CHAPTER XVII
TACKLE—CURIOUS METHODS OF FISHING FOR THE SARGUS BY DRESSING IN A SHE-GOAT’S SKIN—FOR THE SKATE BY DANCING AND MUSIC—FOR THE SILURUS BY A YOKE OF OXEN—FOR THE EEL WITH THE GUTS OF A SHEEP. WHAT WAS THE SILURUS? WILD THEORIES AS TO THE PROPAGATION OF EELS
“Unseen, Eurotas, southward steal, Unknown, Alpheus, westward glide, You never heard the ringing Reel, The music of the waterside.” (A. Lang.)
The tackle, implements, and some curious modes of fishing apparently peculiar to, or handed down to us only from, Greek and Roman sources call for consideration and comment.
Nets, we have seen, were of all sorts and kinds in shape, make, and size. Their number and nature as disclosed by Julius Pollux, Plutarch, and Ælian indicate that the art of netting was well nigh perfected. Oppian, after enumerating many varieties and telling how the enormous
“Nets, like a city, to the floods descend And bulwarks, gates, and noble streets extend,”
excuses himself from further amplification:
“A thousand names a fisher might rehearse Of nets, intractable in smoother verse.”[559]
Confirmation comes from Alciphron’s[560] statement that scarce a fathom of the harbour of Ephesus but held a Net: on one occasion the sole haul, after much moiling and toiling, was the putrid carcase of a camel![561]
What and whence the Rod? It was certainly short: only from 6 to 8 feet (Ælian, XV. 1)—a length which is in the main confirmed, if assuming the height of some of the fishermen represented on vases, etc., in the Greek and Roman rooms of the British Museum to be as high as six feet, you then measure the rod. On the other hand, the sitting youth in the Agathemeros relief (Brit. Mus. Cat. Sculpture, I. 317, No. 648) measures 24 cm., the Rod 8 cm., the line 15 cm.[562]
As we do not possess any relic of the Homeric rod, the length of the only one mentioned in either the Iliad or the Odyssey must be a matter of conjecture, especially as this is styled περιμήκης, or “very long” one.[563]
The ordinary Rods were made of cane, hence Harundo and Calamus, which was imported usually from Abaris in Lower Egypt, or of some light elastic wood. For large and powerful fish, where something stronger was required, Ælian tells us that Tuncus Marinus and Ferula were preferred.
If the Rod were tapered, it was tapered probably by Nature not by art, at least so the Agathemeros relief, all the pictures of Venus and Cupid angling, and of many Amorini from Herculaneum would suggest. The question whether the Rods were jointed has been discussed in my chapter on the crescens harundo of Martial.
The line, ὁρμιά, or Linea, made from the strong bristly hairs of animals (seta) but most generally of horse-hair,[564] of flax, of sparton out of the genista, perhaps of byssus, but never of gut, was very finely twisted, as the epithet εὐπλόκαμος shows. It was usually as long as the rod itself, although in the Agathemeros relief we find it nearly double the length. The colours of the line were grey, black, brown—sometimes red or purple. It was made tight to the top of the Rod and not let down to the butt, or running.[565]
Plutarch prescribes that the hairs next to the hook should for deception’s sake be taken from a white horse, and adds advice, as pertinent now as then, that there “should not be too many knots in the line!”[566]
To the line was fastened the hook (hamus) which was of one or two sharp barbs.[567] From Herculaneum,[568] Pompeii, and elsewhere have been collected hooks which vary extremely in form, size, and method of adjustment.[569] Although sometimes of bone, they are mostly manufactured from iron or bronze. Cf. Oppian, III. 285: χαλκοῦ μὲν σκληροῑο τετυγμένον ἠὲ σιδήρου.
It strikes us moderns as strange to have the epithet hard applied to bronze and not to iron, till we are informed that the ancient bronze was made of tin and copper, not zinc and copper, as is our softer alloy, and was so hard that, Pliny tells us, it could be worked to represent the finest hair of a woman’s head.
The Pompeian hooks were almost exclusively adapted for sea fishing, and are thus generally large in size, long in shank, and flattened at the top to facilitate attachment to the line.
THE OLDEST
MYCENÆAN
HOOKS IN
THE BRITISH
MUSEUM.
Plutarch’s statement that some hooks were straight, as distinct from the usual recurved sort, may possibly be indicative of a survival of the palæolithic gorge. Some of the Roman hooks are double-barbed, some are fixed back to back like eel-hooks, and fastened to wire to prevent erosion by the teeth. In the pursuit of large fish such as the Amia, hooks of a serpentine curve are recommended, “as these great fish manage to get loose from straight ones!”
To the hook was fastened the bait (esca), usually worms, flies, and other insects. For large fish the bait was often cooked, because the scent was believed to offer an additional attraction. By a clever contrivance of small pieces of lead equally balanced and carefully attached the lure was made to have the appearance of natural movement.
The Reel on a fishing Rod was certainly unknown to Ancient Nations. Wilkinson figures something resembling a Reel being employed when spearing hippopotami.[570]
The Amia (mentioned by Pliny, IX. 19, alone of all the Latin writers) is according to Oppian[571] a little smaller than the tunny, which reaches large proportions. Later,[572] he recounts how the Amia furnishes sad labour and trouble to the fishermen from his habit, the moment he feels the hook, of instantly rising, of swallowing more line, and then of biting through the middle, “or even the topmost hairs of it.”
But successful cunning to avoid capture was no monopoly of the Amia. Ovid, Oppian, Pliny, Plutarch, Ælian, recount numerous devices which certain fish employ to nullify net or hook. I subjoin three of the chief tricks used to defeat the hamus.
The Mugil, whose greed is only saved by its guile, despite his foreknowledge of danger has madly grabbed the bait, but keeps thrashing it with his tail, till at last he shakes it free of the hook. “At mugil cauda pendentem everberat escam Excussamque legit.”[573]
The Anthias on the first prick of the hook turns over on to his back and quickly severs the line with his dorsal fin, or spike, “of the shape and keenness of a knife.”[574]
The Scolopendra, according to Aristotle, “after swallowing the hook, turns itself inside out until it ejects it, and then it again turns itself outside in,” and (in Pliny’s words) vomits up everything inside him till he has ejected the hook, and “deinde resorbet!”[575]
Lines with floating corks and lead attached close to the hooks, partly to facilitate the throwing of the line, and partly, combined with a sliding cork, to regulate the position of the bait, were in regular use. Ground fishing, when the lure is leaded and thrown with or without rod, was well known and widely exercised.
Pastes and scents were also employed, either like myrrh dissolved in wine to intoxicate (see the accompanying drawing, which is, I believe, unique),[576] or, like the cyclamen, or sowbread, to poison the fish.[577] From Oppian’s description of the workings of the poison, IV. 658 ff., we take the lines:
“Soon as the deadly Cyclamen invades The ill-starred fishes in their deep-sunk glades, ... the slowly working bane Creeps o’er each sense and poisons every vein, Then pours concentred mischief on the brain, Some drugged, like men o’ercome with recent wine, Reel to and fro, and stagger thro’ the brine; Some in quick circlets whirl: some ’gainst the rocks Dash, and are stunned by repercussive shocks; Some with quenched orbs, or filmy eyeballs thick, Rush on the nets and in the meshes stick, In coma steeped their fins more feebly ply, Some in titanic spasms gasp and die. Soon as the plashings cease and stillness reigns, The jocund crew collect, and count their gains.”
In the simile—inevitable in Oppian—which ends the passage our author may indicate, though he does not name, the Germanic tribes (for over Rome in his day as over Europe in ours hung the barbarian menace) when he condemned the abhorred habit practised by the enemy of poisoning the springs and wells:
... “the brave defendants sink In thirsty pangs, or perish if they drink.”
In the number of methods, in the variety of devices, the fishermen of Oppian and Ælian are not behind their modern successors; it is indeed the reverse of
“John P. Robinson he Guessed they did not know everything down in Judee.”[578]
ANGLING WITH WINE.
From a Mosaic at Melos. [See n. 4, p. 239].
We moderns are, in fact, merely the heirs to a piscatorial estate, which by scientific improvement or intensive culture we have rendered more serviceable and better adapted to the requirements of fish more harried, and consequently more highly educated.
The old devices, the old recipes were never entirely lost.[579] They continued to be handed down through the Middle Ages, and may be found in most of the collections of household recipes, such as those of Baptista Porta, Conrad Heresbach, and others. They naturally in the course of some thousand years got rather split up, or fell into abeyance; it was not, in fact, till the seventeenth century that fairly full collections of them began to reappear.
But except just to mention “tickling,” an ancient device in both Oppian and Ælian, we have room here only for four methods, all very quaint, either unknown or uncommon among twentieth-century fishers.
The first, that by which the goat-herd annexes the Sargus, according to Oppian.[580]
In hot weather it was, and still is, in Sicily the wont of the goat-herds to drive their flocks to some cool shallow of the sea. “Once upon a time” one of them noticed that the sargi came round the goats in vast shoals. The reason for this—whether grasped in a moment by one great brain, or evolved by two or three generations of speculating herdsmen—was discovered to be the attraction of the male sargus by the smell of the female goat.
So the reasoning goat-herd slays his nanny, puts himself inside her skin, and to perfect, I presume, the resemblance of the deception, “adjusts on his brows the horns!” Then he gently glides into the shallow, “scatters the food full shower” among the sargi hot on their amorous mission and, well! for the number that were slain by “The Sturdy Rod his latent Hand extends” I refer you to the fourth book of the Halieutica!
Ichthyologists declare that the male sargus is very uxorious, and has at least one hundred wives always in close-herded attendance on him. As the words “unhappy lovers” indicate that the sargi were present not a few, these multiplied by one hundred must have yielded quite a decent creel.[581]
The second method owes its success to the love for music and for watching the dance, which Aristotle and Ælian assert to be characteristic of several fishes, but especially of the skate. The recipe of this method, far pleasanter, certainly less odoriferous than that of the last, demands 1 Boat, 1 Violin, 1 big Net, 2 Men, one of whom fiddles, while the other dances as he unwinds the net. Attracted to the spot, and, like Wagner-devotees, so entirely absorbed by the melody as to be unconscious of all else, the skates fall easy and numerous victims to the slowly drawn net.
This method seems “the limit.” It certainly trenched on even Badham’s credulity. He states that he would not have cited this statement of Ælian’s, unless it had been “singularly countenanced and confirmed by no less a person than the great French ichthyologist, Rondolet,” whose mere name in this musical context must presumably carry conviction, for (as is not unusual with Badham) no reference is given.[582]
The third method, employed by the Mysians for capturing the Silurus in big rivers like the Danube and the Volga, is set forth by Ælian (XIV. 25) in words which describe with such charming naïveté the perfection of the Silurian palate, eye, and possibly nose, enabling it to discriminate instantly between “the lungs of a wild” and other “bull,”[583] that we may venture upon quoting the whole passage:
“An Istrian fisherman drives a pair of oxen near the river-bank, not, however, for the purpose of ploughing.... If a pair of horses are at hand, the fisherman makes use of horses; and with the yoke on his shoulders, down he goes and takes his station at a spot which he thinks will make a convenient seat for himself, and be a good place for sport. He fastens one end of the fishing-rope, which is stout and capable of standing a good tug, to the middle of the yoke, and supplies the oxen, or the horses, as the case may be, with sufficient food, and the animals take their fill.
