[220] Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, III. 48.
[221] Xenophon, Anab., I. 4; Cicero, de nat. Deorum, III. 39; Ovid, Fasti, II. 473-4.
[222] Very different was the behaviour of the first generation of Man (who according to Philo’s Translation of Sanchuniathon, quoted by Eusebius, præp. ev., I. 9, 5), “consecrated the plants shooting out of the earth, judged them gods, worshipped them, but yet lived upon them” (Cf. de Brosses, Culte des Dieux Fétiches). In Plutarch, Symp., VIII. 8. 4, Nestor states that “the priests of Poseidon never eat fish, for Poseidon is called the Generator; and the race of Hellen sacrificed to him as the first father, imagining, as likewise did the Syrians, that Man rose from a liquid substance, and therefore they worship a fish as of the same production and breeding as themselves, being in this matter more happy in their philosophy than Anaximander: for he says that fish and men were not produced in the same substance, but that men were first produced in fishes and, when they were grown up and able to fend for themselves, were thrown out and so lived on the land. Therefore, as fire devours its parents, that is the matter out of which it was first kindled, so Anaximander, asserting that fish were our common parents, condemneth our feeding upon them.” The belief in the descent of man from fish exists in the present day among the Ponapians of the Caroline Islands, and elsewhere (J. G. Frazer, Folk Lore in the Old Testament (London, 1918), i. 40). As regards the changes in our development which make the whole world kin, Empedocles, (Καθαρμοί, frag. 117, Diels) sings,
ἤδη γάρ ποτ’ ἐγὼ γενόμην κοῦρός τε κόρη τε θάμνος τ’ οἰωνός τε καὶ ἔξαλος ἔλλοπος ἰχθύς.
[223] Symposium, VIII. 8, 3: γέγονεν ἁγνείας μἐρος ἀποχὴ ἰχθύων. Elsewhere we read of more prosaic and practical reasons why the great majority of the Greeks abstained from certain kinds of fish, e.g. the fear in the case of the loach, of which the Syrian goddess was protectress, lest she gnaw their legs, cover their bodies with sores, and devour their livers.
[224] Herodotus, I. 62.
[225] Paulus Rhode, Thynnorum Captura (Lipsiæ, 1890). Had his exhaustive monograph come to hand earlier, this notice would have been worthier, and much time spent on Aristotle, Oppian, etc., have been saved.
[226] The real derivation of πηλαμύς, which was probably a pre-Hellenic word, seems unknown: see É. Boisacq, Dictionnaire Étymologique de la langue grecque (Paris, 1913), p. 779.
[227] Their method was to let down by a rope from the boats blocks of wood (heavily weighted with lead) to which were attached great spikes and hooks, which on reaching the bottom were drawn to and fro, with the result that “here gasping Heads confess the killing Smart, | There bleeds a Tail, which quivers round the Dart.” Cf. a fragment from Menander’s The Fisherman, frag. 12 in the Frag. comicor. Graec., IV. 77, Meineke, “The muddy sea which nourishes the great Tunny.” Sophron’s Tunnyfisher seems the earliest mime, where this fish figures.
[228] O. Keller, Die Antike Tierwelt, vol. ii. 388, fig. 122. This work (published at Leipzig a year before the War) unfortunately came into my hands only when I had practically finished my book, and thus I have been precluded from the more copious use of the Fische portion, which I should have desired and which it would certainly have demanded. The seventy pages dealing with fish form a compact treasure-house of ichthyic literature, but owing perhaps to their scope lack piscatorial interest.