The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 2 (of 6)

Chapter 219: CHAP. 32.—THAT THE SAME KINDS ARE NOT EVERYWHERE EQUALLY ESTEEMED.

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The volume assembles an encyclopedic survey of the known world and its living inhabitants, moving from detailed regional geography and descriptions of seas, rivers, islands, and peoples to extended treatments of humanity, its generation, anatomy, and the origins and inventions of arts. Subsequent books catalog terrestrial animals—their habits, capture, and uses—followed by comprehensive observations on fish and marine creatures, their sizes and behaviors. Accounts mix naturalistic description, reported marvels, medicinal uses derived from animals, and travel and secondhand reports, organized as topical chapters intended as a practical compendium of natural and human phenomena.

CHAP. 32.—THAT THE SAME KINDS ARE NOT EVERYWHERE EQUALLY ESTEEMED.

There is this also in the nature of fish, that some are more highly esteemed in one place, and some in another; such, for instance, as the coracinus 2426 in Egypt, the zeus,2427 also called the faber,2428 at Gades, the salpa,2429 in the vicinity of Ebusus,2430 which is considered elsewhere an unclean fish, and can nowhere 2431 be thoroughly cooked, wherever found, without being first beaten with a stick: in Aquitania, again, the river salmon 2432 is preferred to all the fish that swim in the sea.