CHAPTER XIV
INFATUATION FOR FISH—EXTRAVAGANT PRICES—COSTLY ENTERTAINMENTS—VITELLIUS—CLEOPATRA —APICIUS—COOKS—SAUCES
Leaving now the Lore of fishing among the Greeks and Romans, let us turn, before examining the nature and number of their Lures, to their estimation of Fish as a food.
We found, it will be remembered, that the Homeric poems make no mention of fish being served at a banquet of the heroes, or even appearing on the tables of people of position. Only poor or starving folk ate fish. Although fish became later an insensate luxury, the Greeks at first apparently abstained from all fish caught in fresh water, except the eels of Lake Copaïs, then as now far-famed.[459]
This abstention from fresh-water fish originated (according to Plutarch) in the belief that every spring and every stream was sacred to some god or nymph, to catch whose property or progeny—the fish in them—would be an act of impiety.[460] This sounds like a laboured explanation of a fact really due to other causes. One of these is brought out clearly in Geikie. When noticing the difference which existed between the Greek and the Roman interest in and feeling for the sea, he, or rather Professor Mackail, attributes it largely to a question of food supply.[461]
Greece proper, from its comparative sterility and poverty of water, was very limited in its capacity to grow crops or rear herds. It compulsorily fell back largely on fish. And principally sea-fish, because of their superior palatability, and because of the inadequacy, owing to scarcity of lakes and perennial rivers, of fresh-water fish.
Whatever be the cause of the early abstention, three points arouse our interest. (A) The passages in Greek writers (previous to Ælian) that describe angling in Greek fresh waters, reach but a scant half-dozen, while those that depict fishing in such waters—sacred lakes, temple stew-ponds, and eeling in Lake Copaïs excepted—can probably be reckoned on both hands.[462]
(B) The Palatine Anthology (at least in the period from 700 b.c. to 500 a.d.) contains no reference (as far as I know) to aught but sea-fishing.
(C) The Greek comedians, Athenæus, the Greek opsophagic authors all almost always reserve their appreciations for food from ἰχθυόεις πόντος.
The statement that the Romans abstained, like the Maeatæ or Celts[463] of North Britain, from fresh-water fish from similar, or any motives, cannot be established. It goes far beyond the evidence at our command, although some aversion may be possibly deduced from Ovid (Fast., VI. 173 f.), and as regards shellfish from Varro. Unlike the Greeks, however, they certainly in a very short period became great consumers of fish from the Tiber, the Po, the Italian Lakes, and afterwards from the Danube, Rhine, etc., but in their estimation, as in that of the Greeks, fish from the sea ever held the higher place.[464]
If cost be a true criterion, this preference for salt-water fish continued as late as the fourth century. In Diocletian’s Edict, 301 a.d., fixing the price of food, etc., throughout the Empire, the maximum allowed for best quality sea-fish was nearly double that of best quality river-fish.[465]
In both Greece and Rome fish became luxuries of the most expensive kind. Seas and rivers were scoured far and wide. No price was thought too extravagant for a mullet, a sturgeon, or a turbot; three mullets of historical celebrity even fetched in Rome the almost incredible sum of £240![466]
In spite of many laws and decrees made at Athens and at Rome (where the Censor often interfered[467] in cases of extravagance in dress, living, etc.) the prices, owing to the ingenuity of the sellers and the wild competition of the buyers, rose constantly higher. The plaint of Cato the Censor that things could not be well with a community, where “a fish fetched more than a bull,” was uttered in and of a generation, which in comparison with its successors looks frugal, even niggardly.
Pliny records (N. H., IX. 31) “octo milibus nummum unum mullum mercatum fuisse”—one mullet equalled £64, or the price of nine bulls! He also says (N. H., IX. 30) that mullets were plentiful and cheap when under 2 lb., “a weight they rarely exceeded.” Martial (Ep., XIV. 97) confirms this in his “Do not dishonour your gold serving-dish by a small mullet: none less than two pounds is worthy of it.” In proportion as they exceeded this, they grew in value.
One would imagine that Nature had fallen in with the caprice of the Romans, for the fish seems to have grown larger in the decline of the Empire, as if to humour the extravagance of this degenerate people. Horace thought he had pretty well stigmatised the frantic folly of his glutton by a mullet of 3 lbs. (Sat., II. 2, 33); but the next reign furnished one of 4½ lbs., which presented to and sold at auction by the Emperor Tiberius was bought by Octavius for £40 (Seneca, Ep., XCV. 42), while in Juvenal, IV. 15 f., we have one of 6 lbs.[468]
How long the passion for these big mullets lasted it is impossible to tell, but Macrobius, speaking with indignation of one purchased by Asinius Celer in the reign of Claudius for £56 (in Pliny, N. H., IX. 31, I find the price was £64!), declares that in his time (fifth century a.d.) such mad prices had vanished.
Alongside of Pliny’s caustic comment[469] that the price of a victorious Triumph equalled that of a cook, or a fish, can be set the lament of the Greek comedians that for some fish one had to pay ἴσον ἲσῳ, i.e. for weight avoirdupois you handed over a similar weight in money or, as Mayor neatly renders it, “£ for lb.” This gibe at the public mania sprang from bitter personal experience. At Rome, too, we read “of those who sell rare fish for their weight in money.”
