[623] There is in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington an excellent collection of specimens, illustrative of the development of the Eel.
[624] Any apparent resemblance in this list, or in this book, to Badham’s book is easily accounted for by the fact that both derive much from the same source, he without any, I with due acknowledgment to the little known volume by Nonnius (Antwerp, 1616), which itself draws largely from Athenæus, Xenocrates, etc. The sequence of sentences, turns of expression, choice of epithets in Badham sometimes so strongly suggest Nonnius, that it is a case of yet another miracle of unconscious absorption—from a rare book written in Latin 238 years previously!—or of—well, Ælianism. I hesitated for a long time from even hinting such unacknowledged extraction by an author to whom two generations have owed much pleasure and more knowledge. Were it not for the inadequacy of his references and for his bursting, Wegg-like, into poetry, which doubles the length and sometimes obscures the sense of the original Greek or Latin, Badham would be delightful reading.
[625] Bk. IX. 29.
[626] Cf. Blakey, op. cit., p. 73.
[627] N. H., XXXII. 5.
[628] In Krause, op. cit., 237, Loki, originally god of Fire, changes into a salmon from his predilection for the red colour of the fish! The Icelandic Eddas attribute the invention of the Net to Loki.
[629] Var. epist., III. 48.
[630] Op. cit., p. 93.
[631] Matron, Ἀττικὸν δεῖπνον, 27 ff.; ap. Athen. IV. 13.
[632] Cf. Seneca, Nat. Quæst., III. 18. Also Pliny, N. H., IX. 30.
[633] Archestrat., ap. Athen., VII. 44.
[634] Cf. Macrobius, Sat., II. 12, and Athenæus, VII. 44.
[635] Horace, Sat., II. 2, 46.
[636] Macrobius, Sat., III. 16, 1.
[637] Pliny claims for the Acipenser that he “unus omnium squamis ad os versis contra aquam nando meat.” The reading of the last four words is however much disputed. C. Mayhoff prints contra quam in nando meant. Plutarch, De Sol. Anim., 28, of the Elops, “it always swims with the wind and tide, not minding the erection or opening of the scales, which do not lie towards the tail, as in other fish.”
[638] Athen., VII. 44; and Pliny, IX. 27.
[639] Ælian, VIII. 28.
[640] Cf. Athenæus, VII. 139.
[641] Cf., however, Alciphron, I. 7, where among presents from fishermen, it takes premier place.
[642] Juv., IV. 37 ff.
[643] With this meeting compare that summoned post-haste by Nero in the Revolution (which led to his death), when to anxious and breathless senators he imparted the important news that he had just effected an improvement of the hydraulic organ, by which the notes were made to sound louder and sweeter. His ἐξεύρηκα conflicts somewhat with the account in Suetonius (Nero, 41). The Emperor evidently had a bent and a liking for mechanical invention, for according to C. M. Cobern, New Archæological Discoveries, etc., 1917, in one of his palaces were elevators which ran from the ground to the top floor, and a circular dining-room which revolved with the sun.
[644] The part played by fish in recovering episcopal keys and rings has been dwelt on elsewhere. Sad it is that in the case of St. Lupus the rôle is performed not by his namesake fish, but by a barbel, in whose belly was found, just previous to the return of the bishop to his See of Sens the self-same ring which on being exiled by Clothaire II. he had cast into the moat. Let us, disregarding all geographical habitats, trust that Barbel was here an ichthyic inexactitude for Lupus. Cf. S. Baring Gould, The Lives of the Saints, Vol. X. 7, Edinburgh, 1914.
[645] Pliny, IX. 28.
[646] Cf. Macrobius, Sat., II. 12: “Lucilius ... eum ... quasi ligurritorem catillonem appellat, scilicet qui proxime ripas stercus insectaretur.” À propos of ‘Catillo,’ there is a quaint remark in the Gloss. Salom., “Nomen piscis a catino dictus ob cuius suavitatem homines catinum corrodunt”—the fish was so delicious it made one fairly bite the dish!
[647] IX. 28.
[648] Epist., XI. 40.
[649] Hal., 41 f.
[650] N. H., IX., 88; Arist., H. A., IX. 3.
[651] Dorion, ap. Athen., VII. 99. Dorion was the author of a treatise much used by Athenæus.
[652] IX. 25; N. H., IX. 36.
[653] IX. 25; N. H., IX. 36.
[654] Athen., VII. 99. Cf. Oppian, I. 151.
[655] De Ling. Lat., 5.
[656] Pliny, XXXII. 38.
