CHAPTER XI
PLUTARCH: THE CHARGE AGAINST HIM OF CONTEMNING FISHING QUITE FALSE—CLEOPATRA’S FISHING—OPPIAN—THE TORPEDO FOR GOUT—ATHENÆUS
Our next two authors, Plutarch (a little later than Martial) and Oppian (c. 170 a.d.), both wrote in Greek.
Plutarch for centuries has been misrepresented and maligned as an opponent and contemptuous disdainer of fishing, but quite inaccurately. I am not of the class of writers who invest Nero with a halo, or canonise Clytæmnestra. I am no Knight of the Round Table on a quest to redeem lost characters, but I feel it a duty and a pleasure on behalf of Plutarch to fling down the glove and challenge his traducers to a duel à outrance.
Modern English writers,
“to the listening earth Repeat the story,”
but not, like the Moon, the story of “the birth” of their error. Inevitably in their pages crop up Burton’s words, “Plutarch, in his book De Sol. Anim., speaks against all fishing as a filthy, base, illiberal employment, having neither wit nor perspicacity in it, nor worth the labour.”[392]
Holland translates the passage, “for the cowardice, blockishness, stupidity, want of shifts and means in fishes, either offensive or defensive, causes the taking of them to be dishonest, discommendable, unlovely, and illiberal.” I subjoin the Greek so that each reader may make his choice of or a translation of his own.[393]
These words do, it is true, occur in Plutarch’s de Sol. Anim., 9. But the chapter merely gives a fanciful report of an imaginary debate before a jury empanelled to determine whether land or water animals are the more crafty. The words embody, not the opinion, matured or other, of the author, but one of the charges in the opening speech of Aristotimus, who appears on behalf of the superior sagacity of the terrestrials as against the aquatics.
From a sentence in the mouth of a special pleader Plutarch has been branded for centuries, at any rate since the time of Burton’s book (1621), as the foe of fishing and the maligner of the craft. And with as much reason you might make Plato responsible for an opinion alien to his nature but advanced by one of his dialecticians, or saddle Father Izaak with some heresy of Venator’s.
An attempt to account for so learned and on the whole so fair an author as Burton being led into a charge, the inaccuracy of which even cursory perusal of chapter nine evinces, may, if fishless, yet interest some of my readers. One of the blemishes ascribed to the Anatomy is the burdening of the text with too profuse quotations, ransacked from not only classical and patristic writers, but also (literally) from “Jews, Turks, and Infidels.”
Making full allowance for Burton’s encyclopædic knowledge, whence, and how, were these all amassed? Hearne, the Oxford historian, helps towards an answer in his statement that Mr. John Rouse, of Bodley’s Library, for many years provided his friend of Christ Church with choice books and quotations. Is it too much to surmise that the passages “provided” by the helpful service of Rouse[394] —a trait fortunately still characteristic of his Bodley successors—included the sentence of damnation, which, even if verified, was, from being torn out of its context, certainly misunderstood and ill-digested?
One ought to be chary of attributing motives, much more so reasons; but the only apparent reason for the numerous repetitions of Burton’s slander must have been the line of least resistance or least exercise, which deterred writer after writer from taking the trouble to consult the original context and thus discovering by whom and how the words were spoken. I have so far failed to find a single defender of Plutarch on this count or any plea for reversal of a verdict based on evidence wrongfully accepted.[395]
Indignation at the injustice of the charge waxes all the hotter, when one remembers that the person indicted is the very self-same Plutarch who stands out as our authority for much unique lore on fish, fishing, and tackle. He, and no other, consoles the victims of an Emperor’s decree of banishment by pointing out the happiness of their lot in being far removed from the intrigues, the vices, the dust, the noise of Rome to a fair Ægean island, where the sea breaks peacefully on the rocks below, and—an additional assuagement—“where there is plenty of fishing to be had!”