Does not Martial’s savage outburst on a glutton who had sold a slave for £10 to procure a dinner, which was not really a good one because nearly all the money was spent on a mullet—
“Non est hic, improbe, non est Piscis: homo est; hominem, Calliodore, comes,”
apply with greater force to “the men-eaters” who purchased mullets for £40 or £60 each?[470]
Juvenal’s scathing invective on Crispinus—who had bought a mullet of 6 lbs. for £48—runs:
“What! you, Crispinus, brought to Rome erewhile, Lapt in the rushes of your native Nile, Buy scales at such a price! You might, I guess, Have bought the fisherman himself for less; Bought, in some countries, manors at this rate, And, in Apulia, an immense estate.”[471]
The folly of the Roman nobles and millionaires did not exhaust itself in buying fish at insane prices, or squandering their fortunes on Vivaria and similar extravagances. They touched a yet lower depth of infamy by taking their cognomen from fish.
Thus Columella contrasts the custom of their ancestors of taking a cognomen from some great victory, e.g. Numantinus or Isauricus, with that of their decadent successors such as Licinius Muræna or Sergius Orata.[472]
The Greek Comic Poets and Satirists castigate with bitter sarcasms and jeers the frenzied, almost cat-like devotion to fish.
Even Diogenes the Cynic came to an untimely end by eating with eager haste a polypus raw.[473] Philoxenus the Poet, when warned by his doctor, after “he had bought a polypus two cubits long, dressed it, and ate it up himself all but the head,” that he had but six hours left to live and to arrange his affairs, bequeathed his poems and the prizes of his poems to the Nine Muses:
“Such is my Will! But since old Charon’s voice Keeps crying out ‘Now cross’: and deadly Fate, Whom none can disobey, calls me away, That I may go below with all my goods, Bring me the fragments of that polypus.”[474]
The moralists of the Empire bewail “the costly follies of the patricians.” Juvenal, Martial, and other Roman Satirists lampoon the gluttony and extravagance connected with opsophagy, or the eating of fish. This limitation of the word is explained by Plutarch (Symp., IV. 4), “fish alone above all the rest of the dainties is called ὄψον, because it is more excellent than all the rest,” and characteristically defended by Athen., VII. 4.[475]
The banquets of the Greeks[476] seem to have outdone even those of Imperial Rome. Both must have weighed heavy, alike on table and on chest.
At these, writes Badham, “although all flesh was there, although quadrupeds mustered strong, and a whole heaven of poultry, still it was the flesh of fishes that ever bore away the palm; they were the soul of the supper, and the number of kinds brought together at one repast was surprisingly great. From the poetic bills of fare preserved by Athenæus I have verified twenty-six species of fish in one Attic supper, and not less than forty at another![477] On the fish course being brought in, the appearance of the banqueting hall soon became more splendid: hardware made way for solid silver: gold breadbaskets were now handed round: the flower of youth of both sexes entered bearing bits of pumice, drugs against drunkenness, and trays full of chaplets of Violets and Amaranth, while others hung up that mystic flower, the present of the God of Love to the God of Silence, to intimate that henceforth all things said or done at the feast were to be kept, inviolable and sub rosa, under which flower by the rain of myriads of petals all the guests literally soon were.”[478]
The amount of money spent on suppers and entertainments at Rome staggers conception. The figures recorded by even serious historians seem beyond all belief: for instance, the ordinary expense of Lucullus for a supper in the Hall of Apollo is given at 50,000 drachmæ, or £1600.
At one of the suppers to which it was the custom of Nero to invite himself—his meals, Suetonius (Nero, 27) tells us, were prolonged from mid-day to midnight or vice-versa—no less than £32,000 was expended on chaplets, and at another still more on roses alone. But it must be remembered that the Italian rose bloomed only for one day—witness the lines, “Una dies aperit, conficit una dies,” and “Quam longa una dies, ætas tam longa rosarum.”[479] The cost of an entertainment by his brother in honour of the Emperor Vitellius on his entrance to Rome was nearly £80,000!
But of Vitellius himself let Suetonius[480] speak: “He was chiefly addicted to the vices of luxury and cruelty. He always made three meals a day, sometimes four—breakfast, dinner, supper, and a drunken revel afterwards. This load of food he bore well enough, from a custom to which he had inured himself, of frequently vomiting!” No wonder Seneca lashes the gluttons of Rome with “Vomunt ut edant, edunt ut vomant!”[481] For each of these meals he would make different appointments at the houses of his friends for the same day. None ever entertained him at less expense than 400,000 sesterces (or £3200). But the most famous entertainment—given in his honour by his brother—commandeered no less than 2,000 choice fishes, and 7,000 birds.
Yet even this supper he himself outdid at a feast to celebrate the first use of a dish fashioned expressly for him, and from its extraordinary size yclept “The Shield of Minerva.” In this dish[482] costing £100,000 and capable of feeding one hundred and thirty guests “were tossed together the livers of charfish, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingos, and the entrails (or rather the milt) of lampreys, brought in ships of war from the Carpathian Sea, or the Spanish Straits.”[483]
In order “satiare inexplebiles libidines,” etc., Vitellius is believed to have squandered in a few months[484] no less than seven million two hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds (£7,265,000)![485]
No wonder that Caligula, perhaps the biggest spendthrift of the Cæsars, laid down the maxim that “a man ought to be either an economist, or an Emperor!”
The fabulous sums spent on entertainments by the Greeks and Romans were equalled, even surpassed by the Persians, the Sybarites, the Egyptians, and other nations. But the cost, though prodigious, of Cleopatra’s four-day entertainment to Antony and his captains (in the menu of which fishes from the Nile and the Red Sea figured conspicuously), pales before that of a supper given in honour of Xerxes and his captains by Antipater of Thasos, i.e. 400 (presumably Attic) talents or some £100,000! No wonder Herodotus mournfully adds, “Wherever Xerxes took two meals, dinner and supper, that city was utterly ruined!”[486]
Nor at the feasts, which the invader of Media made “for a great multitude every day,” was it a case of taking up of the fragments that remained but twelve basketsful, because, as Posidonius (in the 14th book of his History) continues, “besides the food that was consumed and the heaps of fragments which were left, every guest carried away with him entire joints of beasts, and birds, and fishes, which had never been carved, all ready dressed,[487] in sufficient quantities to fill a waggon. And after this they were presented with a quantity of sweetmeats,” etc.