“To the other end of the rope he fastens a strong and terribly sharp hook, baited with the lungs of a wild bull; this he throws into the water as a lure—a very sweet lure—to the Istrian silurus, having previously fastened a piece of lead of sufficient size to the rope above the place where the hook is bound on, to serve as a support for the pull.[584]
“When the fish perceives the bait of bull’s-flesh, he immediately rushes at the prey, and, meeting with that he so dearly loves, opens wide his great jaws and greedily swallows the dreadful bait; then the glutton, at first turning himself round with pleasure, soon finds that he has been pierced unawares with the aforesaid hook, and being eager to escape from the calamity shakes the rope with the greatest violence.
“The fisherman observes this, and is filled with delight; he jumps from his seat, and, now in the character of a fisherman, now in that of a ploughman, like an actor who changes his mask in a play, he urges on his oxen or horses, and a mighty contest takes place between the monster and the yoked animals; for the creature, foster-child of the Ister, draws downward with all his might, while the yoked animals pull the rope in an opposite direction. The fish can make no headway. Beaten by the united efforts of the team, he gives in, and is hauled on to the bank.”
Siluri, according to common report, have been caught weighing over 400 lbs. and of more than twelve feet in length.
There is good ground for us moderns patting ourselves on the back, when we realise that owing to the many improvements effected in our tackle, and not least in the Rod, an angler off Catalina has often landed a heavier fish than a yoke of oxen on the banks of the Ister, e.g. Mr. A. N. Howard (in 1916) caught the record Black Sea Bass in Californian waters, weighing 493 lbs.
Even this big fellow is quite a dwarf beside the Tuna of 710 lbs. taken in Canadian waters by Mr. Laurence Mitchell,[585] which still holds, I believe, the record of the world as the very largest fish ever taken on a rod.
I myself have seen a sword fish of over 300 lbs. killed on a rod off Santa Catalina. When in 1909 out for Tarpon in Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, I had the good luck to secure after a fight of two and a half hours, and after being towed almost down to Port Royal and back, a distance of some five miles, a shark weighing 116 lbs., with a rod only 8 foot long, with a light salmon line, with a No. 4 hook, and with a bit of piano wire, faute de mieux, attached to prevent erosion.[586]
From the time of the earliest authors the identification of the Silurus has been a vexed question.
Aristotle writing of the Glanis, a large fresh-water fish (his only account of actual fishing, it may be remembered, is a fight with a Glanis),[587] attributes to it characteristics and habits, which Pliny totidem sententiis, if not verbis, transfers to the Silurus, although he thrice mentions the Glanis. Ælian, in addition to XIV. 25, declares in XII. 14, that the Glanis a species of, and very like, the Silurus, while Athenæus treats them as separate fish.
As late as the time of Scaliger, the problem gave rise to discussion which led to no elucidation of what fish exactly corresponds to the classical Silurus. Perhaps the sentence of Albertus Magnus,[588] “a river fish which was called by the Greeks Glanis, but by us Silurus,” seemed, although only a conjectural compromise, as near as we could get to the identity.
Agassiz, however, reluctant to accept Cuvier’s identification of the Glanis with the Silurus glanis, came to the conclusion (after examining six specimens of a Siluroid new to Ichthyologists, which he obtained from the Acheloüs in Western Greece) that from agreement in the form of the anal fin, the position of the gall bladder, the connected spawn, etc., they were the same as Aristotle’s Glanis. To this Siluroid Agassiz gave the name Glanis aristotelis: it is, perhaps, better known as Parasilurus aristotelis.[589]
If the Silurus be the Scheid of Germany, his strength, habits, and ferocity, as set forth in our authors are indeed very credible. From Aristotle we learn that this “river fish” is easy to hook (as we should suspect from its rapacity, which has been tersely summarised in “pisces pisci præda at huic omnes”), but from its huge powers and hard teeth very hard to hold.
The passage in Pliny, IX. 75, which he extracts from Aristotle[590] —“Silurus mas solus omnium edita custodit ova, sæpe et quinquagenis diebus, ne absumantur ab aliis”—has by a wrong rendering accorded to the male Silurus the proud distinction of being the only male fish that guards its eggs. This is absurd, for other instances, e.g. Chromis simonis, exist.
Where fish, however, pay any regard whatever to their ova, it is usually, but not always, on the father that the duty falls. “Omnium” in Pliny is to be read not with “solus” but with “edita ova.” This reading advances the quite different claim that the Silurus is the only male that includes in its watch and ward not merely its own but promiscuously also the eggs of other fish. Perhaps the same start of surprise awaits him, on the pentecostal and last day of his vigil, as that of the hen when she first beholds a mixed brood of chickens and ducklings emerging from under her breast.
Pliny reveals some fabulous uses of the Silurus. In XXXII. 28, fresh caught Siluri are an excellent tonic for the voice. In 46, by the smoke and scent of a burnt Silurus, especially one hailing from Africa (!), the pangs of childbirth are said to be greatly eased. In 40, for curing “ignes sacros” or the malady of St. Anthony’s fire, the application of the bellies of living frogs, or of ashes from a Silurus, were two of the nostrums recommended.
The fourth and last method, for the capture of Eels, given by Ælian,[591] although almost certainly cribbed from Oppian,[592] but with a local habitation and a name carefully thrown in to suggest originality, reads much as follows:
The eeler from a high bank of the “river Eretaenus, where the eels are the largest and by far the fattest of all eels,” lets down at a turn of the stream some cubits’ length of the intestines of a sheep. An eel, seizing a bit of it at the nether end, tries to drag the whole away, on which the fisher applies the other end (which is fixed to a long tubular reed serving the place of a fishing rod) to his mouth, and blows into the sheep’s gut. This presently swells; the fish receiving the air in his mouth swells too, and unable to extricate his teeth is lugged out, adhering to the inflated intestines.[593]
“Gin these be joys of artful eeling, oh! gie me Essex Flats,” with their “sniggling for eels with a needle,” or “banding“ for fish with whitethorn hooks!
In addition to this pneumatic method of Ælian others were employed for taking eels. Stirring up the mud, in which they were wont to lurk was a common device; hence the proverb ἐγχέλεις θηρᾶσθαι, to fish in muddy waters. Thus Aristophanes[594] makes the sausage seller, whom the Whigs of Athens had hired to outbawl the demagogue Cleon, shout, “Yes, it is with you as with the eel-catchers; when the lake is still, they do not take anything, but if they stir up the mud, they do; so it is with you, when you disturb the State.”[595]
Even at the risk of being likened to Mr. Bouncer of Oxford fame, who in every answer of his Divinity paper dragged in his sole and cuff-attached bit of Old Testament knowledge with “and here it may not seem inappropriate to subjoin a list of the Kings of Israel and Judah,” I venture some comments on the Eel.
The frequent allusions in our authors to the Eel, (A) as a sacred fish, (B) as the delight of the epicure, and (C) as a propagator of its species in a variety of surprisingly erroneous ways, must be my excuse.
(A) It was held as a god, or at least as a sacred creature, by the Egyptians,[596] as sacred to Artemis in the spring of Arethusa,[597] and semi-sacred by the Bœotians.[598]
Antiphanes[599] ridicules the Egyptians for the sacred honour paid to the fish, wrongly termed by the Greeks the Eel. Contrasting the value of the gods with the high prices paid for the fish at Athens he gibes; “they say that the Egyptians are clever in that they rank the Eel equal to a god, but in reality it is held in esteem and value far higher than gods, for them we can propitiate with a prayer or two, while to get even a smell of an Eel at Athens we have to spend twelve drachmæ or more!” Anaxandrides’[600] makes a Greek say to an Egyptian:
“You count the Eel a mighty deity, And we a mighty dainty!”
Juvenal in Satire XV. (written probably after his return from semi-exile in Egypt) lashes with ridicule the compatriots of his butt Crispinus. The enumeration of their animal and vegetable gods is a fine specimen of dignified humour. By piscem in line 7, may be indicated the Oxyrhynchus, the Lepidotus, or the Phagrus, the so-called Eel—three sacred fishes of the Nile.
“Illic æluros, hic piscem fluminis, illic Oppida tota canem venerantur, nemo Dianam.”
(B) As a delicacy, the Eel by the Greeks was rated very high. But the reverse held good at Rome. Unlike its cousin the Muræna it gets little commendation by the Latin comedians—Terence’s in Adelphi, 377-381, is the solitary exception I can recall—and by the gourmets. Apicius deemed it worthy of but one recipe.[601]
“Vos anguillæ manet longæ cognata colubræ” (Juvenal, V. 103) is often quoted as stamping the low position of the Eel at Rome, but in reality, as the whole context bears out, this particular “cousin of the snake” was condemned not because of its kinship, but because it was Cloaca-bred and drain-fed.[602]
The passage in Menander’s,[603] Drunkenness which makes one of the characters declaim that, were he a god, he would never allow a loin of beef to load his altars, unless an Eel were also sacrificed, testifies to the preference for the Eel to meat. Numerous are the pæans of praise rendered by Greek writers to the superlative excellence of the fish.
The Eel is dight “the King of fish”[604]; he, or rather she, was “the white-skinned Nymph”[605]; was “chief of the fifty Virgins of Lake Copaïs”[606]; was a very “Goddess,”
“Then there came Those natives of the Lakes, the eels, Bœotian goddesses, all clothed in beet,”[607]
(with which, or majoram, on beech leaves, Aristophanes[608] tells us they were often served); and, the very last word in laudation, was “the Helen of the Feast.”[609]
Whether this was applied because the fish was the personification of all delicate dainties, as Helen was the fairest of all the fair, or because every guest strove like Paris to supplant his neighbour and keep her all to himself, the reader must choose. Athenæus certainly leans to the latter view.[610]
Philetærus[611] would seem to have no doubt in identifying what is the sting of death and what is the victory of the grave,
“For when you’re dead, you cannot then eat eels.”
To the sense of smell as well as that of taste the Murænidæ appealed strongly, to judge by the eulogy that their bodies when being cooked exhaled an odour fragrant enough to restore the sense of smell in the nose of a dead man! while, if boiled in fine brine, they “changed the human nature into the divine!”[612]
The luxurious and lazy Sybarites, who felt they had broken their bones if they but saw another digging, and suffered not a cock in the whole country, lest he should mar their slumber, were so passionately addicted to Eels that all persons catching or selling them were exempt from taxes and tribute.[613]
(C) The propagation of Eels: This has given birth to more theories—all of them till some twenty years ago quite erroneous—than any other ichthyic question. From Aristotle downwards nearly every zoologist, nearly every writer on fish, has advanced his view as to how and whence eels are bred.[614]
Only a few of them, and they all divergent, can find space here. Aristotle held that Eels had never been found with milt or roe, that when opened they did not seem to possess generative organs, and that apparently they came from the so-called entrails of the earth, seemingly referring to certain worms formed spontaneously in mud and the like.[615]
Oppian (I. 513 ff.)—
“Strange the formation of the eely race That know no sex, yet love the close embrace. Their folded lengths they round each other twine, Twist amorous knots, and slimy bodies joyn; Till the close strife brings off a frothy juice, The seed that must the wiggling kind produce. Regardless they their future offspring leave, But porous sands the spumy drops receive. That genial bed impregnates all the heap, And little eelets soon begin to creep.”