Could a man who contemned and denounced fishing so vigorously put into the mouth even of the pleader for the superior craftiness of fish, unless he himself had angled and possessed the true angling spirit, the following sentences, as true and as useful to-day as when written nineteen centuries ago?
“For the first and foremost, the cane of which the angle Rod is made, fishers wish not to have big and thick, and yet they need such an one as is tough and strong, for to pluck and hold the fishes, which commonly do mightily fling and struggle when they be caught, but they choose rather that which is small and slimmer, for fear lest if it catch a broad shadow, it might move the doubt and suspicion that is naturally in fishes.”
“Moreover, the line they make not with many water knots” (happy anglers!), “but desire to have it as plain and even as possibly may be, without any roughness, for that this giveth as it were some denuntiation unto them of fraud and deceit. They take order likewise that the hairs which reach to the hook should seem as white as possibly they can devise, for the whiter they be the less are they seen in the water for their conformity and likeness in colour to it.”[396]
We anglers seem of a verity “nae gleg at the uptak.” After some 1650 years we find John Whitney, in the preface to The Genteel Recreation: or the Pleasure of Angling, ascribing with modesty as to personal prowess, but quiet pride as to discovery, his success very largely to the use of “fine Tackling” which in the poem (!) he further, if in barbarous verse, enforces,
“Fineness in Angling’s th’ Anglers nearest Rule: For Prudence must still regulate in all.”[397]
The sentence in his Preface is apposite to many a Preface, whether in prose or verse. “As to the verse there is fault and folly enough, but grant Poetical License, if in pleasing nobody I have pleased myself, and that’s all the reward I desire,” for alas! to many of us writers self-pleasing must be the sole reward of our desert, if not of our desire.
Misrepresentation as a despiser of fishing and fishermen has clutched another victim, Dr. Johnson, of all people! As Plutarch has been branded for an opinion not his own, so Johnson has been held guilty of the famous libel—“A worm at one end and a fool at the other.” The popular belief is all false. According to Boswell, he was very appreciative—an attitude not always Johnsonian—of Walton’s work.
Again, it was no other than he[398] who urged Moses Browne to bring out in 1750 a new edition—the fifth and last was published in 1676—of The Compleat Angler, of which his criticism, “a mighty pretty book,” hardly indicates contempt for its subject, or author, whose life he once meant writing.
On Voltaire also the Worm-Fool libel has also been saddled, but wrongly. To another Frenchman, Martial Guyet, it has been attributed, but not convincingly.
In Notes and Queries, 3rd series, X. 472, can be found the lines:
“Messieurs, je suis pêcheur, et pêcheur de la ligne, J’en fait ici l’aveu. Ce cas semble peu digne De vos graves esprits: car on l’a dit souvent La ligne, avec sa canne, c’est un long instrument Dont le plus mince bout tient un petit reptile, Et dont l’autre est tenu par un grand imbécile!”
“These lines were written by Guyet, who if he were Martial Guyet died nearly one hundred years before the great lexicographer was born.”[399] Even before Guyet the libel seems to have become hackneyed, “car on l’a dit souvent.”
Plutarch’s works figure so frequently in these pages that I will not here specially dwell on or quote from them, except “once more the tale to tell” of Antony and Cleopatra’s fishing as given in his Life of Antony, 29, 2.
Antony (who “fishes, drinks, and wastes the lamps of night in revel”), when with Cleopatra on the Nile had, of course, if Beaumont and Fletcher’s lines hold, not been half as successful as his mistress:
“She was used to take delight, with her fair hand To angle in the Nile, where the glad fish, As if they knew who ’twas sought to deceive them, Contended to be taken.”[400]
To shine in her eyes, he secretly commanded his diver to attach fish to his hook. Cleopatra, becoming aware of the trick, signalled her diver to go down (or as some others relate, bribed Antony’s own servants) to affix to his hook, a salted fish (τάριχος). This he promptly struck and hauled out mid laughter and ridicule. “Leave,” cried Cleopatra, “leave the fishing rod to us; your game is Cities, Provinces, and Kingdoms.”[401]
Shakespeare makes Cleopatra’s diver attach the salted fish:
“Cleo: Give me mine angle, we’ll to the river: there, My music playing far off, I will betray Tawny finn’d fishes; my bended hook shall pierce Their slimy jaws, and as I draw them up, I’ll think them every one an Antony, And say ‘Ah, ha! you’re caught.’
