Ausonius (c. 310-c. 393 a.d.) is practically the last Latin writer within my time-limit (a.d. 500) who has allusions of interest to Fishing. In the fifth century, however, Sidonius, whose fishing and hunting interest apparently equalled his diocesan—his ‘Nolo Episcopari’ was, if fruitless, at once exceptional and genuine, for the see of Clermont had to be forced on his acceptance—tells us in a letter and in his poems of the catching of fish, especially by night lines in a lake on his wife’s property in the Auvergne.[440]
The tenth Idyll of Ausonius (“Ad Mosellam,” a great favourite with Izaak Walton), ranks, according to Mackail, “the writer not merely as the last or all but last of Latin, but also as the first of French poets.” It demands mention, quite apart from the vividness of its pictures, because it is the only fisher poem of any length in classical Latin, and because in it occurs the first mention of the Salar and the Fario.
Of the Salmo Pliny three hundred years previously was the first to speak.[441] The Greeks knew not the Salmon: at any rate, no opsophagist or other author notices the fish. Their silence is natural; the high temperature of the water forbids its frequenting the Mediterranean or its inflowing rivers.[442]
The length of the whole poem (483 lines) prevents entire quotation, although the touch and movement all through display fully the instinct and feeling for sport.
Pictures of the scenery along the banks of the Moselle are followed by the enumeration and characterisation of the fish in its waters rendered after the manner of the didactic epic. The poem furnishes a lively description of the fishermen of the Moselle, made from actual observation. Men in boats drag nets in midstream; men watch the corks of little nets in shallower water; men perched on banks or on rocks armed with rods scan the floats bobbing on the water, or jerk in the prey. But we search for fly-fishing in vain.
“And now, where the bank gives easy access, a host of spoilers are searching all the waters.[443] Alas! poor fish, ill sheltered by thine inmost stream! One of them trails his wet lines far out in mid-river, and sweeps off the shoals caught in his knotty seine; where the stream glides with placid course, another spreads his drag-nets buoyed on their cork-floats.
“A third, leaning over the waters beneath the rock, lowers the arching top of his supple rod, as he casts the hooks sheathed in deadly baits. The unwary rovers of the deep rush on them with gaping mouth—too late, their wide jaws feel through and through the stings of the hidden barb—they writhe—the surface tells the tale, and the rod ducks to the jerky twitch of the quivering horse-hair. Enough—with one whizzing stroke the boy snatches his prey slant-wise from the water; the blow vibrates on the breeze, as when a lash snaps in the air with a crack, and the wind whistles to the shock.
“The finny captives bound on the dry rocks, in terror at the sunlight’s deadly rays; the force which stood to them in their native stream languishes under our sky, and wastes their life in struggles to respire.[444] Now, only a dull throb shudders through the feeble frame, the sluggish tail flaps in the last throes, the jaws gape, but the breath which they inhale returns from the gills in the gaspings of death: as, when a breeze fans the fires of the forge, the linen valve of the bellows plays against its beechen sides, now opening, and now shutting, to admit or to confine the wind.
“Some fish have I seen who, in the last agony, gathered their forces, sprang aloft, and plunged head foremost into the river beneath, regaining the waters for which they had ceased to hope. Impatient of this loss, the thoughtless boy dashes in after them from above and strikes out in wild pursuit. Even thus Glaucus of Anthedon, the old man of the Bœotian Sea, when, after tasting Circe’s deadly herbs, he ate of the grass which dying fish had nibbled,[445] passes, a strange denizen, into the Carpathian deep. Armed with hook and net, a fisherman in the depths of that realm whose upper waters he had been wont to plunder, Glaucus glided along, the pirate of those helpless tribes.”
Whether the Salar and the Fario of the Idyll are, or are not, identical with the burn trout or salmon trout of modern days affords a problem for ichthyologists, not for me.