Sæpe citos egi per juga longa canes.
The younger Pliny describes himself on one occasion sitting beside the nets, while the hunters were pursuing the boars and driving them into the snare (Epist. i. 6). In Euripides (Bacc. 821-832) we find the following beautiful description of a fawn, which has been driven into the space inclosed by the nets, but has leaped over them and escaped:—
ὡς νεβρὸς χλοεραῖς
ἐμπαίζουσα λείμακος ἡ-
δοναῖς, ἡνίκ’ ἂν φοβερὸν φύγῃ
θήραμ’ ἔξω φυλακᾶς
εὐπλέκτων ὑπὲρ ἀρκύων, &c.
Here a Bacchanal, tossing her head into the air with gambols and dancing, is said to be “like a fawn sporting in the green delights of a meadow, when she has escaped the fearful chase by leaping over the well-platted nets so as to be out of the inclosure, whilst the shouting hunter has been urging his dogs to run still more swiftly: by great efforts and with the rapidity of the winds she bounds over a plain beside a river, pleased with solitudes remote from man, and hides herself in the thickets of an umbrageous forest.”
If hollows or valleys were inclosed[680], the nets were no doubt extended only in those openings, through which it was possible for the animals to escape. Also a river was of itself a sufficient boundary:
Inclusum flumine cervum.—Virg. Æn. xii. 749.