“Charmian:’Twas merry when You wager’d on your angling; when your diver Did hang a salt-fish on his hook, which he With fervency drew up.
“Cleo:That time!—O times!— I laughed him out of patience, and that night I laugh’d him into patience; and next morn, Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed.”
We owe most of our knowledge as to the technical methods, the varying minutiæ, and the numerous materials employed by the Greeks and Latins in Fishing and Angling, to Oppian, to Ælian, Pliny the Elder, and Plutarch.
“Bearing somewhat the same relationship to Eclogues of Fishermen that Virgil’s Georgics do to those of Shepherds, were the Greek verse treatises on fish and fishing. No fewer than six didactic Epics of the sort were composed, but only that of Oppian is extant in complete form.[402] It is written in hexameter, and combines material based on observations with much extraordinary information gathered from floating material. In the last part of the treatise, the accounts given of the methods of capturing fish by men on various coasts lend a few pictures akin to independent Idylls.”
“Most of the poem, however, is very like Pliny’s Natural History, put into verse. These didactic poems, as a whole, have little relationship with the Piscatory Eclogue, other than that implied in the fact that they are written in verse and tell much about the practices of fishers.”
This grudging estimate of Oppian by Mr. Hall contrasts strangely with the terms of highest eulogy which authors of all ages have bestowed on him. Scaliger calls him “a divine and incomparable poet.” Sir Thomas Browne bewails with wonder that “Oppian’s elegant lines are so much neglected: surely we hereby reject one of the best epic poets.” Scaliger remarks that no author makes more frequent use than Oppian of similes, which he praises warmly for their strength and beauty, for their brilliancy and effect.
In my humble opinion they occur far too frequently and regularly. If we do not come across one at least in every hundred lines, the effect is agreeable disappointment. The subjects of comparison, moreover, are conventional and limited.
But Oppian’s poems were held in the very highest favour, not only by our stingy stepmother, Posterity, but by his contemporaries. The Emperor (whether he were Antoninus—of all the Emperors[403] perhaps the keenest fisherman—Caracalla, or Severus is not clear, as Oppian’s exact date is still unsettled[404]), on hearing the author recite his verses revoked the decree of banishment on Oppian’s father (to Malta), and paid the poet a golden stater, or more than a guinea a verse.[405]
With this very liberal payment by piece or verse-work may be contrasted the treatment meted out to the great Persian poet Firdausi by the Emperor Mahmud.
The most romantic of the versions of the story makes the latter promise a miskal (or something less than ¼ oz.) for every couplet of the former’s epic, Shah Nameh. On the poem’s arrival at Court, joy reigned till discovery that it contained some 60,000 couplets.
Aghast at the amount, Mahmud or his Chancellor of Exchequer took advantage of some ambiguity in the terms and, despite the protests of Firdausi that the largesse was promised in gold, made payment in silver. It chanced that the treasure arrived while the author was in the public baths at Tús; furious at the fraud, he gave 20,000 to the bathkeeper, 20,000 to the refreshment seller, and 20,000 to the camel driver who had brought the bags of bullion.
Many years after, the Emperor, either repenting him of his broken word or moved by reports of the great poverty in which the poet had long lived, dispatched the sum in gold, or, as some say, indigo. Alas! as the convoy entered Tús by the Rudbar gate, by that of the Razan was Firdausi being borne to his grave.[406]
At the death of Oppian in his thirtieth year, the citizens of his native place in Cilicia erected a statue to his memory. It bore the most laudatory of inscriptions, of which the last two lines have been Englished—“All” (i.e. preceding poets)
“All the inspired him their chief allowed And all to him their humbler laurels bowed,”
—to which halting and involved translation we at least neither bow laurels nor doff hats.
