Ausonius (c. 310-c. 393 a.d.) is practically the last Latin writer within my time-limit (a.d. 500) who has allusions of interest to Fishing. In the fifth century, however, Sidonius, whose fishing and hunting interest apparently equalled his diocesan—his ‘Nolo Episcopari’ was, if fruitless, at once exceptional and genuine, for the see of Clermont had to be forced on his acceptance—tells us in a letter and in his poems of the catching of fish, especially by night lines in a lake on his wife’s property in the Auvergne.[440]
The tenth Idyll of Ausonius (“Ad Mosellam,” a great favourite with Izaak Walton), ranks, according to Mackail, “the writer not merely as the last or all but last of Latin, but also as the first of French poets.” It demands mention, quite apart from the vividness of its pictures, because it is the only fisher poem of any length in classical Latin, and because in it occurs the first mention of the Salar and the Fario.
Of the Salmo Pliny three hundred years previously was the first to speak.[441] The Greeks knew not the Salmon: at any rate, no opsophagist or other author notices the fish. Their silence is natural; the high temperature of the water forbids its frequenting the Mediterranean or its inflowing rivers.[442]
The length of the whole poem (483 lines) prevents entire quotation, although the touch and movement all through display fully the instinct and feeling for sport.
Pictures of the scenery along the banks of the Moselle are followed by the enumeration and characterisation of the fish in its waters rendered after the manner of the didactic epic. The poem furnishes a lively description of the fishermen of the Moselle, made from actual observation. Men in boats drag nets in midstream; men watch the corks of little nets in shallower water; men perched on banks or on rocks armed with rods scan the floats bobbing on the water, or jerk in the prey. But we search for fly-fishing in vain.
“And now, where the bank gives easy access, a host of spoilers are searching all the waters.[443] Alas! poor fish, ill sheltered by thine inmost stream! One of them trails his wet lines far out in mid-river, and sweeps off the shoals caught in his knotty seine; where the stream glides with placid course, another spreads his drag-nets buoyed on their cork-floats.
“A third, leaning over the waters beneath the rock, lowers the arching top of his supple rod, as he casts the hooks sheathed in deadly baits. The unwary rovers of the deep rush on them with gaping mouth—too late, their wide jaws feel through and through the stings of the hidden barb—they writhe—the surface tells the tale, and the rod ducks to the jerky twitch of the quivering horse-hair. Enough—with one whizzing stroke the boy snatches his prey slant-wise from the water; the blow vibrates on the breeze, as when a lash snaps in the air with a crack, and the wind whistles to the shock.
“The finny captives bound on the dry rocks, in terror at the sunlight’s deadly rays; the force which stood to them in their native stream languishes under our sky, and wastes their life in struggles to respire.[444] Now, only a dull throb shudders through the feeble frame, the sluggish tail flaps in the last throes, the jaws gape, but the breath which they inhale returns from the gills in the gaspings of death: as, when a breeze fans the fires of the forge, the linen valve of the bellows plays against its beechen sides, now opening, and now shutting, to admit or to confine the wind.
“Some fish have I seen who, in the last agony, gathered their forces, sprang aloft, and plunged head foremost into the river beneath, regaining the waters for which they had ceased to hope. Impatient of this loss, the thoughtless boy dashes in after them from above and strikes out in wild pursuit. Even thus Glaucus of Anthedon, the old man of the Bœotian Sea, when, after tasting Circe’s deadly herbs, he ate of the grass which dying fish had nibbled,[445] passes, a strange denizen, into the Carpathian deep. Armed with hook and net, a fisherman in the depths of that realm whose upper waters he had been wont to plunder, Glaucus glided along, the pirate of those helpless tribes.”
Whether the Salar and the Fario of the Idyll are, or are not, identical with the burn trout or salmon trout of modern days affords a problem for ichthyologists, not for me.
Ausonius is the first to mention not only the Salar and Fario[446] but also our Pike—Esox Lucius.[447]
which Badham has loosely translated:
The striking silence as to a fish so far-spread in his habitat and so notable in his habits as Esox lucius in all preceding Greek and Latin literature must excuse a semi-excursus.
Cuvier writes: “We are necessarily astonished that the Ancients have left us no document, so to speak, on a fish so abundant in Europe as the Pike ... a fish which the Greeks must have known. The word Esox occurs only once (Pliny, IX. 17) as an example of a large fish[448] comparable to the Tunny in form. In spite of Hardouin, I do not see that Esox of the Rhine is the Pike, or believe with Ducange that it is the Salmon. The name Luccio or Luzzo, by which we still call the Pike in this country, gives force to the supposition that the Latins of the time of Ausonius called it Lucius.”[449]
The astonishment at the absence of all reference to the Pike would be greatly increased, if the authors, or really Valenciennes, had lived to read later writers. Parkyn (op. cit., p. 131) cites the fish among those represented by the craftsmen of both Palæolithic and Neolithic Art in the caves of France and Spain. G. de Mortillet (op. cit., p. 220) claims that the remains of Pike in the Palæolithic age occur not infrequently. F. Keller (op. cit., vol. I. 537, 544) notes their presence in Neolithic finds at Moosseedorf, etc. Meek, Migration of Fish, p. 18 (London, 1917), states that the Pike “occupied the European region in Oligocene and Miocene times, and that the remains of Pike are found in the Pleistocene of Breslau.”
