only drawn off when decomposition was complete! No wonder Plato the Comedian complains ... “drenching them in putrid garum they will suffocate me.”

Alec, like garum, once the name of a fish (possibly the anchovy), came to signify only the sauce made from it, and subsequently from other cheap fish. It differed from garum chiefly from being thicker, and judging from the recipes probably nastier. You took first the dregs and fæculence remaining after the garum liquor had been decanted: to them, add turbid brine, sodden bodies of the fish, etc., and then you have the semi-solid compound, from which alec was derived, not inaptly yclept “Putrilago.”[499]

If, as Badham (p. 69) asserts but not convincingly, garum a double duty served, as a sauce and as a liqueur, the price of the latter was exorbitant, over £3 a gallon.[500] Martial (Ep., XIII. 102) in

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

Apart from their gastronomic popularity, the medical efficacy of the various gara as pæaned by Pliny must, like the Waverley Pen, have “come as a boon and a blessing to men,” in the wide range of their cures.[501] For ulcers of the mouth and ears, one mirifice prodest. On the application of other gara, “dumb-foundered flee away” burns, blains, dysenteries, bites of dogs, maximeque crocodili, etc. Chapter 44 might indeed easily pass as the leaflet of an advance agent for a patent pill.

With the knowledge and use of the various internal parts of fish, it is strange to find Caviare, made out of the roe of the Sturgeon, first in a recipe of the ninth century. Soft and hard roes then, as now, were generally exported, but as a separate article it became known only in Byzantine times.[502]

With the hungry desire for fish among all classes and with the deep pockets of the rich enabling them to go to any extreme price, is it any wonder that the trade of a fishmonger at Athens and Rome was most lucrative? Several fishmongers acquired large fortunes and high position. The Athenians even raised to the rank of citizens the sons of Chærephilus, for the adequate reason that he sold such excellent pickled fish![503]

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