The Halieutica is divided into five books. The first two treat of the natural history of fishes, the other three of the art of fishing. Despite this proportion of space, fish rather than fishermen are the heroes of the scenes. The work displays considerable knowledge of zoology, coupled with absurd fables, which are adduced as grave matters of fact.
In the fulness with which he enumerates the various kinds of fish, and methods of fishing, the technique, the weapons, the materials appropriate to each, Oppian stands pre-eminent among our authors. Nor need we wonder at this fullness of treatment. He was wedded heart and soul to all pertaining to fish, or fishing, which he calls the “lovely art.”
The kinds of fish mentioned by this “poeta doctissimus”[407] number, according to Bishop Hieronymus, one hundred and fifty-three. This figure is verified by Ritter, who adds that “Pliny’s long list contains only twenty-three more, i.e. one hundred and seventy-six in all,” a total which hardly warrants the naturalist’s triumphal outburst, “In the sea and in the ocean, vast as it is, there exists by Hercules! nothing that is unknown to us, and a truly marvellous feat it is that we are best acquainted with those things which Nature has concealed in the deep.”[408]
From the only English translation of the Halieutica (made in 1722 by Diaper and Jones, Fellows of Balliol) I take a few passages illustrating the character and methods of Oppianic fishing.[409]
The latter at once arrest our attention by their modernity. They are practically ours. Apostolides in his work describing fishing in modern Greece states that “les quatre engins d’Oppien, les filets, les hameçons, les harpons et les nasses,” with the addition of “les claies de roseau, d’importation romaine sans doute,” are the weapons of Hellas in the present day. The tricks of Oppian prevail in the Peloponnese: to-day, as nearly two millenniums back, the Scarus and the Mullet are caught by using the female as decoy.
The procedure of taking the Octopus (which Aristotle pictures for us in IV. 8), “when clinging so tightly to the rocks that it cannot be pulled off, but remains attached, even when the knife is employed to sever it: and yet if one employ fleabane (κόνυζα) to the creature, it drops off at once,” remains the same in Greece to-day. Apostolides writes (p. 50), “Comme on voit, non seulement le procédé de pêche aux poulpes a persisté jusqu’à nos jours, mais la plante (Conyse) qu’on emploie à cet effet porte encore le même nom.”
But as Canning called into existence a new world to redress the balance of power in the old, so too the Attic fisherman to dislodge the Octopus has, Raleigh-like, imported to the aid of his old herb, American tobacco.[410]
The devices for fishing, which in Oppian, I. 54-5, are—
“The slender-woven Net, Viminious Weel,[411] The Taper Angle, Line and Barbed Steel Are all the Tools his constant Toil employs, On arms like this, the Fishing Swain relies,”
are amplified in III. 73 ff. in number and detail.
“y those who curious have their art defined, Four sorts of fishers are distinct assigned. The first in Hooks delight: here some prepare The Angle’s Taper Length, and Twisted hair. Others the tougher threads of flax entwine, But firmer hands sustain the sturdy Line. A third prevails by more compendious ways, While numerous Hooks one common Line displays.”
We then pass to fishing by Nets, Mazy Weel, and Spears or Tridents. A spirited passage, spoilt in the translation by superfluous verbiage, sings of nocturnal fishing with spears and an attracting light. The method probably obtained the world over, certainly in China, Rome, and Greece, where Plato (Soph., 220 D.) classes it under the heading πυρευτική next to Angling. In Scotland it prevailed extensively, if illegally, as Burning the Water, or Leistering, a Norse term, and practice which Thor himself did not disdain. A passage from a lost comedy—The Trident—perhaps by Philippides, shows a fisher armed with a three-pronged fork and horn-lantern off a-Tunnying.[412]
The lines ring as true to-day as when Oppian[413] penned them.