The prize, however, for mad lavishness must be adjudged even in a race of such strenuous competitors, to “that most admirable of all monarchs,” Ptolemy Philadelphus. It is “Eclipse first, the rest nowhere,” if the description of the coronation feast given by Callixenus in his History of Alexandria be faithfully rendered by Athenæus.[488]
The imagination of the average reader before reaching the last chapters will have been fatigued and appalled by the picture of overwhelming wealth and magnificence, but as Ptolemy, after a reign of grandiose and continuous expenditure, left at his death £200,000,000 in the treasury, the cost of the whole entertainment must have been as nought compared with his revenue.
M. Gavius Apicius, after squandering half a million sterling on the indulging his passion for creating new dishes and new combinations of food from materials collected in Europe, Asia, and Africa, one day balanced his accounts. Finding that but barely £80,000 remained, and despairing of being able to satisfy the cravings of his hunger from such a miserable pittance he poisoned himself. He is possibly the author of a Treatise (in ten books!) of recipes for new dishes and new sauces for fish; for one of the latter more than twenty-five ingredients were necessary.[489]
The importance attached to cooks and cooking finds a cloud of witnesses in Greek and Roman writers. Athenæus in especial recites their triumphs and their bombastic boasts. So high was the chef’s position and so excellent was the cuisine in Greece that we find the Roman ambassadors, who in the sixth century b.c. were sent to investigate the working of Solon’s Laws, bringing home a special report on Cooking!
To these Attic cordons bleus in succeeding generations not only Italy but Persia were glad to send pupils, and pay exorbitant fees for tuition. The Attic cook gave himself the same airs of superiority over his Roman brother, as the French chef over the Anglican—him “of a hundred sects but only one sauce.” Carême, the chef of Talleyrand (the author of this mot), never abated his claim that to the success of the Congress of Vienna he contributed no less than his master.[490] His salary, however, does not begin to compare with that of Antony’s cook, £3000 a year and “perquisites” galore.
Anaxandrides[491] compares the beauteous work of portrait painters unfavourably with the beauty of a dish of fish. Xenarchus[492] contrasts poets with fishmongers, much to the detriment of the former:
“Poets are nonsense: for they never say A single thing that’s new. But all they do Is to clothe old ideas in language new, Turning the same things o’er again And upside down. But as for fishmongers, They’re an inventive race and yield to none,” etc.
Hegesippus’s summing up, “But the whole race of cooks is conceited and arrogant,” finds confirmation in dozens of instances. Two grandiloquent boasts may serve: “I have known many a guest who has, for my sake, eaten up his whole estate,” and
“I am in truth a God, I bring the dead By mere scent of my food, to life again.”
Self-laudation is no monopoly of Greece, or Sicily, whence came perhaps the most famous of the tribe. In our own Beaumont and Fletcher’s play—The Bloody Brother—a chef vaunts,
“For fish I’ll make you a standing lake of white broth, And pikes shall come ploughing up the plums before them, Arion on a dolphin playing Lachrymæ.”
Lucian, in his witty Dialogue,[493] makes Hermes act as auctioneer at the sale of the different creeds as personified by their founders or by philosophers, and dilate on the exceptional merits of the lot then under the hammer, “because he will teach you how long a gnat will live, and what sort of soul an oyster possesses.” Mr. Lambert states that Ausonius wrote a poem on the oyster! To be more accurate, he wrote two,[494] and lengthy ones to boot!
The Emperor Domitian (Juvenal, IV.) ordered a special sitting of the Senate to deliberate and advise on a matter of such grave State importance as the best method of cooking a turbot.
Greek and Roman writers frequently poke fun at the gourmets who asserted that they could instantly tell from the flavour whence the fish came: from what sea, and what part of that sea, from what river, and even from which side of that river.[495]
Either these ancient connoisseurs were blessed with a more exquisite and developed sense of taste than we moderns, or the whole pose was an intolerable affectation, for “they drenched their subtly-conceived dishes with garum, alec, and other sauces, which were so strong and composite that it would have been hardly possible to distinguish a fresh fish from a putrid cat—except by the bones!”[496]
This assertion is none too strong, if the receipts for these sauces be duly pondered. Mention of garum, which gets its name from being made originally from the salted blood and entrails of a fish called garon or garos by the Greeks, is in classical writers very general: we find it even in Æschylus and Sophocles.[497]
The various sauces known in Latin are too numerous to recite.[498] The two best, although the authorities are far from unanimous, seem to have been made out of the gills and entrails of the Mackerel and Tunny. The components of one recipe justify Robinson. In addition to other odds and ends, its outstanding feature was the gore and entrails of the Tunny, crammed in a vessel hermetically closed, and only drawn off when decomposition was complete! No wonder Plato the Comedian complains ... “drenching them in putrid garum they will suffocate me.”
Alec, like garum, once the name of a fish (possibly the anchovy), came to signify only the sauce made from it, and subsequently from other cheap fish. It differed from garum chiefly from being thicker, and judging from the recipes probably nastier. You took first the dregs and fæculence remaining after the garum liquor had been decanted: to them, add turbid brine, sodden bodies of the fish, etc., and then you have the semi-solid compound, from which alec was derived, not inaptly yclept “Putrilago.”[499]
If, as Badham (p. 69) asserts but not convincingly, garum a double duty served, as a sauce and as a liqueur, the price of the latter was exorbitant, over £3 a gallon.[500] Martial (Ep., XIII. 102) in
“Expirantis adhuc scombri de sanguine primo Accipe fastosum, munera cara, garum,”
calls attention to the expensive nature of his present, for garum made from the scomber was in Pliny’s words “laudatissimum,” while the ἄλμη, or muria, fabricated from the intestines and nothing else of the tunny was cheap and inferior.