Attempts have been made to explain the absence of this fish previous to Ausonius by identifying Esox lucius with (A) the Oxyrhynchus, and (B) the Lupus. These seem to me unsuccessful.[450]
Petrus Bellonius among the early writers upholds the first identification. In his Observations de Plusieurs Singularitëz, Book II. ch. 32 (published 1553), “Le fleuve du Nil nourrit plusieurs autres poissons, lesquelz toutes fois ie ne veul specifier en ce lieu, sinon entăt que le Brochet y est frequent, et que nous avons difficulté de luy trouver une appellation antique, ie veul mŏstrer qu’il fut ancieňement appellé Oxyrynchus.”
His effort breaks down for three reasons. First, Ælian says that the Oxyrhynchus,—a fish supposed to have sprung from the blood of the dead Osiris, or to be the impiscation (if the word may be coined) of Osiris—although caught in the Nile (X. 46, 1, 12.), dwells mainly, or according to Plutarch, de Iside et Osiride, 7, altogether in the sea, whereas our Esox cannot endure sea-water. Second, the sharp pointed form of beak (whence the name) cannot possibly represent the broad goose-like mouthpiece of our Pike. Third, the size of the Oxyrhynchus, often 8 cubits or 12 feet in length,[451] proscribes the Pike.
Against the identification suggested by Franciscus Philadelphus of Esox lucius with Lupus two reasons lean heavily: (A) the etymological impossibility of λύκος (because of the wolflike nature of the Pike[452]) changing into Lucius, and (B) the Lupus is always in Greek called λάβραξ, never λύκος.[453]
The story of how the Lupus comes to his death by the Prawn can be read in Oppian[454] and in Ælian.[455] The fish, ever voracious, takes the prawns into his mouth by the thousand; these, unable to resist or retreat, jump about and puncture his throat and jaws so seriously that he soon dies of poison and suffocation.
Pliny (IX. 17), it has been claimed, under the word Esox intends our Esox lucius; but Cuvier maintains, and rightly, that his Esox signifies some very large fish, perhaps a Tunny.
Sulpicius Severus, a presbyter who lived in Aquitania (c. 365-425 a.d.) and penned an enthusiastic Life of S. Martin of Tour,[456] writes: “ad primum jactum reti permodico immanem Esocem extraxit.” It is not for me to discuss or decry this amazing statement of a very small net holding this monstrous Esox. But as the growth of a Pike under the most favourable circumstances is probably not more than 2 lbs. a year for twelve years when usually it lessens materially, I do suggest that the adjective immanem is hardly applicable (unless St. Martin’s biographer, perhaps also a fisherman, has lapsed unconsciously into a “fish story”) to a fish of about 20 or 30 lbs., and so would seem to confirm Cuvier.[457]
Pike, Carp, and Grayling were not apparently indigenous in England. They were introduced from the Continent at some undetermined date by one of the earlier religious orders for the better keeping of Fast Days, which as enjoined by the Church, even in Queen Elizabeth’s time, amounted to no less than 145 in number.[458]
The Pike, though known in the thirteenth century, was very scarce. Its price (as fixed by Edward I.) doubled that of the salmon, and exceeded ten times over that of either the turbot or cod. Even as late as the Reformation a large pike fetched as much as a February lamb, and a very small pickerel more than a fat capon. This ratio of prices recalls the rebuke administered by Cato the Censor to those prodigal Romans who were willing to pay more for a dish of fish than for a whole ox.
In view of the necessity for fish on the fast days, which claimed nearly half the year, the situation of twenty Sees (two Archbishoprics and eighteen Bishoprics) out of twenty-seven on what were then salmon rivers can hardly have been a geographical accident.
The Carp must also have been a scarce fish in Tudor England. Dame Juliana Berners writes, “Ther be fewe in Englande.” Holinshed, à propos of its scarcity in the Thames, states, “It is not long since that kind of fish is brought over into England.” Leonard Mascall, however, in his Book of Fishinge (1596), credits a Mr. Mascall of Plumstead in Essex with the introduction of carp.
A hackneyed couplet, frequently quoted for the purpose of establishing the date at which carp and pike were introduced, but so full of mistakes as to be worthless, runs thus:
Since another version brackets “Reformation, hops, bays, and beer,” the year intended is obviously 1532.
A Pike, or rather the head of a fish so-called, served at supper is said to have caused the end of Theodoric the Goth. In it he imagined he saw the face and head of Symmachus, whom he had just put to death; straightway he became so terror-stricken that within three days he had joined his victim.