Quite apart, however, from the recognised prose treatises by iatric writers such as Galen, Diphilus, and Xenocrates, there must have existed a very ample literature in Greek verse. One collection alone, Poetæ Bucolici et Didactici (Didot, Paris, 1872), reveals under the heading of Carminum Medicorum Reliquiæ the names of some dozen authors who deal chiefly—Marcellus Sidetes indeed exclusively—with the medicinal properties of fish.
Cursory skipping of these fragments compels, even if one’s acquaintance with ancient medical writers be slight, ready assent to the opinion of the learned editor (p. 74) that originality was not the dominant characteristic of their begetters. They are apparently, with two exceptions, but metrical plagiarisms or excerpts—not quite as bad as Tate and Brady’s Translations of the Psalms—from the works of Galen and others.
The first exception, the medical oath (ὅρμος ἰατρικός) startles our modern conceptions. The practitioner swears that he will administer none of the poisons, some of the deadliest of which, as we have seen, were piscine.[721]
The second is a fragment from a medical work by Marcellus Sidetes. In the days of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, despite the stirring times described by historians, Life (to alter the well-known verse) must verily have been a watch and a vision—or rather a yawn—between a sleep and a sleep to many a reader, for no less than forty-two volumes were necessary to contain the hygienic hexameters of our author. But more astonishing even than the leisure required for their perusal, the whole forty-two (according to Suidas) were held in such high esteem that by command of the Emperors they were placed in all the public libraries of Rome.
In our fragment, Remedies from Fish, Marcellus, after prefacing that by long study he has acquainted himself with their medicinal effects, sets out a list of healing fish. He adds here and there some leading specific. To one of these he prettily makes us privy, e.g. the application of a burnt mullet, mixed with honey, in cases of carbuncle.
But our author must not be written down as a one-ideaed fish-quack; for that Nature works cures (if not miracles) by the agencies of earth, and of “broad-wayed air,” as well as of the sea, is a firm tenet of his faith.[722]
Among the Greeks and Latins aphrodisiacs and antaphrodisiacs, i.e. incentives to, or prophylactics against love, were accounted of potency, and meet with frequent mention. Each kingdom of Nature, animal, mineral, vegetable, piscine, was impressed to compass these purposes.
The list submitted by Pliny—a weighty natural historian, mark you!—of those drawn from the first would be scouted by any modern Obeah or Ju-ju man, however powerful, as taxing too severely the credulity of his ignorant clientèle. Even Haitian superstition would reject its obvious absurdities. “The ashes of a spotted lizard”—here even the compiler is compelled to caution ‘si verum est’—“held in the left hand stimulate, but in the right kill desire,” ranks far from being the most incredible of the prescriptions.[723]
The Ancients specialised not only in gods, but also in fishes which made, or made not, for passion. We, however, while enjoying a hundred sects, have brutally boiled down our aphrodisiacs to one, stout and oysters!
The salacious properties of many fishes—inherited or acquired, according to ancient legends, from their mother or protectress, Aphrodite—furnish the theme of classical authors, grave and gay; e.g. of Epicharmus in Hebe’s Wedding—at wedding feasts fish were an absolute essential; of Varro,[724] tunc nuptiæ videbant ostream Lucrinam; of Plautus,[725] where at the marriage of Olympio the old man in love orders the purchase of stimulating fish.