And none but he’s the thief: to prison with him![[591]]
They had at Corinth a pretty strict police regulation on this subject. When any person was observed habitually to purchase fish, he was interrogated by the authorities respecting his means. If found to be a man of property they suffered him to do what he pleased with his own; but, in the contrary event, he received a gentle hint that the state had its eye upon him. The neglect of this admonition was followed, in the first place, by a fine, and ultimately, if persevered in, by a punishment equivalent to the treadmill.[[592]] These matters were in Athens submitted to the cognizance of two or three magistrates, called Opsonomoi, nominated by the Senate.[[593]] With respect to the purchase of this class of viands, everywhere attended with peculiar difficulties, it may be said, that the ancients had considerably the advantage of us; since in Lynceus of Samos’s “Fish-buyer’s Manual,” they possessed a sure guide through all the intricacies of bargaining in the agora.
But before we proceed further with this part of our subject, we will demand permission of Lynceus to hear what Hesiod has to say of saltfish, on which Euthydemos, the Athenian, composed a separate treatise. According to this poet, who boldly speaks of cities erected long after his death, immense quantities of fish were salted on the Bosporos, sometimes entire, as in modern times,[[594]] sometimes cut into gobbets of a moderate size. Among these were the oxyrinchos whose taste proved often fatal, the thunny, and the mackerel. The little city of Parion furnished the best kolias (a kind of mackerel), and the Tarentine merchants brought to Athens pickled orcynos from Cadiz, cut into small triangular pieces, in jars.[[595]] Physicians, indeed, inveighed against these relishes; but the gourmands would consult only their palates and preferred a short life with pickled thunny to that of Saturn himself on beef and mutton.
But the Hesiod of Euthydemos (a creation probably of his own) is but very poor authority compared with Archestratos, who made the pilgrimage of the world in search of good cheer, and afterwards, for the benefit of posterity, treasured up his experience in a grand culinary epic. In his opinion a slice of Sicilian thunny was a rare delicacy, while the saperda, though brought from the Pontos Euxinos, he held as cheap as those who boasted of it.[[596]] The scombros, by some supposed to be a species of thunny, though others understand by it the common mackerel, stood high in the estimation of this connoisseur. He directs that it be left in salt three days, and eaten before it begins to melt into brine.[[597]] In his estimation the horaion[[598]] of Byzantium was likewise a great delicacy, which he advises the traveller, who might pass through that city, to taste by all means. It seems to have been there what macaroni is at Naples.
Alexis, in one of his comedies, introduces the Symposiarch of an Eranos (president of a picnic) accounting with one of the subscribers who comes to demand back his ring, and in the course of the dialogue, where something like Falstaff’s tavern-bill is discussed, we find the prices of several kinds of salt-fish. An omotarichos (shoulder piece of thunny) is charged at five chalci; a dish of sea-mussels, seven chalci, of sea-urchins, an obol, a slice of kybion, three obols, a conger eel, ten, and another plate of broiled fish, a drachma. This comic writer[[599]] rates the fish of the Nile very low, and he is quite right, for they are generally muddy and ill-tasted, though the Copts, who have considerable experience during Lent, contrive, by the application of much Archestratic skill, to render some kinds of them palatable. Sophocles, in a fragment of his lost drama of Phineus, speaks of salt-fish embalmed like an Egyptian mummy.[[600]] Stock-fish, as I know to my cost, is still a fashionable dish in the Mediterranean, especially on board ship, and from a proverb preserved by Athenæus we find it was likewise in use among the Athenians.[[601]]
The passion of this refined people for salt-fish furnished them with an occasion of showing their gratitude publicly. They bestowed the rights of citizenship on the sons of Chæriphilos, a metoikos who first introduced among them a knowledge of this sort of food.[[602]] A similar feeling prompted the Dutch to erect a statue to G. Bukel, the man who taught them to salt herrings.[[603]]
Without enumerating a tenth part of the other species eaten among the Greeks, we pass to the shell-fish, of which they were likewise great amateurs. Epicharmos, in his marriage of Hebe, supplies a curious list, which, however, might be extended almost ad infinitum. Among these were immense limpets, the buccinum, the cecibalos, the tethynakion, the sea-acorn, the purple fish, oysters hard to open but easy to swallow, mussels, sea-snails or periwinkles, skiphydria sweet to taste but prickly to touch, large shelled razor-fish, the black conch, and the amathitis. The conch was also called tellinè as the same poet in his Muses observes. Alcæos wrote a song to the limpet beginning with
“Child of the rock and hoary sea.”[[604]]
Boys used to make a sort of whistle of tortoise and mussel shells. These mussels were usually broiled on the coals, and Aristophanes, very ingenious in his similes, compares a gaping silly fellow to a mussel in the act of being cooked.[[605]]
Like the sepia, of which excellent pilaus are made at Alexandria, the porphyra or purple fish was very good eating, and thickened the liquor in which it was boiled.[[606]] There was a small delicate shell-fish caught on the island of Pharos and adjacent coasts of Egypt, which they called Aphrodite’s ear,[[607]] and there is still found on the same coast near Canopos a diminutive and beautiful rose-coloured conch called Venus’s nipple. On the same shore, about the rise of the Nile, that species of mussel called tellinè was caught in great abundance, but the best-tasted were said to be found in the river itself. A still finer kind were in season about autumn in the vicinity of Ephesos. The echinos, or sea-chestnut,[[608]] cooked with oxymel, parsley, and mint, was esteemed good and wholesome eating. Those caught about Cephalonia, Icaria, and Achaia were bitterish, those of Sicily laxative; the best were the red and the quince coloured. A laughable anecdote is told of a Spartan, who being invited to dine where sea-chestnuts were brought to table, took one upon his plate, and not knowing how they were eaten put it into his mouth, shell and all. Finding it exceedingly unmanageable, he turned it about for some time, seeking slowly and cautiously to discover the knack of eating it. But the rough and prickly shell still resisting his efforts, his temper grew ruffled: crunching it fiercely he exclaimed, “Detestable beast! Well! I will not let thee go now, after having thus ground thee to pieces; but assuredly I will never touch thee again.”