“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.)—