Pliny, after making the assertion (taken, as usual, from Aristotle) that among fish the females are larger, and often the more numerous, goes on, an echo once more of “His Master’s Voice,” to deny to the Eel sex, either masculine or feminine: according to him, Eels when they had lived their day, rubbed themselves against the rocks, and their scrapings came to life: “they have no other mode of procreation.”[616]
Von Helmont attributed the birth of Eels to the dews of May mornings! other authors deduced their parentage from the hairs of horses! others again from the gills of fish! while the great Izaak Walton insisted on spontaneous generation![617]
To solve the insoluble, recourse was, as usual, had to the gods: thus Jupiter and a white-armed goddess yclept Anguilla[618] (the Latin for Eel) were accounted parents of the countless “cousins to the snake.”
Theory was piled upon theory, false conclusions were drawn from falser data. Even as late as 1862 appeared an author, not one whit less certain of the truth of his discovery based “on a series of observations extending over sixty years,” or one whit less active in asserting it, than any of his numerous predecessors.
In The Origin of the Silver Eel, Mr. D. Cairncross propounded the following assertion: “The progenitor of the silver Eel is a small beetle: of this I feel fully satisfied in my own mind, from a rigid and extensive comparison of its structure and habits with those of other insects.”[619] “The beetle in the act of parturition” is represented on the [frontispiece]!
The fact that this beetle is evidently a dead one would not, as the Bibliotheca Piscatoria rather wickedly puts it, even if known to the writer, cause him to alter his opinion one jot!
It was only in 1896—strange, indeed, that a problem which so many keen intellects had attacked should remain unelucidated for over two thousand years!—that the mode of reproduction and development of the Eel was first surmised, and then for the most part ascertained by Professor Grassi and Dr. Galandruccio. But not till 1904 were most of the surmises of the Italian investigators placed beyond question, and the mode of reproduction, etc., established beyond doubt by Johann Schmidt of Copenhagen.
The now accepted view (stated shortly) is as follows: fresh-water Eels approach maturity when about six years old, and then change their colour from browny-yellow to silver, whence “Silver Eels.” In this bridal attire and with eyes enlarged, they find their way from the rivers to the sea, and far out into deep waters of the ocean. The pace at which they travel on their way to the sea cannot be computed exactly, but two marked Eels have been caught whose record was nineteen kilometres in two days. Meek[620] states that neither the exact locality nor the approximate depth of the spawning is as yet known, but that there can be no doubt that the spawning region lies deep and far out in the Atlantic beyond the Continental shelf.
The Times, Sept. 25, 1920, announces that Dr. J. Schmidt has just discovered the spawning place of fresh-water Eels to be not far S. of Bermuda, or about 27 deg. N. and 60 deg. W., much farther W. than he anticipated. Of the many marvels of the ichthyic world this is, perhaps, the greatest. It taxes, it transcends, our powers adequately to conceive the hereditary instinct or gauge the enduring strength which impels fish—as yet sexually undeveloped—of only moderate size to traverse 3000 or 4000 miles of an ocean full of foes, and to seek, especially to find, the only area which contains the requisite depth, temperature, and currents favouring the procreation and the return home of their minute but parentless progeny.
The conclusion is now clear that the Eels of Europe at any rate have a spawning area in common; the two Italian doctors were wrong in supposing that Eels spawned in the Mediterranean. In such ocean depths certainly below, probably far below, the one hundred fathoms[621] line the generative organs of the Eels develope, and in due though protracted time the females spawn.[622]
Their eggs float for a time; the young, when hatched out, pass through a metamorphosis and are known in one stage as Leptocephalus brevirostris. This larval form, which is flat and transparent and has a very small head, drifts with the ocean currents towards the coasts of Europe, where it passes through a series of metamorphoses into the Elver or young Eel, which in March and April swims up English rivers. The fecundity of the Eel, were it not for the system of check and countercheck devised by Nature, would in time become a danger; for the ovary of a female thirty-two inches in length has been estimated to contain no fewer than 10,700,000 eggs![623]
But however legitimate or illegitimate their methods may seem, all praise should be rendered to our ancient anglers. Especially so, when we call to mind that, as they possessed not running lines, reels, gut, nor probably landing nets, the playing of large fish must have required more delicate manipulation and the landing presented far greater difficulties than to us, armed as we are with all these and many other appliances.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE NINE FISH MOST HIGHLY PRIZED
I subjoin a list of the nine fish which found most favour in Greece and Rome. This, although necessarily rough and tentative, can (I believe), be justified by an examination of our authors.[624] To anyone who on the strength of one author may be dissatisfied with the place allotted to a particular fish, I would point out that since the oracles of taste vary with the ages, it is essential to hold in mind the exact date at which a passage was written.
Then, again, the Greek saw not eye to eye, or ate not tooth to tooth, with the Roman. The verdict of the opsophagists or, as these often differed, of the plain people of one century not infrequently reversed that of the last.
As with us at the present day it is hardly feasible to adjudge definitely to what fish belongs the primacy of palate, so was it with the ancients. In the case of the Greeks the task is impossible. Every one of our nine can boast at least half a dozen champions. Then, again, as regards the epoch of individual supremacy we are without any guiding statement, such as Pliny’s that in his time the Scarus was reckoned the king of fish.[625]
| Palæmon |  | |
| Mullus.... | Chrysophrys | |
| Torpedo ocellata | ||
| Mugil.... | Scorpæna | |
| Labrus.... | Scyllium Catulus | |
| ....Lolligo vulgaris | ||
| Octopus vulgaris | Murex | |
| Palinurus vulgaris.... | ||
| Balanus ut videtur.... | ....Serranus scriba | |
| Coris julis | Murena belena | |
| Scyllium canicula.... | ....Engraulis encrasicholus | |
| Chrysophrys | Labrax lupus | |
| ....Tritonium | ||
| Mullus | ....Serranus | |
| FISH ON A POMPEIAN MOSAIC IN THE NAPLES MUSEUM. | ||
| From O. Keller, Die Antike Tierwelt, Fig. 124. | ||
For these reasons, discount as we may the personal predilections of an author like Ennius, of a gourmet like Apicius, of a bon vivant like Vitellius, any list is perforce approximate, not absolute. It must be governed by the dictum of the great Greek epicure, χαίρει γὰρ ὁ μὲν τούτοις, ὁ δ’ ἐκείνοις.
But if our opsophagists disagreed as to which was the best fish, they were fairly unanimous as to which part of a fish was best. Setting aside the peculiar partiality of the Greeks for the head of the Conger, the part near the tail afforded the most savour, and found the most favour with ancient (and modern) gourmets.
Three reasons for this preference have been suggested:
(A) That from Xenocrates. After laying down that fish roasted are more nutritious than fish boiled, that sea fish are easy of digestion and by their formation of blood impart a good colour to the skin, that fish from lakes and rivers are generally bad for the stomach, form thick juices, and are difficult of evacuation, this great physician affirms emphatically that the part near the tail of all kinds of fish (Nonnius excepts the Tunny) are the most wholesome, on account of it being most frequently exercised.[626]
(B) That from Pliny. Writing of the Muræna, he says that it is quite clear that in its tail abides its anima (‘life’ or ‘being’), because a blow on that part swiftly kills it, while one on the head is more tedious in effect.[627]
(C) That alleged in Scandinavia. To the Norseman the most delicate part of the salmon was its tail. His choice, nowadays by no means exceptional, was explained by a pretty piece of ætiological tradition. Loki, fleeing from the pursuit of the gods whose anger he had provoked, had the wit and the time to transform himself into a salmon. Then and in this guise would he have surely escaped, had not Thor caught him by the tail, “and this is the reason why salmon have had the tails so fine and so thin ever since.”[628]
In my list, which excludes the Echineis, despite its being according to Cassiodorus[629] “that honey of flesh, that dainty of the deep,” in precedence comes 1 the Mullus, 2 the Scarus, 3 the Acipenser, 4 the Rhombus, 5 the Lupus, 6 the Asellus, 7 the Eel and the Muræna, 8 the κάπρος, 9 the Sole.
1. Mullus (M. barbatus), the “Red Mullet.” The passages already quoted as regards the huge prices sometimes given for it establish the extreme esteem with which this fish was regarded. But if need be, witness after witness to credit can easily be called. Perhaps, as regards the Latins, Nonnius will suffice: “Inter omnes pisces prærogativa quadam omniumque consensu Mullus sibi imperium occupavit, nec alius unquam majori in honore aut gratia apud Romanos fuit.”[630]
Among the Greeks, if, as seems acknowledged, the τρίγλη corresponds to the Mullet, its place must be accounted high from the number of its devotees. Matron[631] goes into raptures even over its mere head when steeped in brine, irrespective of whether it came from an autumn (as recommended by Aristotle) or a spring fish (the choice of Xenocrates).
The acme of epicurean hospitality was reached with serving the Mullet, not dead swimming in sauce, but alive swimming in a globe of glass, to be handed round among the guests. All eyes gloated as its gay hues gradually grew dimmer, till at last with death they faded into one dull colour.
Seneca lashes with his bitterest irony the custom, and the company. They are no longer content to satisfy their teeth and their stomach—no, they must also gratify their eyes. “No one now sits with a dying friend. None can bring himself to witness the death, however much desired! of his father. The last hours of brother or kinsman find no soul with him. To the death of the Mullet have they all flocked with one accord.”[632]
2. For the Scarus (S. cretensis), the “Parrot Wrasse,” [see Chapter X].
3. The Acipenser, a Latin name, adopted by some Greek writers, which is often, if not convincingly, identified with the Sturio, the “Sturgeon,” and by Archestratus[633] is affirmed but wrongly, to be the γαλεός, enjoyed a long and glorious reign of supremacy from the early times of the Republic down to Vespasian. For it alone, with perhaps one exception, was reserved the high honour of being served at a banquet to the music of flutes and pipes, crowned itself, borne by slaves likewise crowned.[634]
Its praise and its price (Varro styles it multinummus) seem alike exorbitant. We find the name of Gallonius the glutton-auctioneer, the first to bring the fish into fashion, occurring again and again.[635] On Ovid’s (Hal. 134) “Tuque peregrinis acipenser nobilissimus” may be piled passage upon passage. Plautus in a fragment of his Bacaria[636] asks:
“Quis est mortalis tanta fortuna affectus umquam Qua ego nunc sum? quoius hæc ventri portatur pompa: Vel nunc qui mihi in mari acipenser latuit antehac, Quoius ego latus in latebras reddam meis dentibus et manibus.”
Cicero—no fish story-teller he—makes at least four references to it. In De Fato, frag. 5, he sets forth the tale of the Acipenser (‘piscis ... in primis nobilis’) presented to Scipio, to whom, as he persisted in inviting all and every one who saluted him, Pontius anxiously whispered, “Do you know what you are about? Lo! this is a fish fit only for a few choice palates!”
As to its decline from its high estate, Pliny’s definite assertion (IX. 27), “Apud antiquos piscium nobilissimus habitus acipenser ... nullo nunc in honore est,” finds corroboration by Martial, XIII. 91:
“Ad Palatinas acipensem mittite mensas; Ambrosias ornent munera rara dapes.”[637]
The Elops or Helops has been deemed to be the Acipenser,[638] but this conflicts with Ovid (Hal., 96)—“Et pretiosus elops nostris incognitus undis”—with Columella (VIII. 16), and with Pliny (XXXII. 54).