“Erected torches blaze around the Boat, And dart their pitchy Rays ... Admiring shoals the gaudy flames surround, And meet the triple spear’s descending wound,”
while if fishing were legally permitted only to those who came up to his ideal of what an angler should be (III. 29-31),
“First be the Fisher’s limbs compact and sound, With solid flesh, and well braced sinews bound, Let due proportion every part commend, Nor Leanness shrink too much, or Fat distend,”
rents the world over would speedily abate, and many a river would know its tenant no more.
For reading “at lairge” Oppian is admirable. At one moment you are enjoying a vivid and passably accurate account (III. 149 ff.) of how the Cramp or Torpedo Fish (νάρκη), like Brer Fox, lies low in the sand and the mud, but on a sudden “ejects his poisoned charms” with such effect that soon
“On every joint an Icy Stiffness steals, The flowing spirit binds and blood congeals.”[414]
A fish stupefied by the shock is likened (II. 81 ff.) unto a man who in dreams tries to escape from the threatening phantoms, only to find his knees bound and his limbs incapable of flight.
At another moment our poet (in I. 217 ff.) is reproving the incredulity of those who doubt the fact that a sucker fish can stop a ship under full sail, by sticking to its keel![415]
The peculiar powers of the Torpedo Fish command some comment. Ancient authors galore, to whom, in the absence of the more powerful electric Eel of Central America, the νάρκη must have appeared an amazing creature, have written and differed about it. Aristotle had early noted that it caught its prey by means of a stupefying apparatus in its mouth, or rather at the back of its head. Claudian asks (Carm. Min. Corp., XLIV. (XLVI.) 1 f.):
“Quis non indomitam miræ Torpedinis artem Audiit et merito signatas nomine vires?”
CAMPANIAN FISH-PLATE WITH PATTERN OF TORPEDO FISH.
Note the small well in centre for sauces.
Plato compares Socrates to the fish from his capability of electrifying his audience in the strict, but not in the corrupt present-day sense of the word, as some writers imagine. The comparison to the fish in Meno 80A illustrates the benumbing effect of the Socratic method on the thought and talk (τὴν ψυχὴν καὶ τὸ στόμα ναρκῶ) of Meno (and others), so that he was μεστὸς ἀπορίας, and reduced to silence (οὐκ ἔχω ὅ τι ἀποκρίνωμαι).
If limited to the electric fire which flashed from his eyes, the comparison is complimentary to the philosopher, but, if applied to the whole face, is, even if true, quite the reverse. The thirty odd busts still extant of Socrates hand down to us an ugly, flat face with pig’s-eyes, all characteristic of the Torpedo narke.[416]
Ælian (IX. 14) indulges in wondrous stories gleaned from his mother and viris peritis of the permeation of the electric shock. Did one but touch the net in which the fish was taken, lo! he was cramp-bound. If some enquiring observer placed a pregnant torpedo in a vase of sea-water, his fate, did but a drop fall on leg or arm, was similar, but the fish, even though this virtue had gone out of her, in due season became a mother!
According to Mr. Lones, Oppian, Ælian, to whom (V. 37) we owe the specific for immunity when handling the fish, viz. “the liquor of Cyrene,” Theophrastus, all exaggerate the powers of the Torpedo.
A most interesting account is given in Athenæus (VII. 95), who avers that the shock was not produced by all parts of the fish’s body, but by certain parts only, and that Diphilus of Laodicea had proved this by a long series of experiments.[417] According to Galen and Dioscorides the shock, whence or however obtained, relieved chronic headache, while a contemporary of the latter recommends a person suffering from gout in the feet to stand “bare-legged” on the shore, and apply the Torpedo.
