Olympio: Vin’ lingulacas? Lysidamus: Quid opust, quando uxor domi est? Ea lingulaca est nobis, nam numquam tacet.[672]
To render the double punning of these lines has been a task too hard even for the excellent Loeb Library. But Badham, perhaps poeta nascitur, but here non fit, comes to the fore:
“Fresh tongues for sale, who’ll buy, who’ll buy? Come, Sir, will you? No, friend, not I; Of tongue enow at home I’ve got In my old wife, Dame Polyglot.”
The Cestreus, or Mugil. My inclination to include this fish among “The Nine Fish most highly prized” was checked in part by Faber’s placing it only in Class II., and in part by the possible reproach, seeing that the glories of its cousin the Mullus had been fully recounted, of “too much one family.” But as the fish possesses traits very individual, if not always engaging, and as Athenæus devotes to its gastronomic and other properties no less than four chapters,[673] I cannot pass by it without some comment.
Its edible qualities vary with the place of its capture. While the Mugil of Abdera, Sinope, and other clear-watered places achieved high praise, its more frequent but muddy-tasting brother of the lagoons formed the staple of one kind of τάριχος. Their predilection for lagoons and brackish water—evidenced by writers as far apart as Aristotle and Apostolides (1900 a.d.)—came about possibly from the fish “breeding best where rivers run into the sea,” or can be accounted for by the belief that “Some of the grey mullet species are not produced by copulation, but grow spontaneously from mud and sand.”[674]
Apart from characteristics already mentioned, e.g. its greed and guile, its hereditary feud with the Lupus, its being “the swiftest of fishes” (which attribute, nevertheless, saved it not from being the prey of the slowest, if not the shrewdest of fishes, the Pastinaca or sting-ray,[675]) we find various points of interest noted by ancient writers:
(A) “Whilst rain is wholesome for most fishes, it is, on the contrary, unwholesome for the Cestreus, for rain and snow superinduce blindness.”[676]
(B) The passionate desire of the Cestreus, when about to spawn, “renders it so unguarded” that, if a male or female be caught, fastened to a line, allowed to swim to sea, and then gently drawn back to land, shoals of the opposite sex will follow the captive close up to the shore and fill the awaiting nets.[677] This method of fishing, which prevails at Elis at the present day, is but one, as Apostolides indicates, of the many survivals in modern Greece of the ancient craft.[678]
(C) The Mugil, together with three others, possesses by far the best sense of hearing, “and so it is that they frequent shallow water.”[679]
(D) The Mugil, anticipating the ostrich, hid its head when frightened and fancied that the whole of its body was concealed. Unlike the ostrich, however, it has long got cured of its “ridiculous character”[680], for, as Cuvier remarks, this trait in modern times has not been observed.