Apart from their gastronomic popularity, the medical efficacy of the various gara as pæaned by Pliny must, like the Waverley Pen, have “come as a boon and a blessing to men,” in the wide range of their cures.[501] For ulcers of the mouth and ears, one mirifice prodest. On the application of other gara, “dumb-foundered flee away” burns, blains, dysenteries, bites of dogs, maximeque crocodili, etc. Chapter 44 might indeed easily pass as the leaflet of an advance agent for a patent pill.
With the knowledge and use of the various internal parts of fish, it is strange to find Caviare, made out of the roe of the Sturgeon, first in a recipe of the ninth century. Soft and hard roes then, as now, were generally exported, but as a separate article it became known only in Byzantine times.[502]
With the hungry desire for fish among all classes and with the deep pockets of the rich enabling them to go to any extreme price, is it any wonder that the trade of a fishmonger at Athens and Rome was most lucrative? Several fishmongers acquired large fortunes and high position. The Athenians even raised to the rank of citizens the sons of Chærephilus, for the adequate reason that he sold such excellent pickled fish![503]
At Athens, and probably at Rome, there existed a Society or Corporation of Fishmongers, akin to our own Fishmongers’ Company, one of the many trade guilds of mediæval times. Its power and political pull often defeated or evaded the stringent regulations, which from time to time fixed the price of fish. In early times fish were sold by the fishermen themselves, as soon as the Fish-Market at Rome had been opened by the ringing of its bell.
CHAPTER XV
FISH IN SACRIFICES—PICKLED FISH—VIVARIA OF OYSTERS, ETC.—ARCHIMEDES
The Feast Day, Ludi, of the Tiber fishermen was celebrated on the Campus Martius in June under the management of the Prætor Urbanus with much ceremony. Ovid[504] sings:
“Festa dies illis qui lina madentia ducunt, Quique tegunt parvis æra recurva cibis.”
The custom of offering to the Gods fish (although rarer than that of animals) certainly and widely prevailed. Proof can be piled on proof—pace a passage from Plutarch and pace the contention that the practice is not purely Hellenic—from the pages of both Greek and Roman authors.
Take, for instance, the statement of Agatharchides of Knidos: that the largest eels from Lake Copaïs were sacrificed by the Bœotians, who crowned them like human victims, and after sprinkling them with meal offered prayers over them.[505] Or the story in Posidonius the Stoic of Sarpedon celebrating his victory by “sacrificing to Neptune, who puts armies to flight, enormous quantities of fish.”[506] Theocritus in his fragmentary Berenice, Ælian,[507] and Antigonus on the offering of the Tunny all confirm the custom.[508]
Plutarch (Symp., VIII. 3) would seem indeed the only exception: he straightly asserts, according to Nonnius and others, that “no fish is fitting for offering or sacrifice.”[509]
This is but another instance of Plutarch’s being saddled with responsibility for some expression or opinion uttered by one of his characters, as is clearly shown by the words: “Sylla, commending the discourse, added with regard to the Pythagoreans that they tasted especially the flesh sacrificed to the gods, but that no fish is fit for offering or sacrifices.”
P. Stengel holds that fish, with the curious exception of the Eel, were not sacrificed to the gods in early days, because they neither possessed blood which could be poured forth at the altar, nor could they be offered up alive as could be an enemy, a sacrifice which found special favour in divine eyes.[510]
This statement, unless explained in some manner, contrasts queerly with the passage in Plutarch’s Life of Numa Pompilius, where the king is taught by Picus and Faunus, reinforced subsequently by Jupiter himself, to make a lustration “as a charm against thunder and lightning, composed of Onions, Hair, and Pilchards!” Lest these curious constituents arouse your mirth and infect you with doubt as to their efficacy, hearken unto Plutarch’s further words, “which is used even unto this day!”
From this account (wittily versed by Ovid)[511] we discover Jupiter, resentful at being brought down to earth by the magic of Picus and Faunus, ordering the charm to consist “of Heads”—“Of onions,” replied Numa. “Human”—“Hairs,” said Numa, desirous to fence against the dreadful injunction, and interrupting the god. “Living,” said Jupiter—“Pilchards,” broke in Numa.
Whether fish were but rarely sacrificed or not, Festus[512] at any rate makes clear that at the Ludi on June 7th, and possibly the Volcanalia in September (although at the latter the oblations were mostly animal), Roman fishermen did offer up fish, “quod id genus pisciculorum vivorum datur ei Deo pro animis humanis.”
Offerings of fish may be (as O. Keller suggests) a relic of Totemism resting on the belief that the spirits of men after death pass into fish.
The suggestion gains force when we remember that Anaximander[513] and others taught that men lived once as fishes, but later came on land and threw off their scales; and that the early religious conceptions of Latium were so debased as readily to engender or harbour such a conception. On the other hand, it must be admitted that not a single clear and convincing case of Totemism has hitherto been adduced from the Græco-Italic area.
