[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, ποτεί-Δας, or ‘Lord Zeus,’ the correlative of πότνια Ἥρη, ‘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, Πὰν ἅκτιος (Theocr., Id., V. 14) or ἁλίπλαγκτος (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 Bœotian 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., ἐν βανβύκη Ἀταργάτει. 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 νέοι παῖδες in the oracles’ warning to Homer, which seem at first sight antagonistic to the above, become in Homer’s own words of greeting, ἅνδρες. Perhaps the employment of νέων παίδων 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 ἄρτον, bread; Ahrens substitutes ἄρκτον, 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 ἀνείλκυσα, 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), καὶ τὸν μὲν πίστευσα καλῶς ἒχεν ἠπειρώταν, “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 Λεωνίδου Ταραντίνου, and τοῦ αὐτοῦ, the first is simply Λεωνίδου. 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 πρώτης, which makes nonsense, should certainly be corrected to πλωτῆς.
[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 κύων, which is quite wrong for two reasons. First, κύων 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.:
[343] Cf. Petronius, Sat., 40, 6, and Bion, Id., 4, 5.
[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.