Whatever the Elops, Varro and Epicharmus testify to its extortionate price, while Pliny lets us know that by many of the cognoscenti its flavour was deemed to be the very best of all.
The capture of this rare and elusive fish—its usual habitat was off Pamphylia—became the occasion of great rejoicing; the crew of the successful boat were crowned with wreaths, and welcomed by the music of the flute-players.[639] It is noteworthy that the Acipenser does not occur in the pages either of Varro or of Columella, while the Elops does.
4. The Rhombus, whether it were R. maximus, the “Turbot,” or R. lævis, the “Brill,” has been long in dispute.
Juvenal describes his celebrated Rhombus with “erectas in terga sudes” (IV. 128); “erectas” may be conceded to the licence of a poet as regards the back fin of a Turbot, but not of a Brill, which is yielding and rather wavy. Then, again, Diphilus declares that its flesh is soft, Xenocrates that it is firm, and improves with keeping. Now the flesh of the Brill is soft: that of the Turbot much firmer. Rhombus (unmentioned by Aristotle) probably stood for both Turbot and Brill, as well as for the ψῆττα, “which is called by the Romans the Rhombus.”[640]
The fish, which derives its name from its supposed likeness to the geometrical figure, was in poetry but not in popularity[641] more celebrated than that other famous flat fish, the Sole. As a dainty the Sturgeon was in vogue long before the Rhombus, perhaps because, as Horace (Sat., II. 2. 49) suggests, it was introduced by a man of fashion:
“ ... Quid? tunc rhombos minus æquora alebant? Tutus erat rhombus, tutoque ciconia nido, Donec vos auctor docuit prætorius.”
It ran often to immense size. Martial’s fish (XIII. 81), although “latior patella,” can hold no candle to the one presented to Domitian.[642]
That Emperor, though deeming himself and insisting on his subjects acclaiming him, of godlike attributes, was not equal to solving the knotty question of how to cook and to serve his fish whole, “Derat pisci patinæ mensura”—if its proportions were in the same street with a Rhombus vouched for by Rondolet, viz. three metres long, two broad, and one thick, the fact excites no wonder—so he straightway summoned a special meeting of the Senate.[643]
Discover, Montanus advises, a new Prometheus capable of modelling the amplest trencher instantly, but, since to a god like Domitian (he flatteringly adds), offerings of huge fish will frequently be made—
“But, Cæsar, thus forewarned make no campaign, Unless some potters follow in your train.”
5. The Lupus[644] —Labrax lupus—“common Bass” at Athens enjoyed the choicest preference. Aristophanes absolutely refused to be disturbed while feasting on a Milesian Labrax. Archestratus eulogises it as “god-begotten” (θεόπαιδα). During the early Roman Republic it indeed ranked (with the Asellus) only second to the Acipenser.[645]
The fish throve best and grew fattest in sewage; hence those “from between the two bridges” of the Tiber were famed far and near; see Horace, Sat., II. 2, 31; Macrobius, Sat., II. 12; and Juvenal, V. 103-8. The latter’s “et solitus mediæ cryptam penetrare Suburæ” was rendered quite clear only in 1743, when the remains of the Cloaca leading from the low-lying ground to the Tiber were excavated. From this greedy scavenging he is christened by Lucilius (Sat. 4, frag., 127, Baehrens) “the platter-licker” (catillo)—
“Hunc pontes Tiberinus duo inter captus catillo.”[646]
The Doctors once more are at variance. The Court, unanimous that (in Walton’s phrase) “its savour was excellent,” only by a majority (Galen and Celsus J.J.) upheld its nutritive powers, Hicesius J. dissenting. Rondolet against the volume of authority affirms that the Lupus of the sea is of better quality than that of the river. Pliny[647] dubs the Lupus “lanatus”—not from his woolly appearance, or woolly taste, but from the whiteness of his flesh—laudatissimus. But by the time of Domitian it has fallen from its proudest place.
Its Aristophanic title of “the wisest of fish” was earned by its cunning in escape from net or hook; its method in the case of the former is vouched for by Cassiodorus,[648] and of the latter by Ovid:[649]
“quassatque caput, dum vulnere sævus Laxato cadat hamus et ora patentia linquat.”
Pliny, commenting on the marvellous friendships and hatreds which exist among fish, instances the astounding combination of both in the lupus and the mugil (grey mullet), “who burn with mutual hate for some, yet live in concord for other, months of the year”—despite the cheery custom, hereditary in the lupus, of nibbling off the tail of the mugil; all, however, live, “quibus caudae sic amputentur.”[650]
6. The Asellus has been identified as the Gadus merlangus, the “Cod;” and as the Merluccius vulgaris, the “Hake,” by Scaliger and Rondolet, and by Hardouin with some doubt.
It cannot be the Cod (although Dorion speaks[651] of “the ὄνος which some call the γάδος”), because hardly any of the Gadidæ, except the Hake, frequent the Mediterranean on account of the temperature of the water. Nor can the Asellus be the Hake, because, while the latter is taken all the year round, Pliny[652] and Ælian[653] distinctly state that the Asellus hides in the heat of summer.
This assertion, if the ὄνος be the same as the Asellus, tallies with, probably indeed derives from, Aristotle’s remark that it is the only fish that hides itself in a hole in the ground in the hot weather, when the Dog-star rages.[654] The fish, Varro informs us, is called Asellus from the ashen colour of its scales, resembling that of the coat of an ass.[655]
If there be doubt as to its classification scientifically, there is none gastronomically. Laberius and Cornelius Nepos ranked it only second to the Acipenser. Ovid (Hal. 131) enters a demurrer against the name given in:
“Et tam deformi non dignus nomine asellus.”
Galen warmly commends the fish for its quality of flesh, and great nutritive power; in these respects, indeed, he places the Mullet, the Lupus, and Sole far below. Xenocrates, whose dictum usually differs from his successor, depreciates it, as does “nobilis ille helluo” Archestratus, whose palate pronounced the flesh “spongy.”
A sovereign remedy for fever and ague are “the small stones found in the head of the Asellus, when the moon is full, and attached in linen to the patient’s body!”[656]
7. The Muræna—M. serpens or helena—(frequently but quite erroneously called the “Lamprey”), with whose taming, teaching, and fighting I have dealt, was on the menu a most welcome and eagerly anticipated item.[657]
Of the Murænidæ, at Athens the Eel, at Rome the Muræna was, as the last chapter shows, the greater favourite. Archestratus, it is true, commands men of taste to buy at all hazards the Muræna of “the Straights”[658]; but the Latin authors sing its praise frequently and fervently.
The comparative want of appreciation of the Eel at Rome may have been merely masculine, and evolved from the Latin boy (prætextatus) regarding “this cousin of the snake” not as a dainty for his palate, but as a scourge for his body! Early association counts for much in later life: so his back’s memory of a flogging with a whip made of eel-skins, twisted tightly together, may have caused the male adult to approach delicately, or not at all, the fish with his freeborn palate.[659]
At the tripatinium, which marked the height of delight at a supper,[660] the Muræna gave the choicest morsel. Horace, Martial, and others not only sing its fame, but give its proper dressing. To Martial’s taste that from Sicily ranked first, but Varro—was it because these, as Suidas asserts, were the largest?—votes for the Spanish fish.
While Apicius (X. 8) hands down various recipes for the proper frying and boiling of the other parts, he distinctly discards, on account of its reputed poisonous properties, the head of the Muræna. But among the Greeks direction follows direction for cooking the Conger’s “exquisite head.” Philemon rhapsodises over—
“noble conger From Sicyon’s bay, the conger which the God Of the deep sea doth bear aloft to Heaven Fit banquet for his brethren.”[661]
8. The κάπρος—by some identified with the Aper, by some translated the “Sea-Hog.” Neither scientifically, nor in my list can I place this fish; it was apparently unknown to the Romans.
Of the fish as Caper, except in Ennius,[662] “Caproque apud Ambracienses,” and Pliny, XI. 112, “et is qui caper vocatur,” Latin literature is silent. Nor do these two quotations aid, because the first occurs in the poet’s imitation or translation of Archestratus (Apul., Apol., p. 384), while Pliny simply transliterates Aristotle’s κάπρος.[663]
Of its right to be near the top of the list, the words of Nonnius bear high proof: “Among the fishes which the Greeks sought with mad desire, and at any cost to procure, was first and foremost the κάπρος, which, though called Aper, was unknown to the Romans.”
Archestratus[664] outdoes even himself in his eulogy of this fish, for he straightly enjoins any one lucky enough to be in Ambracia,
“Buy it at once, and let it not escape you, Not if you buy it at its weight in gold; Else will the indignation of the gods O’erpower you: for ’tis the Flower of Nectar.”
The immediate sequel to these lines is of interest. The poet, transported from earth to heaven at the thought of his favourite dainty, describes it in wording which recalls the most solemn rites of Hellenic religion. There were certain foods reserved for communicants. There were mysteries which none but advanced initiates might witness. There were objects of peculiar sanctity borne by virginal ministrants. There were divinatory pebbles shaken in the glittering caldron of Apollo. These sacred associations are all suggested by the language of our enthusiast:
“It is not meet for every man to taste, Nor see it with his eyes. Nay, he must hold The hollow woven-work of marsh-grown wicker And rattle pebbles in his glittering count.”
But the words, though reminiscent of actual cult, have a double entendre and are meant to bear a more mundane meaning. In plain prose, then, “it needs a wealthy man with capacious cash-box (literally a basket, fiscus) and a rattling big bank-account (pebbles to reckon L. S. D.) to afford such a luxury as this!”
Not far behind it among Greek epicures came the Glaucus, possibly the sea-grayling, of whose “most precious head” Anaxandrides is enamoured, and Antiphanes and Julius Pollux write with appreciative gusto. But are not all things about the Glaucus written in the seventh book of the Deipnosophistæ, chapters 45, 46, and 47?
9. The Buglossus, or Lingulaca (Solea vulgaris, the “Sole”[665]), alike at Rome and at Athens the most prized, if not the most lauded in verse, of the Flatfish, held rank as high as any, actually far higher than its so-called cousin, the Passer.
Although Xenocrates and Galen differ as to the firmness or reverse of its flesh—I wonder whether the latter got hold of a Lemon Sole!—the ancient agrees with the modern faculty in accounting it “very nourishing, and of most pleasant flavour.”[666] It then as now was almost always the first fish ordered, “as soon as men be sick or ill at ease“ in Plutarch’s time and words.
From likeness to a tongue sprang its first Greek and Latin names; from likeness to a sandal its second, σανδάλιον and solea. Thus we find Matron[667] establishing, or merely perpetuating, the pretty myth that these fish, possibly from some adhesive power—and is it heresy to suggest their breadth?—served the Goddesses of Ocean as sandals or shoes:
Σάνδαλα δ’ αὖ παρέθηκεν ἀειγενῆ ἀθανατάων Βούγλωσσον, ὂς ἔναιεν ἐν ἅλμη μορμυρούση.