In these oblations and in Varro’s “Populus pro se in ignem animalia mittit,”[514] an animal in place of a man be it remarked—can be detected a mitigated survival of the widespread custom of human sacrifice in propitiation of a deity.[515] On much the same lines grew up the custom, as civilisation progressed, of burning the weapons of, instead of killing, the captured foe, after a battle. The immolation of prisoners formed a sacrifice not so much of revenge, as one in honour of the slain on the side of the victors: such at least is the conclusion suggested to me by the words of Festus, “humanum sacrificium dicebant, quod mortui causa fiebat.”[516]
As offerings at Rome had dwindled from men down to animals, or small fish, or eventually even salt or pickled fish, or fish mixed with wheat, so among the Israelites the Scape-Goat had become the vicarious victim offered up to Jehovah “for the sins of all the people,” and among the Assyrians the oblation had even shrunk to little fishes, made of ivory or metal.
Fish, in addition to being worshipped as gods or held so sacred that eating them was prohibited, were frequently used by the Priests or by the Augurs for divinatory purposes. In accordance with their swimming or not, and in what direction, with their leaps into the air, how, whence, and whither effected, with their reception, or refusal, or smashing with their tails of particular foods, were framed the oracular deliverances or priestly predictions, as Plutarch and others show.[517]
Thus at the spring of Limyra in Lycia, if the fish seized food thrown to them greedily, the omen was favourable; if they flapped at it with their tails, the reverse.[518] In Lydia (according to Varro[519]) from their movements, when rising to the surface at the sound of a flute, the watching seer deduced and delivered his answer. Divination was not limited to certain holy waters; when in the war between Augustus and Sextus Pompeius a fish darted from the sea and threw itself at the feet of the former, the ready augur found no difficulty in acclaiming him as the future “Ruler of the Waves.”[520]
Ichthyic soothsaying held its ground among the Greeks of the Byzantine empire. One prediction[521] —when a boiled fish shall spring out of the pot, then the last hour of Constantinople will have struck—is of present-day importance. But whether the fish has filled his saltatory rôle, and if so whether the doom of the city has sounded, lie for decision at the moment of writing on the lap of the Big Four in Paris.
The belief that fish could and did foretell events lingered long in England; thus the deaths of Henry II. and of Cromwell were foreshadowed by the fighting of fish among themselves in the vivaria belonging to Henry II. and Cromwell.[522]
As is but natural in hot countries, the trade in salted and pickled fish, the τάριχος of the Greeks, the salsamentum of the Romans, grew to great importance.[523]
This sweet-sour comestible was among both nations early, universal, and pushed to the extreme of madness.[524] In such high esteem was it held that it came to be looked on as an offering meet for the gods. Cato and others testify to the exorbitant prices commanded by Pontic and kindred salsamentum, of which a small flask fetched more than one hundred sheep! Of every kind—and they were as diverse as the countries and towns that furnished them—we find champions ready to go to the stake to prove the superiority of their own pet choice.
Of some towns it was the chief, if not the only, commerce. As modern towns frequently bear for their arms or on their seal some device connected with their history or trade, so ancient seaports which produced salsamentum often stamped their coins with the figures of fish, etc.
Thus Olbia, one of the most important markets for salt or pickled fish, bears on its money an eagle taking a fish,[525] while a copper coin of Carteia[526] depicts an angler, possibly Mercury—a god of fishing. Sinope, and many other places, have left similar numismatic representations. Of most interest from a monetary point of view are the Greek diobols of Tarentum. Those bearing the figure of Taras on his dolphin passed as current token in the fish market.[527]
TWO MEN FISHING, FROM COINS OF CARTEIA.
From A. Heiss, 49, 20-21. [See N. 1].
Famous for the beauty of their execution were some of the Syracusan coins, representing the head of Arethusa surrounded by dolphins. The accounts of the legend vary. Shortly, the lovely maid of the train of Artemis fled the embraces of her lover Alpheus,
“Arethusa arose From her couch of snows In the Acroceraunian Mountains,”
and prevailed on Oceanus to open a way through his waves till reaching seeming safety in the Isle of Ortygia, close to Syracuse, she welled forth in the midst of the salt sea a fountain of sweet pure water. Alpheus, not to be outdone, got himself transformed into a river to emerge also at Ortygia and to mix his stream with the spring of the nymph.
Around her head or amidst her hair on Syracusan coins dart dolphins (some hold eels, which were sacred to Artemis), symbolic of the sea, to show that the sweetness of the fountain was still untainted by the surrounding salt of the ocean.[528] Sweet the water may have been, but Athenæus (II. 16) characterises it as “of invincible hardness.” These coins are the work of those great masters, Cimon, Euaenetus, and an unknown third, the ‘New Artist’ of Sir Arthur Evans.[529] On an electrum coin of Syracuse an octopus is well delineated, while the obverse shows a veiled female head in profile.[530]
ARETHUSA,
FROM A TETRADRACHM
OF SYRACUSE BY CIMON.
From G. F. Hill’s
Handbook of Coins,
Pl. 6, Fig. 6.
The octopus, judging by the fact that at Mycenæ in one tomb alone Dr. Schliemann excavated fifty-three golden models of it, and by the many gold ornaments of which the fish forms the chief or only figure, was undoubtedly a very frequent and favourite subject for the craftsmen of the ‘Minoan’ age, although it did not bulk so big in early Mediterranean religion as L. Siret would make out.[531]
The taxes or duties derived from fish or fishing furnished the peculiar of the Temples at Delos, Ephesus, and elsewhere: at Byzantium and some other places they went to the city. After the Roman conquests these imposts were paid not to the cities (Cyzicus and other places were the exceptions), but to the State, and were gathered by the intermediary “publicans.”[532]
With stories before him, such as those of the suppers recorded by the dozen in Athenæus, and given to and by the Emperor Vitellius, for which the fish were brought in ships of war from the Carpathian Sea and the Straits of Spain, it is no wonder that a modern author is driven to conclude that the ancients thought more of the edible than the sporting qualities of the fish. They ransacked the habitable globe for side-dishes, but did not trouble themselves about the precepts of Mrs. Glasse.