As the German and Austrian watering places are still under a cloud, we may yet see on the shores of Italy bands of gouty and passionate pilgrims standing bare-legged, awaiting the cure of the νάρκη!
Complaints of gout are rife, even among our fish-affecting epigrammatists. From Hedylus, a singer rather of wine than of fish, we trace the lineage of the disease, “of Bacchus the limb-loosener, and of Venus the limb-loosener, is sprung a daughter, a limb-loosener, the Gout”![418]
As to spawning, every author from Herodotus down to Izaak Walton has evolved various but mostly inaccurate theories. Oppian (I. 479 ff.) lays down that, as the passion of Love overcomes fish, the bodies of the male and female meet in the water and “exude mingled slime,” which swallowed by the female produces conception. To this (I. 554 ff.) he allows an exception in the case of the murænæ. These mate with land serpents, “who for a time lay aside their venom”: a monstrous connection which finds affirmation by Sostratus[419] and by Pliny.[420]
The touching charm of the passage[421] about the Naucrates ductor or pilot fish (whence its name of ἡγητήρ), which for some reason in more modern times has transferred its affection and services from the whale to the shark, compels quotation:
“Bold in the front the little pilot glides, Averts each danger, every motion guides; With grateful joy the willing whales attend, Observe the leader and revere the friend; True to the little chief obsequious roll, And soothe in friendship’s charms their savage soul. Between the distant eyeballs of the whale The watchful pilot waves his faithful tail, With signs expressive points the doubtful way, The bulky tyrants doubt not to obey, Implicit trust repose in him alone, And hear and see with senses not their own; To him the important reins of life resign, And every self-preserving care decline.”[422]
Some of Oppian’s best bits contain animated portraits of sea-fights. The combatants are as intensely personified as Homer’s Greeks and Trojans in their hand-to-hand fight on the banks of the Scamander. But unlike the Heroes, the belligerents of Oppian pull each other to pieces without any responsibility on their part, or shock to moral sense on ours:
“Unwise we blame the rage of warring fish Who urged by hunger must supply the wish; While cruel man, to whom his ready food Kind Earth affords, yet thirsts for human blood.”
In proportion as fish, which according to the earliest authors was despised or disregarded, grew in favour with the Greeks, the frequency of its mention in Greek literature increased apace.
The Deipnosophistæ by Athenæus, to which belongs the distinction of being one of the earliest collections of Ana, is a curious sort of philosophers’ feast. It quotes from nearly every writer on nearly every topic; it discusses almost every conceivable subject, especially gastronomy. It weighs the qualities of all things edible. Comments on fish, taken from plays, histories, treatises, etc., are plentifully, if incongruously, scattered.[423]
Everything goes in this work; grammatical problems are mixed up with gastronomic; the discursiveness of Athenæus races from grave to gay, grim death to any story, however apparently disconnected.
His tale of the Pinna (III. 46), a bivalve shellfish, and the Pinnothere (a small crab who inhabits the shell of the Pinna) resembles many of the fables current among the West Indian negroes as regards the cleverness of the Crab. As soon as the small fish, on which the Pinna subsists, have swum within the shell side, the Pinnothere nips the Pinna as a signal to him to close his shell and secure them.
Plutarch (De Sol. Anim., 30) shows that the habit was not entirely altruistic, for “this being done, they feed together upon the common prey.” From the Pinna which haunts the bottom of the sea. From the Pinna which haunts the bottom of the sea came ”the most transparent pearls, very pure and very large.”[424]
The enormous industry of Athenæus, who (VIII. 15) speaking of the materials he had amassed for this one book, casually states that he himself “had read and made extracts from 800 plays of the Middle Comedy alone,” and in it cites nearly 800 authors, and over 1200 separate books, has undoubtedly preserved to us many valuable passages of the ample literature and numerous plays in which fishermen once figured. My many quotations from and references to his Deipnosophistæ make it unnecessary to deal with this author[425] at greater length.