As Yonge renders them—
“And next (the goddesses such sandals wear) Of mighty soles, a firm and well-matched pair,”
the verses have the double demerit of being uncomplimentary to Aphrodite et Cie, and of reading into Matron an allusion unwarranted by his lines.[668]
A not dissimilar use of the Sole is instanced in Polynesian theology. Ina the daughter of Vaitooringa attempted flight to the sacred island. Fish after fish essayed to bear her thither, but unequal to the burden dropped her in the shallow water. At last she besought the Sole, who managed to carry her as far as the breakers. Here, again unshipped, she lost her divine temper, and stamped with such fierceness on the head of the unfortunate helper of distressful maids that its under eye was squeezed right through to the upper side. “Hence the Sole is now obliged to swim flat on one side of its face, having no eye.”[669]
Plautus puns or makes play on Solea, which means, first, a shoe or sandal (as does σανδάλιον), and, second, the fish, and sculponeæ, a kind of wooden shoe (which Cato[670] remembers being worn only by country folk) often employed for striking a person.[671]
Then comes the other play on Lingulaca, which in its first sense equals a chatterbox, and in its second the fish.
Lysidamus: Soleas. Chalinus: Qui, quæso, potius quam sculponeas, Quibus battuatur tibi os, senex nequissime?
Olympio: Vin’ lingulacas? Lysidamus: Quid opust, quando uxor domi est? Ea lingulaca est nobis, nam numquam tacet.[672]
To render the double punning of these lines has been a task too hard even for the excellent Loeb Library. But Badham, perhaps poeta nascitur, but here non fit, comes to the fore:
“Fresh tongues for sale, who’ll buy, who’ll buy? Come, Sir, will you? No, friend, not I; Of tongue enow at home I’ve got In my old wife, Dame Polyglot.”
The Cestreus, or Mugil. My inclination to include this fish among “The Nine Fish most highly prized” was checked in part by Faber’s placing it only in Class II., and in part by the possible reproach, seeing that the glories of its cousin the Mullus had been fully recounted, of “too much one family.” But as the fish possesses traits very individual, if not always engaging, and as Athenæus devotes to its gastronomic and other properties no less than four chapters,[673] I cannot pass by it without some comment.
Its edible qualities vary with the place of its capture. While the Mugil of Abdera, Sinope, and other clear-watered places achieved high praise, its more frequent but muddy-tasting brother of the lagoons formed the staple of one kind of τάριχος. Their predilection for lagoons and brackish water—evidenced by writers as far apart as Aristotle and Apostolides (1900 a.d.)—came about possibly from the fish “breeding best where rivers run into the sea,” or can be accounted for by the belief that “Some of the grey mullet species are not produced by copulation, but grow spontaneously from mud and sand.”[674]
Apart from characteristics already mentioned, e.g. its greed and guile, its hereditary feud with the Lupus, its being “the swiftest of fishes” (which attribute, nevertheless, saved it not from being the prey of the slowest, if not the shrewdest of fishes, the Pastinaca or sting-ray,[675]) we find various points of interest noted by ancient writers:
(A) “Whilst rain is wholesome for most fishes, it is, on the contrary, unwholesome for the Cestreus, for rain and snow superinduce blindness.”[676]
(B) The passionate desire of the Cestreus, when about to spawn, “renders it so unguarded” that, if a male or female be caught, fastened to a line, allowed to swim to sea, and then gently drawn back to land, shoals of the opposite sex will follow the captive close up to the shore and fill the awaiting nets.[677] This method of fishing, which prevails at Elis at the present day, is but one, as Apostolides indicates, of the many survivals in modern Greece of the ancient craft.[678]
(C) The Mugil, together with three others, possesses by far the best sense of hearing, “and so it is that they frequent shallow water.”[679]
(D) The Mugil, anticipating the ostrich, hid its head when frightened and fancied that the whole of its body was concealed. Unlike the ostrich, however, it has long got cured of its “ridiculous character”[680], for, as Cuvier remarks, this trait in modern times has not been observed.
(E) The Mugil, although vouched for as the greediest and most insatiable of feeders, attained paradoxically the sobriquet of Νῆστις, or the Faster.
The epithet probably gained currency from the stomach of the fish (like that of most salmon caught in fresh water) rarely being found to contain food. This perhaps may be accounted for by the great length of its gut, throughout which the filmy garbage and vegetable matter forming its chief diet are inconspicuously disposed. “The Cestreus is fasting” even became a proverb and was applied to men who lived with strict regard to justice, because—as Athenæus explains—the fish is never carnivorous.[681]
(F) The use in cases of adultery of the Cestreus in Greece and the Mugil at Rome, if not singular among fish, is striking; for it survived into the civilised age of Catullus (“percurrent raphanique mugilesque,”)[682] and of Juvenal (“Quosdam mœchos et mugilis intrat,”)[683]. Indeed, traces of the same barbaric custom still exist among certain tribes on the West Coast of Africa.
Gifford writes: “the being clystered (as Holyday expresses it) by a Mugil was allowed by no written law, but it seems to have been an old and approved method of gratifying private vengeance. Isidorus thinks that the fish was selected for this purpose on account of its anti-venereal properties, but he confounds the Mugilis with the Mullet.”[684]
From The Fisheries of the Adriatic, a most elaborate Report by Faber on the kinds and market values of the fishes of that sea, I give the class allotted to the fish of my list. It must once more be impressed on the reader that these eight fish (for of course Faber does not deal with the kάpros), were the most renowned in Greece and Rome. Of these, five only—the Mullet, Acipenser, Rhombus, Lupus, and Sole—are in Class I.; the Asellus and Muræna in II.; the Scarus, and it could not be lower, in III.[685]
The classification disappoints and depresses, especially in the case of the vaunted and lovable Scarus. It tempts, however, to an insoluble sum in proportion. If about these and other less esteemed fish the books extant and known to have been lost are almost as countless as the smile of Ocean, how many volumes would an Englishman or an American—given the same fish-mania and the same literary facility as the Greeks—require to do justice to his wealth of first-class edible fish? Verily the Library of Alexandria, with its room for 400,000 volumes, would scarce suffice.
CHAPTER XIX
FISH IN MYTHS, SYMBOLS, DIET, AND MEDICINE
Although the salutary warning—Terminat hora diem: terminet auctor opus—forbids us prolonging the Greek-Roman section, already disproportionate in space, yet the part played by fish (A) in myths, (B) in symbols or emblems, Pagan or Christian, (C) in medicine, and (D) in diet necessarily demands some notice.
And as our authorities are, in the main, writers in Greek and Latin, this section seems the appropriate place for what must, although the literature on the subject is superabundant, be summary and restricted comment.
By the Solar Mythologists, the fish (no creature, however small, escapes the mesh of their net) has been made to take a prominent rôle. The fair-haired and silvery moon in the ocean of light is simply the little gold-fish; the little silver-fish which announces the rainy season is merely the deluge. The gold-fish and the luminous pike, like the moon, seem to expand and contract, and in this form, as expanding or contracting, the god Vishnu or Hari (perhaps meaning “fair-haired” or “golden”) refers now to the sun, now to the moon, Vishnu being held to have taken the form of the gold-fish.
“The epic exploits of fishes,” to borrow de Gubernatis’s term, would include the myths of Adrikâ, the fish nymph who became the mother of Matsyas, the king of fishes; of the Puranic fishes, symbolical and natural; of the fishes of the Eddas, with the scaly transformations of Loki, and hundreds of similar legends.[686]
The vagaries of Solar Mythology can be safely neglected. But the story, derived perhaps from Semitic sources, of fish incarnation and of the adventures of Manu, is deserving of fuller consideration.
According to one variant of the legend, Vishnu, in the form of a small fish, approached Manu to beg protection against the larger fish; whereupon he was placed securely in a water-jar, but in a single night outgrew the jar. Manu then tried a pond, and next the Ganges, but similar increases in size compelled him to remove the fish to the sea. Upon this the god made himself known, warned the sage of the coming of the Flood within seven days, and bade him build a ship and furnish it more or less on the lines of the Jewish Ark, only among the passengers were to be seven Sages!
In accordance with his promise, Vishnu, still in fish shape, reappeared on the subsidence of the waters, and with a rope attached to his horn towed the Ark to the Northern Mountain, where it grounded.[687]
Instances of impiscation (so to speak) appear not infrequently in my pages. Oannes, with head and tail of fish, but also with human face and feet; Dagon, “Sea-monster, upward man and downward fish”; Atargatis, or Derceto, “with face of woman but body of fish”; Venus, turning herself and Cupid—and also, as one account adds, her lover Mars—into fishes to escape the pursuit of the Giants;—all these can be grouped with other myths.
These tell us that Asia was saved by a fish and is supported by a tortoise, that Polynesia was brought up, itself a fish, on a fish-hook out of the primæval ocean, or that America was rescued from the depths of diluvian chaos by a turtle. Well may Robinson conclude, “Since in the beginning there were only Light and Water, the eldest of the Zoological Myths is the Fish Myth.”[688]
According to de Gubernatis,[689] “the ancient systems of mythology have not ceased to exist: they have been merely diffused and transformed. The nomen is changed; the numen remains. Although from loss of celestial reference and significance its splendour is minished, its vitality is enormous.” We find, however, that the mythic motives or original principles common to India and Hellas (as well as Scandinavia, etc.) are most conspicuous among the Greeks. India, indeed, seems absolutely wanting in some which in Europe manifest extraordinary vitality and expansion.
But in any comparative enumeration, strict regard must be paid to the fact that the fauna of a myth commonly varies with its geography; as an instance of this, the epos, which in Europe recounts the cunning of the fox, in India dilates on the craft of the serpent.
The fish myth proved no exception. It passed from nation to nation gradually down the ages, till we find the Greeks, borrowers sometimes unconsciously, sometimes of set purpose, perpetuating it widely in connection with deities and sub-deities.
Thus came it about that to several of the greater gods of the Greek, and afterwards of the Roman, Pantheon appertained a particular fish (or fishes). These not only enjoyed their gods’ protection, but also the double distinction of being at once an attribute represented with them and a sacrifice offered to them.
The association of certain gods with certain fishes is not always obvious. While the linking of Amphitrite with the Dolphin, or of Poseidon with the Tunny is easily explained by legends of hoary tradition, it needs all the ingenuity of Eustathius to decipher the connection between Artemis and the Mainé.[690]
In time, as their coins indicate, fish became associated with various coast towns, which owed their prosperity to fishing. Good examples descend from Olbia, Carteia, and Cyzicus on the Propontis. The early electrum coinage of the last shows the badge of this or that magistrate invariably accompanied by a Tunny, the badge of the state.[691] Very remarkable[692] is an electrum stater with a Tunny upright between two sacrificial fillets, which may signify that this tunny was closely connected with some deity or was itself of a sacro-sanct character.
Even more remarkable is a coin of Abdera in Hispania Bætica. This carries on its obverse a laureat head of Tiberius: on its reverse a four-pillared temple, two of the columns of which are in the form of fish. This unique representation has never been fully explained.[693]
It is surely a happy coincidence that on some mintages of Imperial date the fish occurs together with the head of some self-styled deities, such as that choice couple, Nero and Domitian. On sundry pieces struck by Nero, the octopus-like and predatory Sepia not inappropriately finds place; but monstrously incongruous seem the coins which associate the man-serving and man-saving Dolphin with the self-serving and man-slaying Domitian.[694]
LAUREAT HEAD OF TIBERIUS AND TEMPLE
WITH TWO COLUMNS IN SHAPE OF FISH,
FROM A COIN OF ABDERA.
From A. Heiss, Pl. 45, 9.
