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

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

From Sappho “the sole woman of any age or any country who gained and still holds an unchallenged place in the first rank of the world’s poets”[267] comes down

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

The verses of Alcæus stress poverty even more strongly:

“From fragments of Greek Comedy it is evident that fishers were among the familiar characters on the stage, and were sometimes the protagonists.” Examination of the Old, Middle and New Comedians confirm Dr. Hall.[270]

In Epicharmus (b.c. 540-450) the reputed founder of Comedy in Sicily; in Sophron’s The Fisherman and the Clown, where the former naturally outwits the country boor; in Plato the comedian’s Phaon, where he may have ridiculed the legend of Sappho’s vain love for the Lesbian fisherman; in The Fishes by Archippus, where people were satirised under the names of fishes spelled in the same way as their own; or (to pass from Old to Middle Comedy) in The Fisher-Woman by Antiphanes (in the fragments of which, however, we are confronted by no Sex problem, by no Suffragettism[271]); and (of the New Comedy authors) in Menander’s The Fishermen (where we gather from Pollux that a fisher came on the stage fully equipped for fishing), in all these plays and many more appear fisher folk.[272]

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

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

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

“Theocritus is the creator of the literary piscatory, as he is also of the literary bucolic.” This dictum would, I think, be rendered more accurate by the substitution of modeller in place of creator. Theocritus, even if we allow for Stesichorus, Epicharmus, and Sophron, stands out the first, not to create but to gather, and by his genius reduce to regular literary shape, the existent poems and songs (Volkslieder) which formed the stock in trade of the Bucoliastæ in Cos, Sicily, and Magna Græcia.[273]

The influence of Theocritus on fishing literature in mime, epigram, or romance is writ large in the pages not only of Moschus, Leonidas of Tarentum, Alciphron, Plautus, Ovid, but also of Sannazaro in the fifteenth, of our Spenser[274] and his followers in the sixteenth and subsequent centuries, and even of Keats.[275]

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

A recent writer straightly asserts that “without Theocritus the Bucolics (save the mark!) of Virgil could never have been conceived, or, if conceived, would have miscarried.”[276]

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

a professed imitator of Theocritus, to whom fishermen were as familiar as the waters by which they lived and figured in many of his Idylls,[277] never mentions fishermen in his Bucolics.

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

Even in these four lines observe how insistently rings out the note of poverty!—the constant characteristic, the almost invariable badge, as we shall soon see, of every professional fisherman in Greek poems, plays, or writers from Homer down to the later Greek Romanticists,[279] or (as far as I know) in the epigrams from 700 b.c. to 500 a.d., of the Anthologia Palatina.[280]

“The figure of the weather-beaten fisher is a favourite one in the old poets, and we meet it constantly in Art; in Greek, and in Roman Art especially, it was a very favourite subject.”[281]

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

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

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

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

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

Tyrrhenus, the old deaf fisherman in The Ethiopian History (omitted by Bunsmann), embodies a far better instance of the characteristic Hospitality. His glad welcome and the surrender to his guests of “the cosier part of his dwelling” betoken Nature’s gentleman.[282]

A still better instance meets us in the Greek romance of Apollonius of Tyre[283] possibly an imitation of the Heliodorus idyll. The prince, sole survivor of a shipwreck, is found, fed, clad, and afterwards directed by an old fisherman to Pentapolis, where he wins a competition before the king. This romance, which survives in a Latin version of the sixth century, became in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries widely popular and translated into most European languages. To it, as the scenes and the characters prove, Shakespeare, or possibly Wilkins, must have owed much of his Pericles.

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

But of outward and visible signs of such Piety the Anthologia Palatina is eloquent. Their Piety towards the dead is strikingly attested by Hegesippus, the simplicity of whose style in his eight epigrams in Anth. Pal. betokens an early date. “The fishermen brought up from the sea in their net a half-eaten man, a most mournful relic of some voyage. They sought not for unholy gain, but him and the fishes too they buried under this light coat of sand.”[284]

Bunsmann furnishes two records of impiety among fishermen. The first occurs in the well-known Baiano procul a lacu recede of Martial (Epigr., IV. 30), where an impious poacher in the very act of landing his fish from the Emperor’s lake is stricken with blindness. The second, in Athen., VII. 18, and Ælian, XV. 23, where Epopeus, a fisherman of the island of Icarus, enraged by taking nothing but sacred or tabu Pompili, turned to with his son and devoured them, only themselves in turn to be devoured by a whale.[285]

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

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

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

Ovid’s pretty fancy to account for the Syrian abstention doubtless hangs together with the Greek conception of Atargatis and Aphrodite being one and the same. When the Giants revolted against the Gods, Venus fleeing with Cupid reaches, but is stayed by, the Euphrates: thither, Palæstinæ margine aquæ, in answer to her piteous plaints to heaven above and earth below, two fish approach and convey mother and child safely across the flood.[286]

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

Ktesias gives another account.[287] Derceto by the wiles of Aphrodite “fell in love with a beautiful young man and was brought to bed of a daughter: being ashamed of what she had done, she slew the young man, exposed in the desert the child (who, fed with milk and then with cheese by pilfering pigeons, grew up to become the famous Semiramis) and then cast herself into the lake at Ascalon and was transformed into a fish—whence it came to pass that at this very day the Syrians eat no fishes, but adore them as gods” (Booth’s Trans.).