Apart from this ransacking of the globe, the Romans developed, as the demand for fish by rich and poor alike grew ever greater, the Egyptian and Assyrian vivarium to a marvellous extent.
Built at first (as Columella avers[533]) simply for the purpose of supplying fresh fish for the table, they found such favour that no self-respecting Roman could afford to be without his vivarium. With the rich they were the occasion of most costly ostentation and extravagant expenditure.
Whether Sergius Aurata (or Orata) took or not his cognomen[534] from the fish Aurata, all writers identify him as the first to build a vivarium for oysters. From their sale, from the income derived from the vapour baths (pensiles balineas), of which he was also the pioneer, and from the villas erected on his property, close to Baiæ, the baths, and the oysters, he amassed an enormous fortune. He posed as the Pontiff of the Palate; his was the final decision, from which lay no appeal, as to which sea or which part of what river produced the best of the various fishes.
From the not unnatural bias of owner and founder he adjudged the Lucrine oysters finest of all. Pliny’s words (IX. 79) that, when Orata “ennobled” the Lucrine, British oysters had not yet reached Rome convey a gratifying compliment to our insular pride, somewhat dashed by Pliny plumping for the Circeian.[535]
Oysters throve with travelling and a change to new waters.[536] The Brundisian oyster when planted in Lake Lucrinus not only kept its own flavour, but took on that of its new home.
Apicius, not our gourmet M. Gabius, but an initialless successor, would have proved an admirable Quartermaster-General.[537] When “Trajan was in Parthia at a distance of many days’ journey from the sea, he sent him oysters, which he kept fresh by a clever contrivance of his own invention; real oysters not like the sham anchovies which the cook of Nicomedes, king of the Bithynians, made for him,” when far inland and yearning for oysters.
In a comedy by Euphron,[538] a chef sings his teacher’s marvellous skill:—
“I am the pupil of Soterides Who when his king was distant from the sea Full twelve days’ journey and in winter’s depth Fed him with rich anchovies to his wish And made the guests to marvel. B.How was that? A. He took a female turnip, shred it fine Into the figure of the delicate fish.”
No wonder the king spake to his admiring guests thus:—
“A cook is quite as useful as a poet, And quite as wise, as these anchovies show it.”
To Fulvius Herpinus or Lippinus belongs the credit of being the first—just before the Civil War—to fatten the Cochlea, or sea-snail, in a vivarium. By careful collecting from Africa and Illyrica and skilful feeding, his cockles became renowned for size and number.[539]
In the period between the taking of Carthage and the reign of Vespasian, the taste in fish became a perfect passion; for its gratification Proconsuls enriched, like our Clives from India, beyond the dreams of avarice by the spoils of Asia and Africa, incurred the most lavish expense. Thus Licinius Muræna, Quintus Hortensius, Lucius Philippus constructed immense basins,[540] which they filled with rare species. Lucullus, like the Persian king at Athos, but with unlike motive, caused even a mountain to be pierced to introduce sea-water into his fish-ponds, and for the achievement was dubbed by Pompey, “Togatus Xerxes.”[541]
But in many cases the huge outlay was repaid with interest. Varro[542] avers that Hirrius (who first before all others designed and carried out the vivarium for Murænæ) received twelve million sesterces in rent from his properties, and employed the entire sum in the care of his fishes! At the death of Lucullus the fish in his stew-ponds realised over £32,000.
The rich Patricians were not satisfied with a single pond; their fish preserves were divided into compartments where they kept different kinds. In case any reader, like the Third Fisherman in Shakespeare’s Pericles,
“Marvel how the fishes live in the sea,”
First Fisherman: “Why as men do on land; the great ones eat up the little ones,”
and to add that the fish confined in these separate ponds found in the waters their business and livelihood from the testaceæ purposely planted.
This passion for piscinæ gradually impoverished the Mediterranean and other seas. Fish in the Tyrrhenian Sea had no time to come to maturity, because as Columella complains, “Maria ipsa Neptunumque clauserunt!”[543] While Varro and Columella give careful directions as to the making and keeping of practical fish stews, they keep silence as to methods of capturing the inhabitants.
I have come across no notice of vivaria among the Greeks:[544] their kinsman in Sicily erected at least one magnificent example. Diodorus Siculus (XI. 2) tells us that the Agrigentines (probably by the labour of the Carthaginian prisoners) “sunk a fishpond, with great costs and expenses, seven furlongs in compass, and twenty cubits in depth: in this water, brought both from fountains and rivers, fish were planted which soon supplied them with an ample stock both for food and pleasure.”
To the great Archimedes is due the unique achievement of a vivarium on board ship. It is impossible here to set forth all the glories of this wonderful vessel, intended for the corn traffic between Egypt and Sicily, and propelled by means of huge sweeps—every sweep worked by a team of twenty men (εἰκοσόρος).
Her Gymnasium, her three Baths, her Flower Garden, her trellised Vineyard, her Temple to Venus, her Library with its floor of mosaics exhibiting a series of subjects taken from the Iliad, and, lastly, in the bow by the side of the huge reservoir of 21,000 gallons, her water-tight well, made of planks lined with lead, and filled with sea-water, in which a great number of fish were always kept—if all these wonders of a ship, launched over 2200 years ago, do not cause us to think a little, and to abate our boasts over our Imperators and Olympics, then to the cocksure conceit of the twentieth century naught is of avail, not even the account given by Moschion.[545]
Disregarding the practical directions of Varro (whom Schneider[546] stamps, with regard to fish, etc., as a mere plagiarist of Greek authors), of Columella, and in a lesser degree of Pliny how to construct and conduct paying stew-ponds, and turning a deaf ear to Varro’s warning that “to build, stock, and keep them up was most costly,” the Romans thought no money, no time, too much to expend on vivaria.[547] Possession and cultivation of fish in vivaria, which were sometimes made in the dining-room, became the one delight of these “Tritones Piscinarum,” as Cicero dubs two of his friends.