With the Jews, although its emblematic employment was scanty, the fish occasionally figured, e.g. as a sign of Judah. In the Talmud it appears more frequently, and as symbolic of some moral quality—e.g. of innocence.[695] In Japan the carp has been for centuries the emblem of the Samurai, because of its accredited power to withstand opposition and to swim against the current of the stream.
On the advent of Christianity, numerous become the allusions in Patristic and other literature. From the repetition by Father after Father of Aquæ vivæ piscis Christus, of piscatio duplex, Ecclesia præsens et futura, and of similar sentences, the application approaches perilously near the commonplace.
Nor was its scope morally limited. St. Augustine, St. Cyprian, and others allegorise fish and fishing in both good and bad senses.
Thus, piscis pia fides quæ vivit inter fluctus nec frangitur; piscis fides invisibilium; rete Christus; sagæna Ecclesia; Christus est piscis assus discipulis, serpens Judæis, can be matched by pisces immundi, peccatores; piscis maris, dæmones; piscator Diabolus; rete, deceptio Diaboli; and sagæna, cor mulieris, which last, from a technical point of view, hardly stamps Bishop Humbertus as a proficient in our craft.
From the identification—Christus est piscis[696] —is no long step to the symbolic use of the very letters which spell the Greek word for fish: thus from ΙΧΘΥΣ = I-ch-th-u-s, is established Ἰησοῦσ Χριστὸς θεοῦ υἱὸς σωτήρ, or “Jesus Christ, of God Son, Saviour.”
This symbolic adoption in connection with their God was far from original. A fish, at first the symbol of Vishnu, was adopted by the Buddhists, and from them by the Christians of Turkestan.[697] This adoption and adaptation of a Pagan symbol was but one of the many instances where Christian policy or Christian practice took over and continued heathen customs, institutions, and vestments.[698]
Such seems to have been the trend, possibly from pursuing a policy of compromise, more probably from following the line of least resistance, of most religious changes or revivals. But while the attributes of many of the Greek gods were, at least in certain of their attributes, assimilated to Syrian and Eastern divinities, and while the Roman pantheon made room for various Egyptian new-comers, the Jew’s conception of his Deity remained practically unaffected and uninfected.
A fish frequently figures on the tombs of the early Christians in the catacombs at Rome: sometimes it bears on its back a bowl with wine and wafers of bread. Many tombs contain small fish of wood or ivory. Such fish served, we are told, as emblems and acrostics, pointing out to his co-religionists the burial place of a Christian without betraying the fact to the persecutors.
This explanation lacks confirmation, and carries little conviction, for two (among other) reasons. First: critical statistics show that fish as symbols in Christian art figured frequently both before and after Constantine. Second: fish as indicative of a burial place would by their very presence quickly defeat the object aimed at. They would indicate, as surely as pointers game, the secret grave, for the persecutors of the Christians, as history shows, were not all exactly fools.
Some authors trace back not a few of the signs[699] and usages adopted and perpetuated by the Christians to the worship of Venus, of which, when in conjunction with a fish, the underlying idea was the adoration—nearly universal—of fecundity. Two instances, which I give for what they are worth, must suffice.
As regards Lent, A. de Gubernatis contends that Aphrodite or Venus, the goddess of Love[700], frequently represented the Spring. Hence it is that in Lent, appointed by the Church to be observed in Spring, and again on Friday (or the day of Freya) we are enjoined to eat fish, of which, it must be remembered, Aphrodite was a patron goddess.
As regards Maunday Thursday, Robinson writes: “One of the annual Church disbursements up to the end of the sixteenth century was for herrings, ‘red and white.’ Let us hope that those who in pious observation of Christian ordinances thus charged themselves with phosphorus were not aware that they were simply perpetuating the worship of Venus.[701] Friday, again, is dies Veneris, and fish, her own symbol, is therefore appropriate for the day.”
Of the making and explaining of symbols in early and mediæval times there is no end. The monkish mind, perhaps owing to environment and fasting, found this a congenial and pleasant pursuit.
Among the books on this subject, Mundus Symbolicus, although, or perhaps because, published in 1681, attracts me most, not merely by its fulness of information and of quotation from classical, Patristic, and mediæval literature—it is a good competitor with Burton’s Anatomy for Collectanea—but also by the number and naïveté of its lemmata, or appropriate apophthegms, which appeal alike to one’s ignorance and one’s humour. Of 737 pages of the volume before me 43 concern themselves solely with fish, and provide delightful browsing.[702]
The object and practice of Picinelli, from whose Il Mondo Simbolico Erath makes the Latin translation, is to examine into the habits, real or alleged, of each fish, and deduce, as was the frequent custom of books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from its delinquencies or virtues a moral lesson or lessons.
Thus the lemma, “Fallacis fructus amoris,” not inaptly summarises the amatory character of the Sargus, as indicated in my chapter on Tackle. Nor, again, is the author far astray with his lemma for the Monachus or Monk fish (a name derived from the hood on its head)—“Habitum non virtutem”—which recalls the mediæval jeer, “The cowl makyth not the Monk,” and Oscar Wilde’s description—half-echoing Browning—of the pike as “some mitred old bishop in partibus.” Of the Monk fish—also Bishop fish—a well intended representation can be found in the pages of the learned Gesner.
Under Salmo, when suffering from leeches or gill-maggots, the author provides us not only with the lemma, “Hæret ubique” and the appropriate, if not quite original, reflection of St. Bernard that conscience is like the leech which ceaseth not night nor day from making its presence felt, but also with a vivid description of a kelt dying—“donec toto corpore tabescat.”
Any connection between a salmon and a swallow (hirundo) for a moment seemed a new ichthyic revelation! The context, however, and not least St. Bernard’s pointing of the moral, led to the discovery of the misprint of hirundibus for hirundinibus (‘leeches’).
With one more passage I regretfully leave Picinelli, or rather Erath. The collocation of the rose and fish held in the hand of Cupid, which Alciatus “non sine mysterio instruxisset,” occasioned “the erudite” and anonymous epigram (p. 671) showing that Love resembles the rose and the fish. This apparent incongruity finds explanation thuswise: while each has prickly points, the first fades in a day and the second is incapable of being tamed—a comparison which, if unique, ignores the Egyptian and Roman powers of domestication.[703]
“Symbola adulantum cernis, Rosa, Piscis amorum,[704] Non sane unius Symbola certa mali. Nam Rosa verna suis non est sine sentibus, idem Piscis habet spinas intus et ipse suas. Pulchra Rosa est, verum illa brevi fit marcida, piscis Est ferus, esse aliqua nec cicur arte potest.”
One lemma “Pingit et delectat” is not the author’s happiest effort. That attached to the only illustration of a man fishing—Tenet et tenetur—tersely depicts the happy angler.
Many instances illustrating the importance attached to fish, both in diet and in medicine, are to be found scattered through my pages. I would, however, wager that in addition to these multiplied even one thousandfold, there would yet remain in the pages of medical[705] and other writers (even if we stop as early as Aëtius) matter sufficient for a large Monograph.[706]
In one book alone of Pliny’s (XXXII.) fish are recommended as remedies, internal or external, no less than (according to my rough reckoning) 342 times!
If Hippocrates, “the father of Medicine,” in the fifth century b.c. (c. 460-359) laid the foundation, Galen some six centuries later (131-201 a.d.) crowned the edifice of that science. The cry and the practice of the former, “Back to Nature,” was energetically enjoined and brilliantly defended against the inevitable reactions of the Alexandrian and other schools by the latter, who acclaims his predecessor as “divine.”
In his insistent teaching “Ensue Health,” as the one and only thing alike for patients and physicians, Galen[707] might well have adopted the last line of Ariphron’s glorious pæan to Health:
μετὰ σεῖο, μάκαιρ’ Ὑγίεια, τέθαλε πάντα καὶ λάμπει Χαρίτων ἔαρι σέθεν δὲ χωρὶς οὔτις εὐδαίμων ἔφυ.
In his own case success crowned his efforts. He boldly boasts that he did not desire to be esteemed a physician, if from his twenty-eighth year to old age he had not lived in perfect health, except for some slight fevers, of which he soon rid himself.[708] Perhaps a secondary motive was not absent, viz. the desire to avoid the taunt so often levelled at medical men:
ἄλλων ἰατρὸς αὐτὸς ἔλκεσιν βρύεις,
which Urquhart in his Rabelais translates,
“He boasts of healing poor and rich, Yet is himself all over itch!”
As regards fish as a diet in health and sickness, quot medici, tot sententiæ seems hardly exaggeration. Their wondrous unanimity as regards the food-properties of the Eel amazes, for with fish it was usually a case “where doctors disagree.”
The “Father of Medicine,” in denouncing its use (especially in pulmonary cases) was followed by nearly all medical writers, some of whom, however, were not slow, when otherwise differing from him, to assert that he killed more folk than he saved by his practice of leaving Nature to effect its cure. Paulus Jovius sums up historically the medical attitude towards Eels: “abhorred in all places and at all times, all physicians do detest them, especially about the solstice.”
As Galen’s dictum[709] that fish afford the most desirable food for “the idle, the old, the sick, and the silly” embraces the majority—if we allow Carlyle’s “mostly fools”—of mankind, it would be idle to pursue the dietetic side, were it not for the distinguos (to use the old Schoolman’s term) as to which fishes fell within or without the Mysian’s category.
Diphilus (with Philotimus and others) speaks disparagingly of some, but highly recommends others. Habitat alone, he urged, formed the deciding line between the clean and unclean. His Treatise on Food for the Well and Ill[710] divides sea-fish into (A) those which keep near the rocks—these, in his words, “are easily digested, juicy, purgative, light, but not very nutritious”—and (B) those which haunt deep water—these are “much less digestible, very nutritious, but upsetting to the internal economy.”
Alexander Aphrodisiensis attributes the superiority of Class A to the fact that, as the water round the rocks is in perpetual motion, its denizens continuously exercise themselves.[711] Galen, for a somewhat similar reason, appraises as the lowest in nutriment the inhabitants of marshes, lakes, and muddy waters, because of their lack of swimming exercise and their impure food.
A further subdivision commends itself to Rhazes. All fishes rough of scale, mucilaginous and white-coloured are best; those of a black and red shade must be avoided.[712] A special distinguo extends to the part of fish, as Xenocrates plumps for the tails, on account of their being most exercised! Bonsuetus, centuries after Galen, echoes him:
“All fish that standing pools and lakes frequent Do ever yield bad juyce and nourishment.”[713]
But however divided the ancient practitioners were in their estimate of the digestibility of a fish diet, or of particular fishes, in their ichthyic remedies internal or external they credulously and enthusiastically coincided. Hence rained piscine prescriptions in every form, fresh, salt, cooked, calcined: every part and tissue, flesh, bones, skin, trail, brains, gills, viscera, and teeth—each and all were regarded as specifics against some human disease or infirmity.[714]
All ailments practically find a cure in the ichthyic panaceas or nostrums which render old medical tomes boresome from repetition, and yet at times diverting. In regular prescriptions and old wife recipes alike, fish play a prominent part.
Have you been bitten by a mad dog, and need a theriac? Dioscorides’ recommendation,[715] as amplified by Pliny, is “pickled fish applied topically, even where the wound has not been cauterised with hot iron; this will be found sufficiently effectual as a remedy”!
Do you suffer from toothache? Then you must have omitted to rub your teeth once a year in the brains of a dog-fish, boiled in oil and kept for the purpose!