[657] The Lamprey, Pride, and Muræna are different fish. They are all engraved in Nash’s book, who lays down that the Muræna is not the lamprey—as indeed a representation (from Herculaneum) of the former done with great exactness serves to establish. See T. D. Fosbroke, Encyl. of Antiq. (London, 1843), p. 1033, and p. 402, figure 3.
[658] Ap. Athen., VII. 91.
[659] The toga prætexta was worn by the higher magistrates, certain priests, and free-born children. Isidorus, in Gloss., “Anguilla est qua coercentur in scholis pueri,” and Pliny, N. H., IX., 39, “eoque verberari solitos tradit Verrius prætextatos.” Under the old law prætextati were unamerceable; non in ære, sed in cute solvebant! Our Saxon forbears adopted the whip of eels; see Fosbroke, op. cit., p. 303. Rabelais (II. 30) continues the tradition—“Whereupon his master gave him such a sound thrashing with an eel-skin, that his own would have been worth nought for bagpipes.”
[660] Pliny, N. H. 35; 46; quoting from Fenestella.
[661] Philemon, ap. Athen., 7. 32.
[662] Hedyphagetica. The reading is most uncertain.
[663] In N. H., II. 13, and IV. 9. This cannot be our boar-fish which is marine, whereas Aristotle talks of it being in the river Acheloüs. It may possibly be another name for the Glanis.
[664] In Athen., 7, 72.
[665] See Stephanus, Thesaurus Græcæ Linguæ, ii. 347 c-d.
[666] Badham (plagiarising Blaikie), on p. 364—in “Galen, Xenocrates, Diphilus speak disparagingly of the Sole,” is inaccurate. Xenocrates terms its flesh indigestible. Galen states that it is quite the reverse, and commends it highly as a diet. Diphilus does not hesitate to declare that the Sole affords abundant nourishment and is most pleasing to the taste. Cf. Nonnius, p. 89. In the case of a Sole with its customarily modest dimensions it is not easy to hearken unto the command, which was laid down in the twelfth century for the benefit of Robert, the so-called King of England, “Anglorum Regi scripsit schola tota Salerni,” by “the Schoole of Salernes most learned and juditious Directorie, of Methodicall Instructions for the guide and governing the health of Man”:
Cf. Regimen Sanitatis Salerni, London, 1617, but better still Sir A. Croke’s ed., Oxford, 1830.
[667] In Athen., 4, 13, line 76 ff.
[668] It is noteworthy that two of the Nymphs on the “Nereid Monument” are supported by fish (A. H. Smith, A Catalogue of Sculpture in the British Museum (London, 1900), ii. 35, Nos. 910, 911).
[669] Cf. Robinson, op. cit., 82.
[670] De Re Rust., 59.
[671] Terence, Eun., V. 7, 4.
[672] Plautus, Casin. II. 8, 59 ff.
[673] Deipn., VII. 77-80; cf. Pausanias, IV. 34.
[674] Arist., N. H., V. 10 and 11.
[675] Pliny, IX. 67.
[676] Arist., N. H., VIII., 19.
[677] Oppian, Hal., IV. 120-145; Arist., op. cit., V. 5.
[678] Op. cit., p. 45.
[679] Pliny, X. 89, and Ælian, IX. 7.
[680] Pliny, IX. 26.
[681] Aristophanes, and half a dozen other comedians cited by Athen., VII. 78.
[682] XV. 19.
[683] Sat., X. 317.
[684] Further details must be sought in Robinson Ellis, A Commentary on Catullus (Oxford, 1876), p. 46, and Schneider, op. cit., 69.
[685] Although these five must be reckoned in the first class everywhere, none of the five or other Mediterranean fishes can compare in taste with their northern representatives.
[686] A. de Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology (London, 1872), II. 329 ff. The latest luminary among the Solar Mythologists is L. Frobenius, Sonnenkultus, whose lengthy chapter in vol. I. on the world-wide Fish-Myth and its solar significance may be consulted by the leisurely.
[687] Cf., however, “The Story of the Deluge,” in the Catapatha Brāhmana.
[688] P. Robinson, op. cit. (p. 18), to which I owe much, here and elsewhere.
[689] Op. cit., p. xi.
[690] On Iliad, I. 206, cp. on XX. 71: διὰ τὸ δοκεῖν μανιῶν αἰτίαν εῑναι τισίν, ὡς οἶον εἰπεῖν τοῖς σεληνιαζομένοις.
[691] Brit. Mus. Cat. Coins, Mysia, p. 18 ff. Nos. 1 ff. pl. 3, 8 ff.
[692] Brit. Mus. Cat. Coins, Mysia, p. 18, No. 1, pl. 30.
[693] A. Heiss, op. cit., pl. 45, 9.