The primary cause for their existence, a ready supply of fresh fish in a hot climate, was forgotten. Other owners resembled Hortensius, who (according to Varro) “not only was never entertained by his fish at table, but was scarcely ever easy, unless engaged in entertaining or fattening them.” The death of “his friend,” the Muræna, between whom and himself such a close attachment existed, almost broke his heart.[548]
Macrobius testifies that Crassus, “first among all the greatest men of Rome, mourned a muræna” (probably it of the earrings and necklace of precious stones) “found dead in his vivarium even as a daughter.” It was on the occasion of Domitius twitting him with “Did you not weep when your fish died?” that Crassus got back with “Did you not bury three wives and never weep at all?”[549]
Of Hortensius Varro continues:[550] “His mullet give him infinitely more concern than my mules and asses do; for while I, with one lad, support all my thrifty stud on a little barley, etc., the fish-servants of Hortensius are not to be counted. He has fishermen in fine weather toiling to procure them food; when the weather is too boisterous for fishing, then a whole troop of butchers and dealers in provisions send in their estimates for keeping his alumni fat. Hortensius so looks after his mullet as to forget his men; a sick slave has less chance of getting a draught of cold water in a fever than these favoured fish of being kept cool in their stews in Midsummer.”
The fish often answered to their names when called by their master, or their keeper. The latter, nomenclator, made a very handsome income from the admiring crowds, who flocked to see the fish perform their exercises with wagging tails or heads bedecked with rich jewels.[551]
Antonia, to whom the lands and villa of Hortensius descended, even stripped herself of her earrings to put them on a muræna. This lady, apart from this anecdote, was no ordinary person. We find her passing from the positive of celebrated renown for her beauty, her virtue, her chastity (no mean feat in that day!), through the comparative of being the mother of Germanicus Cæsar and Claudius, and the grandmother of Caligula (which last, in slang parlance, “wanted a bit of doing!”), unto the superlative of deathless fame in Pliny’s “Nunquam exspuisse” (never spat!).[552]
The savage use to which Vedius Pollio put his vivaria can be learnt from the pages of Pliny[553] and Seneca.[554] A slave, for breaking a crystal decanter at a banquet given to Augustus, was ordered to be thrown instantly into a piscina, there to be eaten alive by the nibbling voracious Murænæ. Escaping from his guards he threw himself at the Emperor’s feet, “beseeching nothing else except that he should die otherwise than as food for fish”[555]. Cæsar moved “novitate crudelitatis” (he little knew that this was his host’s cheery custom) commanded the crystals of Pollio to be smashed on the spot, the slave to be freed, and all the fishponds to be filled up.
As conducive to la joie de vivre of the other slaves, the command was commendable, for the bite of the Muræna’s serrated teeth, according to Nicander’s Theriaca—that “nullius fidei farrago”—owing to its mating with the viper, dealt poisonous death and destruction to the fishermen driven by its pursuit “headlong from their boats,” and was only curable by a mixture made of ashes from its own burnt head! So dreaded was this fish—curious is it not, to read, although from its savage nature no other could inhabit the same vivarium, the many stories of its tameness and docility?—that one of the direst of imprecations ran that in the under-world your enemy’s lungs should be mangled by Murænæ![556]
In times preceding these infatuated extravagant ages, the purpose for which vivaria were first created was steadfastly kept in mind and wonderfully advanced by practical pisciculturists. From being a mere pond for keeping fish alive till needed for the table, vivaria developed in the course of time into spawning grounds.
The pisciculturists went even farther. They turned lakes and rivers into natural vivaria by depositing in them not only adult fish, but the spawn of all such species as are in the habit, although born at sea, of pushing some distance up estuaries and streams. Columella instances specially the rivers Velinus, Sabatinus, Ciminus, and Volsinius as examples of the great success of this experiment in fish propagation.[557]
Comacchio on the Adriatic, from its extraordinary advantages of position and of fish-food, can hardly have escaped being utilised for similar purposes by the Romans. For many centuries, at any rate, its valli or breeding grounds have been renowned. Ariosto sings its speciality:
“La Città che in mezzo alle piscose Paludi del Pô, téme ambe le foci.”
Tasso hands it down as the place where the fish—
“finds itself within a prison swamp Nor can escape, for that seraglio Is aye to entrance wide, to exit barred.”
At the present day over twelve hundred tons of fish, eight hundred of them eels, are annually captured at Comacchio.[558]
Since the above was printed, new and interesting evidence of the importance of fish, not only as an economic, but also as a hygienic, factor in the nation’s prosperity has been furnished by Prof. J. A. Thomson in his lecture before the Royal Institution, January 6, 1921.
He traced a connection between the decline of Greece and a shortage of little fishes. There was strong reason to believe that one of the causes for the decay of “the glory that was Greece” was that malaria was brought into the State.
The little creature, which caused malaria, lived on the mosquito by whom it was carried. The mosquito spent its larval life in the fresh waters. Little fish were the enemy of the mosquito—particularly the fish known as “millions”—which consumed the pest at a great rate.
The professor suggested, therefore, that what had happened in Greece was that there had not been enough little fish to keep the mosquitos in check. Because of this, malaria had been brought into the country, and that plague helped, if it did not cause, the destruction of the wonderful civilisation of Greece.
CHAPTER XVI
LEGAL REGULATIONS OF ROME AS REGARDS FISHING
Previous instances of taking fish belonging to another have so far only been attended by divine or superhuman punishment. I venture now a few sentences on what were the Roman (I have discovered no Greek) legal regulations—for there does not appear to have existed at Rome any special law on Fishing—and how the rights of fisheries and fishers were protected.