If, however, this and other remedies disappoint you, Dioscorides[716] and Celsus[717] come to your aid with the sting of the pastinaca, which, applied with hellebore or resin, extracts the teeth painlessly! As a dead certainty, if the ichthyic kingdom fail to give relief, “attach two frogs to the exterior of your jaw”!
Health, perfect health, should be the lot of every woman who follows the Plinian precepts in Book XXXII. 46.
Is she helpless from hysteria? “Lint, greased with a dolphin’s fat, and then ignited,” produces an anti-excitant; or, if the case yield not to treatment instantly, “the flesh of the strombus, left to putrefy in vinegar” is an excellent alternative!
If an easy delivery be desired, “first”—the prescription smacks of Mrs. Glasse—“catch your torpedo-fish at the time that the moon is in Libra, keep it in the open air for three days,” and then, as soon as it is introduced into the patient’s room, the trick is done! Pregnancy, on the other hand, proves often abortive, if the woman “happens to step over castoreum or over the beaver itself,” or misuses a Remora.
For dyeing the hair black calcined echineis with lard, or horse-leeches boiled in vinegar, are cheap and trustworthy recipes. For depilatories your choice is wide. The blood, gall, and liver of the Tunny, fresh or pickled; or merely the liver, pounded, but preserved with cedar-resin in a leaden box[718]; the Pulmo marinus, the Sea-hare, according to Dioscorides (De mat. med., ii. 20), the Scolopendra (ibid., ii. 16); or “the brains of the Torpedo applied with alum on the sixteenth day of the moon!”
Two more panaceas—needful and desirable now, as then—and I move to pastures new, or rather contiguous. The first: a mixture “of a live frog in a dog’s food” will, on Salpe’s authority, for ever deliver us from the yapping and barking which so often makes night hideous.
The second—naïvest and quaintest (if I may employ without cruelty these over-driven adjectives): “Democritus assures us that if the tongue be extracted from a live frog, with no part of the body adhering to it, and it is then applied—the frog must first be placed in the water(!)—to a woman while asleep, just at the spot where the heart is felt to beat, she will of a certainty answer truthfully any question put to her!”[719]
If Hippocrates blamed his predecessors for their scanty use of drugs, he would scarcely, unless suddenly clothed with a shirt of credulity, have approved of the plethora of prescriptions and panaceas prevalent in later centuries. Truly applicable would then have been the inscription suggested for a pharmacy; “Hic venditur galbanum, elaterium, opium, et omne quod in um desinit, nisi remedium.”[720]
But credulity clogged such great minds as Hippocrates and Galen. Even they included astrology in the therapeutic art, and indict practitioners who only used that “science” despitefully, or eschewed it, as “men-killers.”
Quite apart, however, from the recognised prose treatises by iatric writers such as Galen, Diphilus, and Xenocrates, there must have existed a very ample literature in Greek verse. One collection alone, Poetæ Bucolici et Didactici (Didot, Paris, 1872), reveals under the heading of Carminum Medicorum Reliquiæ the names of some dozen authors who deal chiefly—Marcellus Sidetes indeed exclusively—with the medicinal properties of fish.
Cursory skipping of these fragments compels, even if one’s acquaintance with ancient medical writers be slight, ready assent to the opinion of the learned editor (p. 74) that originality was not the dominant characteristic of their begetters. They are apparently, with two exceptions, but metrical plagiarisms or excerpts—not quite as bad as Tate and Brady’s Translations of the Psalms—from the works of Galen and others.
The first exception, the medical oath (ὅρμος ἰατρικός) startles our modern conceptions. The practitioner swears that he will administer none of the poisons, some of the deadliest of which, as we have seen, were piscine.[721]
The second is a fragment from a medical work by Marcellus Sidetes. In the days of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, despite the stirring times described by historians, Life (to alter the well-known verse) must verily have been a watch and a vision—or rather a yawn—between a sleep and a sleep to many a reader, for no less than forty-two volumes were necessary to contain the hygienic hexameters of our author. But more astonishing even than the leisure required for their perusal, the whole forty-two (according to Suidas) were held in such high esteem that by command of the Emperors they were placed in all the public libraries of Rome.
In our fragment, Remedies from Fish, Marcellus, after prefacing that by long study he has acquainted himself with their medicinal effects, sets out a list of healing fish. He adds here and there some leading specific. To one of these he prettily makes us privy, e.g. the application of a burnt mullet, mixed with honey, in cases of carbuncle.
But our author must not be written down as a one-ideaed fish-quack; for that Nature works cures (if not miracles) by the agencies of earth, and of “broad-wayed air,” as well as of the sea, is a firm tenet of his faith.[722]
Among the Greeks and Latins aphrodisiacs and antaphrodisiacs, i.e. incentives to, or prophylactics against love, were accounted of potency, and meet with frequent mention. Each kingdom of Nature, animal, mineral, vegetable, piscine, was impressed to compass these purposes.
The list submitted by Pliny—a weighty natural historian, mark you!—of those drawn from the first would be scouted by any modern Obeah or Ju-ju man, however powerful, as taxing too severely the credulity of his ignorant clientèle. Even Haitian superstition would reject its obvious absurdities. “The ashes of a spotted lizard”—here even the compiler is compelled to caution ‘si verum est’—“held in the left hand stimulate, but in the right kill desire,” ranks far from being the most incredible of the prescriptions.[723]
The Ancients specialised not only in gods, but also in fishes which made, or made not, for passion. We, however, while enjoying a hundred sects, have brutally boiled down our aphrodisiacs to one, stout and oysters!
The salacious properties of many fishes—inherited or acquired, according to ancient legends, from their mother or protectress, Aphrodite—furnish the theme of classical authors, grave and gay; e.g. of Epicharmus in Hebe’s Wedding—at wedding feasts fish were an absolute essential; of Varro,[724] tunc nuptiæ videbant ostream Lucrinam; of Plautus,[725] where at the marriage of Olympio the old man in love orders the purchase of stimulating fish.
“Emito sepiolas, lopadas, loligunculas.”
Even Pythagoras, according to Lilius Giraldus, believed that cupidity could be aroused, not by fish, which were apparently banned to his disciples, but by Urtica marina.[726]
Pliny’s list of proved aphrodisiacs and antaphrodisiacs includes among the former “the eye-tooth of a crocodile attached to the arm,” and among the latter “the skin from the left side of the forehead of the hippopotamus attached fast to the body in lambskin.”[727]
CHAPTER XX
DIOCLETIAN’S EDICT, 301 A.D.—PRICES OF FISH
AND OTHER ARTICLES THEN AND NOW
Struck with Adam’s words with regard to the Edict of Diocletian, 301 a.d.—“if we could fix the value of the denarius at this epoch, the prices of fish then would prove an interesting subject for comparison with those now (1883) current at Billingsgate”—I set to work to ascertain how great had been the depreciation of and what was the exact value of the denarius at the opening of the fourth century.
Much labour would have been saved, had I earlier come across Abbott’s The Common People of Ancient Rome, but I found some compensation in the solution of my sum coinciding approximately with his estimate of the denarius = ·4352 cent.[728]
The Edict of Diocletian[729] contains, as Mr. Abbott (to whose book I am indebted for very much that follows) indicates, many points of great economic interest to us at the present time.
First—sentences of the Introduction (probably from intrinsic evidence written by the Emperor himself) might well pass for a diatribe in to-day’s paper against a Beef or other Trust. Fortunate it is for these that the newspaper man possesses not the power of life and death wielded by Diocletian.
The Emperor, having decided that the prices promulgated shall be observed in “all our domain,” goes on, “it is our pleasure that if any shall have boldly come into conflict with this formal statute, he shall put his life in peril. In the same peril also shall he be placed, who, drawn by avarice in his desire to buy, shall have conspired against these statutes. Nor shall he be esteemed innocent of the same crime who, having articles necessary for daily life and use, shall have decided that they can be held back, since the punishment ought to be even heavier for him who causes need, than for him who violates laws.”
Second—the prices are maximum prices, not for commodities only, but also for wages.
Third—although the number of slaves owned had decreased since Augustan days, the scale of wages was still distinctly affected by slaves being hired out by their owners for day or job work.
Fourth—the absence of power being applied to manufacture, of the assemblage of men in a common workshop, and of the use of any other machines than the hand loom, or the mill for grinding corn.
Fifth—for the urban workman in the fourth century (as Mr. Abbott, p. 176, demonstrates), conditions of life must have been almost intolerable. It is indeed hard to understand how he managed to keep body and soul together, when almost all the nutritious articles of food were beyond his reach. “The taste of meat, fish, butter, and eggs must have been almost unknown to him, and even the coarse bread and vegetables on which he lived were probably limited in amount. The peasant proprietor who raised his own cattle and grain would not find the burden so hard.”
Sixth—the failure within a dozen years of the Emperor’s bold attempt to reduce the cost of living. Lactantius,[730] writing in 313-14, sums up the result of this interference with economic check and countercheck—“for the veriest trifles much blood was shed, and out of fear nothing was offered for sale, and the scarcity grew much worse, until after the death of many persons the law was repealed from necessity.” Sixty years later the Emperor Julian made a similar but smaller attempt to control prices, but the corn speculators of Antioch so entirely worsted him that he had to acknowledge defeat.
By the courtesy of the Secretary of the Fishmongers’ Company I was furnished, with some average wholesale prices for 1913, the last year unaffected by the war. The consumer, it must be remembered, is compelled, in general, to pay the retailer one-third per lb. more to defray handling, rent, etc.
The following sea fish were sold in London, per lb., as follows: Cod for 4, Turbot for 9½, Mullet (Mugil capito) for 11, Sole for 17 pence. In the Edict the price of fresh sea fish is lumped at from 4½ to 7 pence, so we have no datum for comparison of individual prices. In the case of the Mugil capito, however, we are enabled to contrast its price, i.e. 11 pence, with that in Egypt, c. 1200 b.c., i.e. 9⁄20 of a penny.[731]
A comparison with America in 1906 shows that the average price of fresh sea fish was from 4d. to 7d. per lb., or practically the same as in Diocletian’s time, while that of river fish—fresh—per lb. was 6 to 7½ as against 3¾ pence in the Edict.[732]
Salt fish, per lb. in 301 a.d. cost 4¼d., in U.S.A. 4d. to 7½d.
Oysters (by the 100), 1s. 10d., (in London) 4/-to 14/-.
The figures show that prices of other commodities in the Edict vary extremely, but for sea fish are not far apart.
