[135]Seneca has two passages on this subject, which strongly bespeak the barbarous tastes of the Romans. He says: “A mullet even, if just caught, is thought little of, unless it is allowed to die in the hand of your guest. They are carried about enclosed in globes of glass, and their color is watched as they die—ever changing by the struggles of death into various shades and hues.” And again: “There is nothing, you say, more beautiful than the colors of the dying mullet; as it struggles and breathes forth its life, it is first purple, and then a paleness gradually comes over it; and then, placed as it is between life and death, an uncertain hue comes over it.”
[136]Seneca speaks of this cruel custom of pickling fish alive. “Other fish, again, they kill in sauces, and pickle them alive. There are some persons who look upon it as quite incredible that a fish should be able to live underground. How much more so would it appear to them, if they were to hear of a fish swimming in sauce, and that the chief dish of the banquet was killed at the banquet, feeding the eye before it does the gullet?”
[137]Juvenal, Sat. iv. l. 15, speaks of a mullet being bought for 6000 sesterces, a thousand for every pound, and Suetonius tells us that in the reign of Tiberius three mullets were sold for 30,000 sesterces. It is in allusion to this kind of extravagance that Juvenal says, in the same Satire, that it is not unlikely that the fisherman could be bought as a slave for a smaller sum than the fish itself. At the above rate, each of these mullets sold for nearly $400 of our money.
[138]Ἀπὸ τοῦ ἐχειν νῆας. “From holding back ships.”
[139]This division of the bloodless fish, made first by Aristotle, into the mollusca, testacea, and crustacea, has been followed by naturalists almost down to the present day.
[140]Probably this is merely the reproduction of the story of the nautilus with exaggerated details.
[141]It is now known, thanks to the research of Swammerdam, that the black points at the extremity of the great horns of the land snail, and at the base of them in the water snail, are eyes.
[142]All this theory is, of course, totally imaginary. The pearl itself is nothing else but a diversion, so to speak, of the juices, whose duty it is to line the interior of the shell, to thicken and so amplify it; and consequently, the pearl is the result of some malady. It is possible for them to be found in all shell-fish; but they have no beauty in them, unless the interior of the shell, or, as we call it, the mother-of-pearl, is lustrous and beautiful itself. Hence the finest of them come from the east, and are furnished by the kind of bivalve, called by Linnæus, “Mytilus margaritiferus,” which has the most beautiful mother-of-pearl in the interior that is known. The parts of the Indian sea which are mentioned by Pliny, are those in which the pearl oyster is still found in the greatest abundance.
[143]Procopius tells a wonderful story in relation to this subject. He says, that the sea-dogs are wonderful admirers of the pearl-fish, and follow them out to sea; that when the sea-dogs are pressed by hunger, they go in quest of prey, and then return to the shell-fish and gaze upon it. A certain fisherman, having watched for the moment when the shell-fish was deprived of the protection of its attendant sea-dog, which was seeking its prey, seized the shell-fish, and made for the shore. The sea-dog, however, was soon aware of the theft, and making straight for the fisherman, seized him. Finding himself thus caught, he made a last effort, and threw the pearl-fish on shore, upon which he was immediately torn to pieces by its protector.
[144]These alabaster boxes for unguents mentioned elsewhere by Pliny were usually pear-shaped; and as they were held with difficulty in the hand, on account of their extreme smoothness, they were called αλαβαστρα, from α, “not,” and λαβυσθαι, “to be held.” Such was the offer made to our Saviour, of an “alabaster box of ointment of spikenard, very precious.” Seneca says that the Roman matrons were not satisfied unless they had two or three patrimonies suspended from each ear.