[694] See Cohen, Monnaies Domitian, Nos. 227, 229, 236, and Pitra, op. cit., pp. 508-512. Although writing some sixty years ago he enumerates no less than 156 illustrations from coins and representations of fish association.
[695] For the fish-symbol in Judaism there is a good collection of facts in I. Scheftelowitz, “Das Fisch-Symbol in Judentum und Christentum,” in the Archiv. für Religionswissenschaft (1911), XIV. 1-53, 321-392.
[696] Pitra, op. cit., has several plates bearing on this. Of the coloured, pl. 1 shows an eucharistic table with a fish and bread upon it, and at each side seven baskets full of the latter, while in pl. 3 a fish swims bearing on his head a basket with sacred loaves, both illustrative of the miracle. See also pp. 565-6.
[697] Keller, op. cit., p. 352. The latest and best monograph on the fish-symbol in Christianity is that of F. J. Dölger, Das Fisch-symbol in frühchristlicher Zeit (Freiburg, 1910), whose conclusions are summarised in the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft (1912), XV. 297 f.
[698] Cf. the many fascinating works of Dr. J. Rendel Harris, e.g. The Cult of the Heavenly Twins and Boanerges. Also Lowrie, Art and Archæology; and Miss M. Hamilton, Greek Saints and their Festivals.
[699] See C. Cahier, Caractéristiques des Saints dans l’art populaire (Paris, 1867), Vol. II. 691 ff., for illustrations of Saints accompanied by fishes.
[700] Op. cit., II. 340. “The gemini pisces, the two fishes joined in one, were sacred to her, and the joke of the poisson d’Avril ... is a jest of phallical origin, and has a scandalous significance.”
[701] P. Robinson, International Fisheries Exhibition (London, 1883), Part III. p. 43. “The representations of the Virgin in a canopy or vesica piscis are supposed to have a specially Christian significance: if they have any at all, it is a very heathenish one.”
[702] Mundus Symbolicus, a rare folio, of which two editions, 1681 and 1694, exist, is a translation of Il Mondo Simbolico (written by Picinelli Filippi, and published at Milan 1653, 1669, and 1680), made by Aug. Erath. Cf. Trésor des livres rares et précieux, tom. v. (Dresde, 1859-69), p. 282. The Bodleian possesses only the 1694 edition of Mundus Symbolicus, while apparently the British Museum lacks both.
[703] The bronze statuette found at Hartsbourg showing the Germanic god Chrodo, standing on a fish, while holding in his uplifted left hand a wheel, and in his lowered right a basket of fruit and vegetables, is not at all on all fours. Cf. Montfaucon, Antiquity Explained, trans. D. Humphreys (London, 1921), II. 261, pl. 56, 3.
[704] The construction of ‘Rosa, Piscis’ is not discernible. Perhaps (‘Rosa Piscis’) would be less obscure.
[705] To Galen alone 149 works are attributed.
[706] For a list of practitioners, medical authors, and quacks before Pliny, and the enormous fees sometimes paid them, see N. H., XXIX. 1, 7. Not inappropriate, and probably not infrequent, when we read of their number and their disagreements, was the epitaph—Turba se medicorum perisse. This attribution of death to too many doctors is accredited to Hadrian, but is probably a Latin adaptation of Menander’s πολλῶν ἰατρῶν εἴσοδος μ’ ἀπώλεσεν.
[707] It is with some surprise that we read of Galen being one of the original Deipnosophistæ (I. 2), and with more still that we find the omnivorous and omniscient Athenæus quoting but once from this most prolific author, and that a passage which lays down, let us trust from the experience of his patients, that Falernian wine over twenty years old causes headaches.
[708] Empedocles, albeit no doctor, is said to have delivered Selinus in Sicily from malaria by drainage, etc., and so roughly anticipated the triumphs of Ross and Gorgas over the mosquito by some 2400 years. See Diog. Laert. VIII. 70, s.v. “Empedocles.”
[709] De Alim. Fac., 3, 28. Cf. De Attenuante victus ratione, vol. vi. ed. Chartier, which confirms and amplifies the above.
[710] Athen., op. cit., VIII., chs. 51-56, which discuss various fishes from a health point of view.
[711] Quæstiones Medicæ et Problemata Physica.
[712] Blakey, op. cit., 73.
[713] Cf. Burton, op. cit., 1, 97, whose trs. is given above.
[714] The belief in fish as curatives of not only human but also animal ailments still lingers. In this very year, 1920, we read in The Field, Aug. 14, of a Ross-shire crofter begging for a live trout to push down the throat of a cow, that had just calved but was suffering from hæmorrhage. In consequence, or in spite of the trout, the cow recovered.