From the articles of raw material and manufactured wares, which number in the Edict over eight hundred, and from the wages, etc., I subjoin some items and prices on account of their general interest.[733]
| Price in— | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1906 a.d. in the | ||||
| 301 a.d. | United States. | |||
| s. | d. | s. | d. | |
| Wheat per bushel | 1 | 8 | 4 | 10 (wholesale) |
| Beef per lb. | 0 | 3-2½d. | 0 | 5-9d. |
| Butter | 0 | 5 | 1 | 1 to 1 4 |
| Eggs, per doz. | 0 | 2½ | 1 | 0 ” 1 3 |
| Wages per Day. | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 301 a.d. | 1906 a.d. in the | |||
| s. | d. | United States. | ||
| Unskilled Workman | 0 | 5¼ | receives keep. | 5/- to 9/- (8 hours) |
| Carpenter | 0 | 10½ | ” ” | 10/- to 16/- ” |
| Painter | 1 | 4¼ | ” ” | 11/- to 16/- ” |
I add a few other prices, without attempting in these years of the ever-climbing wave of cost to give the corresponding modern quotations.
| £ | s. | d. | |
| Fowl | 0 | 0 | 6½ |
| Snails (per score) | 0 | 0 | 0½ |
| Asparagus (25 to the bunch) | 0 | 0 | 1½ |
| Apples (best, 10) | 0 | 0 | 0¾ |
| Barber | 0 | 0 | 4½ |
| Tailor (for cutting out and finishing best over garment) | 0 | 1 | 1¼ |
| Elementary Teacher (per pupil per month) | 0 | 0 | 10¼ |
| Writing””” | 0 | 1 | 4 |
| Greek, Latin, or Geometry (per pupil per month) | 0 | 3 | 7 |
| Advocate for presenting a case | 0 | 4 | 2 |
| ” ” finishing ” | 0 | 17 | 5 |
| Watcher of Clothes in public baths (for each patron) | 0 | 0 | 4½ |
| Patricians’ shoes (per pair) | 0 | 2 | 9 |
| Boots (Women’s) ” | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| ” (Soldiers’, without nails) | 0 | 1 | 10½ |
| Transportation (1 person, 1 mile) | 0 | 0 | 4½ |
| Waggon (1 mile) | 0 | 0 | 2½ |
| White Silk (per lb.) | 10 | 10 | 0 |
| Genuine Purple Silk (per lb.) | 130 | 10 | 0 |
| Washed Tarentine Wool (per lb.) | 0 | 3 | 1 |
| Ordinary washed Wool ” | from 5½ to 11d. | ||
CHAPTER XXI
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ROMAN AND MODERN PISCICULTURE
With the opinion held by some, that the method of breeding fish employed by the Romans was practically the same as that of the modern Pisciculturists, Badham[734] seems to agree, when he remarks: “The plan of stocking rivers with fish ab ovo has been, after the lapse of many centuries, revived by two Vosges fishermen, Gehin and Rémy,” and “they have thus re-established a very ancient practice, and succeeded in stocking the streams of France.”
But this is a total misconception. It can only have arisen from ignorance either of what is found in Latin writers, such as Columella, or of what is the nature of the method used by Rémy and, with great improvements, by present Pisciculturists.
Shortly, the Roman method collected from the bottom of a river or a marsh eggs, already fertilised in the natural manner by fish, and removed them to other lakes or vivaria.
Rémy and his successors catch and strip the females of their eggs, which are pressed out into a pan. They then extrude the milt of the male on to the eggs, in a proportion, differing according to what fish are being spawned, of one male to one or more female. They next place the eggs on perforated wire or other trays fixed in long boxes, over and under which water of a regulated temperature passes.[735]
The erroneous view of those of Badham’s school needs correction. By tracing historically the various and not generally known discoveries which led to our modern practice of fish-breeding I hope to prove that the process of the Romans differed from ours. For this reason I subjoin a short résumé showing why and how Pisciculture as we term it and know it came about.[736]
The same demand for fish, the same dearth of fish, which compelled the enactment in mediæval Europe of stringent laws protecting fish, spawn, and fry, caused in ancient China and Imperial Rome the breeding of fish in lakes and vivaria by non-natural methods, and in Europe from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century the quest of an unnatural or artificial method.
Laws aimed at repairing the dearth of fish—a very serious economic matter when all Europe observed frequent fast days—caused by destruction of spawn and of fish during the breeding seasons by human and animal agencies, were made in England as early as the reign of our Ethelred II., who in 996 forbade the sale of any young fish.[737] Malcolm II. of Scotland fixed the times and conditions under which salmon fishing was permitted. Under Robert I. the willow of the bow-nets had to be two inches apart, so as to allow a passage for the grilse. In 1411 Robert III. punished with death anyone taking a salmon in the close season. The Kings of France were not idle. Many ordinances fix the meshes of the nets and the length of saleable fish.
The first known attempts at fish-breeding were made by the Chinese and Romans. M. Haime asserts that “we have no positive data as to the epoch in which the Chinese began their experiments, although everything shows that they reach back to the most remote antiquity.” The address of Mr. Wei-Ching W. Yen dates the epoch as probably that of Tao Chu Kung, who lived in the fifth century b.c.[738]
In Rome considerable trade was done in the sale of young fish for stocking waters. In China the commerce in fish eggs was on a vast scale and extremely lucrative. The Jesuit missionary Du Halde writes, “Le gain va souvent au centuple de la dépense, car le Peuple se nourrit en partie de Poissons.”[739]
The method, however, of both the Chinese and the Romans was to gather eggs, already naturally fertilised, lying at the bottom of, or adhering to weeds in, the water. The Chinese went farther by employing special traps of hurdles and mats to bar the rivers and catch the eggs deposited on these.
During the long interval between the Roman Empire and the eighteenth century, we note little or no progress in the rearing of fish, although preserves became numerous in Italy and France. Kings and nobles were zealous and jealous in making and maintaining artificial ponds. Charlemagne the Great personally ordered the repairing of old and digging of new ponds. By sales from their vivaria, and by heavy royalties from their fisheries the religious communities amassed large revenues.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages new methods to counter the scarcity universally prevalent, despite the teaching in the thirteenth century of Peter of Vescenza, were eagerly sought. Dom Pinchon, a monk of the Abbey of Réome, seems the first to have conceived the idea of artificially fecundating the eggs of trout. He pressed out in turn the milt of a male and the eggs of a female into water, which he then agitated with his finger. He placed the resulting eggs in a wooden box, with a layer of fine sand on the bottom, and a willow grating above and at the two ends. The box till the moment of hatching was immersed in water flowing with a gentle stream.
The process—described in a manuscript dated 1420, but not published till about 1850—naturally led to no practical results. Consequently Pinchon’s claim to be the father of modern Pisciculture—a term first used some three hundred years after his death—can hardly be sustained. His discoveries interest only from a historical point of view.
The middle of the eighteenth century witnessed an improvement on Pinchon’s plan. In Sweden (where the care taken to protect fish even prohibited the ringing of bells at the spawning season) the bream, perch, and mullet attach their eggs either to rocks, or twigs of pine.
Lund shut up males and females for three or four days in three boxes, furnished with twigs of pine, etc. (on which the fish spawned), and pierced with little holes to allow the entrance of water. He succeeded at his first attempt in raising from 50 female bream, 3,100,000 fry; from 100 perch, 3,215,000 fry; and from 100 mullet, 4,000,000 fry.
Jacobi of Westphalia, the first real inventor of practical fecundation by artificial means, experimented on trout and salmon for sixteen years before attaining definite success.
He pressed in turn the eggs and milt into a vase half filled with water which he kept gently stirred with his hand. The fertilised eggs were at once placed in a grated box inside a larger chest, in which Jacobi had inserted at the sides and at the top fine metallic gratings to allow the easy flow in and out of water over the sand or gravel lying at the bottom. The apparatus was set in a trench by the side of a brook, or, better still, in an artificial channel into which springs were led. The young fish after hatching lived for three or four weeks on their umbilical sac, and were then passed into a reservoir.
By these simple means Jacobi, who for his services was granted by England a pension for life, solved the problem of protecting fertilised eggs against their enemies, and yet of leaving them in surroundings not unlike those of Nature. The experiment, as far as it went, succeeded admirably.
In Great Britain[740] Shaw, Andrew, Young, Knox, and Boccius, and in Germany, Blooch, and others carried on, at various times and with varying methods and measures of success. In France little or nothing was done, except by Quatrefages, till we reach the two peasants, Rémy and Gehin, whose labours laid firm the foundation on which all subsequent Pisciculturists have built.
In 1849 the Academy of Sciences learned that a prize had been granted in 1845 by the Society of the Vosges to two fishermen of La Bresse, Rémy and Gehin, for having fertilised and artificially hatched eggs from trout, and for having raised some five to six thousand trout from one to three years old, which continued to thrive in the waters in which they were confined.
On investigation by the Academy, it was found that Rémy and Gehin (who came in later) had been led from conclusions based entirely on their own observations (for “they are quite unlettered and ignorant of the progress of the Natural Sciences”) to employ with success methods rather similar, but superior, to those of Jacobi.
They had enormously decreased the high mortality by their greatest and probably unique achievement, i.e. provision for the fry of a natural food. This was produced by the simultaneous rearing of a smaller and non-cannibal species, and by the collection in the enclosed streams or made waterways into which the young trout were liberated of hundreds of frogs, whose spawn afforded an excellent subsistence.
Jacobi’s and Rémy’s discovery was the parent of our modern Pisciculture. The gear and apparatus, especially in America, have been transformed. The methods of stripping, of hatching, of feeding are enormously improved, with mortality in eggs and fry incredibly reduced.
From this account of their discoveries and from the nature of the methods now in use, it is obvious that the suggestion of Badham and others that the method of breeding fish employed by modern Pisciculturists was practically that of the Romans must go by the board.
THE RAPE OF HELEN.[741]
From a Fifth Century b.c. Scyphos, made by the potter Hieron and painted by the artist Makron, from Furtwängler and Reichhold, Griech. Vasenmalerei, Vol. II., Pl. 85.
[See n. 1, p. 295].
CHAPTER XXII
THE RING OF HELEN
In the countries dealt with in this book I give instances where Fish and Fishing have, according to myth or tradition, played a prominent part in human affairs, and have been the cause, direct or indirect, of important events.
Thus in Greece and Rome, to fish is assigned the responsibility for—
(A) The death of Homer, from his inability to solve the riddle of the lads.[742]
(B) The death of Theodoric, who recognised in the head of a pike which he was eating the head of his murdered victim, Symmachus.[743]
(C) No less an event than the Trojan War, which, according to the windbag Ptolemy Hephæstion, happened on this wise.
In the belly of a huge fish named Pan (from its resemblance to that god) was found a gem (asterites), which when exposed to the sun shot forth flames and became a powerful love philtre. Helen, on acquiring this, had it engraved with a figure of the Pan fish, and when desirous of making a special impression wore it as a signet ring.
Thus, when Paris visited Sparta the charm blazed from her finger with the result of the immediate conquest of Paris, the flight from Menelaus, and the Ten Years’ War!
THE RETURN OF HELEN.
From a Fifth Century Scyphos, made by the potter Hieron and painted by the artist Makron, from Furtwängler and Reichhold, Griech. Vasenmalerei, Vol. II., Pl. 85.
But, despite Homer, it was discovered (!) afterwards that Helen was not in Ilium at any time during the siege, and that what the Trojans harboured was not her real self, but only her “living image,” εἴδωλον ἔμπνουν.[744] The discoverer of this interesting fact was (so ran the slander) Stesichorus. Struck with blindness after writing an attack on Helen, he recovered his sight by composing a Palinodia.[745] The ghost of Achilles, when raised by that most famous medium of antiquity, Apollonius of Tyana, denied positively that Helen was in Ilium.[746]
If Mr. J. A. Symonds be right, “We fought for fame and Priam’s wealth,” and for naught else, then she “with the star-like sorrows of immortal eyes” was neither causa causans nor any cause of the Fall of Troy. Perhaps “Priam’s wealth” is but an intelligent anticipation of Mr. Leaf’s theory that the War was fought for “The Freedom of the Sea” (Euxine), and, incidentally, the capture of another nation’s profits.