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

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

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

Like their modern brethren fishermen offered, before setting sail or after returning safe from dangers encountered, gifts to the gods of their craft, of whom first came Poseidon or Neptune, usually represented with a trident[288]; second, Hermes or Mercury, the most venerated, because of his wily cunning and ready ruses[289]; third, Pan, a son of Mercury, who taught him all his craft,[290] and fourth, Priapus.[291]

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

His lineage, either the son of Hermes, or his grandson, for among the many putative fathers of Priapus was Pan, may account for the inclusion of Priapus. To Priapus, arriving how he may at goddom, offerings were more freely made than to any other except Hermes.[292]

In addition to these four flourished minor gods. Goddesses too of Fishing (such as Artemis[293]), of rivers, of springs, and of the fish therein found devotees. First and foremost, ranked Aphrodite or Venus:

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

Whether she can be identified or not with Atargatis, through Derceto or Astarte, matters little here.[294] But the image of the goddess, as described by Lucian,[295] “In Phœnicia, I saw the image of Derceto, a strange sight truly! For she had the half of a woman, and from the thighs downwards a fish’s tail,” corresponds closely with an image of Ascalon,[296] “having the face of a woman, but all the rest of the body a fish.”

When in addition we find this same image at Ascalon stated by Herodotus (II. 115) to be that “of the heavenly Aphrodite,” the identification of the Greek-Roman goddess appears, at any rate, to have gained wide acceptance. Doubtless Horace had this,[297] or perhaps some fish-tailed Egyptian goddess, in mind when he penned his famous comparison for an incoherent simile: “Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne.”

Coins of Hierapolis in Cyrrhestica often show Atargatis riding on a lion or enthroned between two lions,[298] sometimes with the legend ΘΕΑΣ ΣΥΡΙΑΣ, ‘of the Syrian goddess.’ Strabo (XVI. 27, p. 748) tells us that this city worshipped the Syrian goddess Atargatis, who (Ibid., p. 785) according to Ktesias the historian was called also Derceto.[299]

Another reason for abstention from fish, apart from their sacredness to the goddess, we owe to Antipater of Tarsus.[300] Gatis, queen of Syria, developed such a passion for fish that she issued a proclamation forbidding their being eaten without her being invited (ἄτερ Γάτιδος). Hence the common people thought her name was Atargatis and abstained wholly from fish.

Mnaseas[301] assigns to her the deserved and not inappropriate fate of being thrown into her own lake near Ascalon and devoured by fishes.[302] But against this legend must be placed the fact that Atargatis, in common with many Asian deities and cults translated westward, found sanctuary and high veneration, in her case at Delos.[303]

Theocritus in the fragment on Berenice recommends the sacrifice of a certain fish to a goddess. “And if any man that hath his livelihood from the salt sea, and whose nets serve him for ploughs, prays for wealth and luck in fishing, let him sacrifice, at midnight, to this goddess, the sacred fish that men call ‘silver white,’ for that it is brightest of sheen of all; then let the fisher set his nets, and he shall draw them full from the sea.”[304]

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

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

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

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

These characteristics find their place not only in Greek and Latin literature from and before the “sleepless chase” of Sophocles (Ajax, 880) to the last Romanticist,[305] but also in the statuary, pictures, frescoes, mosaics of Greek and Roman Art. Numerous examples can be cited from the museums of Naples, Rome, Paris, and London sustaining the contention that all real fishermen were ever depicted old and careworn.[306]

The fishing boys and women of the Amorini at Pompeii and elsewhere may be adduced as vitiating this statement: but these, it must be borne in mind, are merely artistic representations of Anglers and of dalliance, not of real fishermen toiling for their livelihood. So, too, in the Greek representations where boys, not Putti or Amorini, figure as fishing, it will be found that they are helpers or “fish-boys” of the working fisherman.[307]

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

According to Hall, the fisher, a common character in all Greek literature, was in early times described with simple truth. Only later, when imitation took the place of originality, did conventionalism render him always as aged, pathetic, superstitious, wretchedly poor, yet patient and content.[308]

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

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

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