[715] De Materia Medica, II. 33; I. 181, ed. (Kühn).
[716] De Materia Medica, II. 22, 1, 176 (Kühn). Cf. P. A. Matthiole, Commentarii in libros sex Pedanii Dioscordis Anazarbei (Venetiis, 1554), Bk. II. c. xix.
[717] VI. 9.
[718] Salpe the midwife recommends this prescription to disguise the age of boys on sale for slaves (Pliny, XXXII. 47). At the end of the chapter the author seems to awake from his trance of trustfulness, in the words, “in the case of every depilatory, the hairs should always be removed before it is applied!”
[719] Pliny, XXXII. 18. Belief in the efficacy of fish-nostrums continues unto this day: in the Middle Ages it permeated all classes, and all Europe, e.g. Charles IX. of France would never, if he could help it, drink unless a fragment of the tusk of the narwhal, or so-called sea-unicorn, were in the cup to counteract a possible poison.
[720] Badham, op. cit., 83.
[721] The influence of fish, wherever important, in commerce is noteworthy. They furnished, as we have seen, designs for a mint or cognomina for Roman Nobles. An interesting and probably very ancient instance occurs in the oath taken this very year (1920) by the Stipendiary Magistrate of Douglas, Isle of Man: “I swear to do justice between party and party, as indifferently as the herring’s backbone doth lie in the midst of the fish.”
[723] N. H., XXX. 49. Cf. Ælian, op. cit. passim, for aphrodisiacs.
[724] Fragment, Varro Sexagesis, ap. Man. Marc., p. 319. 15 ff., Lindsay.
[725] Cas., II. 8, 57; cf. also Aul., at the wedding of Euclid’s daughter.
[726] See ibid., Rudens, II. 1, 9.
[727] N. H., XXXII. 50.
[728] London, 1912. Note, however, that Hultsch in Pauly-Winowa, Real Enc. (Stuttgart, 1903), V. 211, says: ‘Damit war aus dem Silber-D., der noch unter Severus einen Metallwert von etwa 30 Pfennig gehabt hatte ... eine kleine Scheidemünze zum Curswerte von 1, 8 Pfennig oder Weniger geworden.’ On this showing the denarius had sunk to 1⅘ pfennigs in 301 a.d.
[729] Fragments of the Edict in Latin and in Greek have been coming to light for the last two centuries from Egypt, Greece and Asia Minor—not the least important being found by W. M. Leake; see his Edict of Diocletian, 1826. See also Mommsen’s Inscriptionum Latinarum, vol. III. pp. 1926-1953, the text of which was published by H. Blümner with a commentary in 1893 in his Der Maximaltarif des Diocletian. A convenient account of this famous Edict, together with a full bibliography, is given by H. Blümner in Pauly-Winowa, Real. Enc. (Stuttgart), V. pp. 1948-1957.
[730] Lactantius, de mortibus persecutorum, 7.
[731] See p. 337, postea.
[732] The lower price of river as compared with sea fish seems additional evidence that the preference for the latter, well attested in the earlier days of Athens and of Rome, still continued.
[733] From p. 174 ff. of Abbott, who gives the prices in cents.
[734] Op. cit., p. 48.
[735] In the case of Trout, the ova can be successfully transported to South Africa or even to New Zealand, as the period of incubation is a long one. After hatching, the alevins, fry, or young fish can be utilised to stock fish ponds, or other waters.
[736] Cf. an article in the Revue des deux Mondes, for June, 1854, by M. Jules Haime.
[737] According to Magna Carta, c. 33, “all kydells [dams or weirs] for the future shall be removed altogether from the Thames and the Medway, and throughout all England, except on the sea-shore.”
It was for over 500 years held that this was a measure intended to safeguard the passage of fish, but W. S. McKechnie, Magna Carta (Glasgow, 1914.) pp. 303 ff., 343 ff., has shown that it aimed at removing hindrances to navigation, not to ascending fish.
[738] Op. cit., 376, but see Chinese chapter.
[739] History of the Chinese Empire (Paris, 1735), vol. I. p. 36.
[740] Leonard Mascall, owing to his recipes for preserving spawn in his Booke of Fishing 1590, “must be looked upon as the pioneer of fish-culture in England,” according to Mr. R. B. Marston, op. cit., 35.
[741] From a splendid vase-painting representing the two sides of a magnificent scyphos made by the potter Hieron and painted by the artist Makron. The original (now in Boston) is of the finest fifth-century (b.c.) art. See Furtwängler and Reichhold, Griechische Vasenmalerei (München, 1909), vol. II. 125 ff., pl. 85.