From the evidence available it is clear—
(1) That among Res Nullius, or things belonging to no one, were fish and wild animals in a state of nature. The Digest, 41. 1. 1, lays down that “omnia animalia, quæ terra, mari, cælo capiuntur, id est feræ bestiæ, volucres, et pisces, capientum fiunt.”
(2) That they became the property of the person who first “reduces them into possession,” i.e. captures them.
(3) That the sea and public rivers were not capable of individual ownership.
(4) That no citizen could be prevented from fishing in the sea and such rivers by any person. To this rule there are several exceptions; for instance, (a) a cove of the sea bordering on a man’s land—perhaps if enclosed with stakes, etc.—could be exclusively occupied for fishing (Digest, 47. 10, ss. 13 and 14); (b) a right of fishing in a recess or backwater of a public river could be acquired by prescription, and would then be protected by a possessory Interdict against any one who tried to fish this water (Ibid., 44. 3. 7).
It is hard to define precisely what constituted a public river and what a private river. Under the term “public” came all rivers of any size, not merely those that were tidal. Whether a river was public depended not only on its size, but also on the “opinion of those dwelling around it.” No river, periodically dry in summer, could be accounted public (Digest, 43. 12, ss. 1-4).
All streams not public, many lakes, and all piscinæ, etc., were private property, from which the owner could prevent any one taking fish. The legal remedy for such exclusion, based on the ground of trespass, was Interdict—a procedure very similar to that of Scotland, whose law is mainly modelled on that of Rome.
The further legal question—were the fish in such piscinæ res nullius or were they such individual property as to make any one taking them without permission liable for theft—was answered by the jurist Nerva in Digest, 41. 2. 3, s. 14, who held that they were individual property—“pisces quos in piscinas coiecerimus a nobis possideri.”
Thus the owner of vivaria could proceed against a poacher by (1) an interdict for trespass, and (2) a prosecution for theft, in case of a fish being caught with the intention of taking it away. On the other hand, a person prevented from fishing or navigating by another could only proceed by an action of Injuria, personal affront (Digest, 43. 8. 17, ss. 8 and 9; 41. 1. 30; 43. 14, s. 7).
Although I purposely limit myself to a very slight sketch of Roman regulations, the case reported by Pliny (N. H., IX. 85) seems, alike from legal and piscatorial interest, worthy of reproduction and examination.
As the Anthias is one of the shyest of fishes, special precautions and plenty of patience were necessary for a good catch. Thus fishermen wore clothes of the same colour as their boats. They sailed without fishing over the same stretch of sea. They merely went on “baiting the swim” on each tack, day after day, till some spirit, bolder than the rest, could be induced to take the bait. Still more days elapse before the fish, which has by this time been well identified, is followed by any of his mates. Eventually example proves so infectious that shoals innumerable, of which the Elder Brethren even eat from the fisherman’s hands, surround the boat.
Now is the accepted hour for “the fisherman to throw out a little beyond his finger tips a hook concealed in bait,” and (to prevent alarm) smuggle the fish out gently, one by one, by a very slight jerk. His mate receives the fish on pieces of cloth, so that no floundering about or other noise may scare their comrades. On no account must “the betrayer of the others” be captured, lest instantly the shoal take to flight and be no more seen.
But “there is a story that a fisherman, having quarrelled with his mate, threw out a hook to one of the leading fishes, which he easily spotted and with malicious intent captured. The fish was, however, recognised in the market by his mate, against whom he had conceived this malice: accordingly an action for damages (damni formulam editam) was brought, which the defendant, as Mucianus adds, was condemned to pay.”
Now, as shown above, (1) a fish is “res nullius,” (2) a fish becomes the property of him who first “reduces it into possession,” (3) the sea, with some exceptions which do not apply here, is not capable of individual ownership.
If “the betrayer of his kind” was till malicious capture admittedly and of set purpose left free in the sea, how could it have been reduced into possession, how could any title in it have been acquired, and, lastly—granted some kind of possession—by what actio or legal formula could such possession have been enforced?
These points were to me a stumbling-block, till Professor Courtney Kenny of Cambridge kindly came to my aid. As the extension here of Mansuefactio is apparently unique, and would possibly have been repudiated by jurists after Mucian’s time, we seem to be faced by a novel point, which on account of its intricacy and interest will appeal to people learned in the Roman Law.
The Professor’s letter runs: “Ownership in the Anthias must have been created by that form of Occupatio of a res nullius, which consists, not by the physical detention by angling, or by a piscina, but in mere mansuefactio. This form is familiar for birds (Dig., 41. 2. 3. 15: and for English Law, Bracton, 2. 1. 4): but for fishes I know of no other passage than the one cited by you. Perhaps jurists, not so early as Mucian, would have declined to admit that there had been a true occupatio of this Anthias. The partner, who sold this fish, which was partnership property, would be called on to account for it, and pay over, in damages, his partner’s share of the price by the contractual action Pro Socio. He might, in addition, be made to pay a penalty for his wrong-doing in the delictual Actio Furti. For, though there was a legal primâ-facie presumption (Dig., 17. 2. 51) in favour of the honesty of any partner in the sales of partnership-property, we are here expressly told that he acted ‘maleficii voluntate,’ i.e. his contrectatio of the fish was ‘fraudulosa,’ and therefore a Furtum. The defrauded partner might well have brought both actions at once (Dig., 17. 2. 45), but Pliny speaks only of his having brought the last named one.”
A GREEK ANGLER.
From the Agathemeros Relief, c. 3rd century b.c.