[302] According to an inscription at Smyrna, H. Dittenberger, Sylloge inscriptionum Græcarum, (Lipsiæ, 1900), ii. 284 f., No. 584, a violator of the sacred fish was forthwith punished by all sorts of misfortunes and finally was eaten up by fish. If one of these fish died, an offering must on the self-same day be burnt on the altar. Cf. Newton, Gk. Inscript., 85.
[303] Keller, op. cit., 345.
[304] For discussion as to which was the “sacred fish,” see Plutarch, de Sol. Anim., 32, and Athen., VII. 20.
[305] To cite but one of the scores of intermediate authors as regards poverty, Ovid, Met., III. 586-91,
Pauper et ipse fuit, linoque solebat et hamis Decipere, et calamo salientis ducere pisces. Ars illi sua census erat. Cum traderet artem, “Accipe quas habeo, studii successor et heres,” Dixit, “opes.” Moriensque mihi nihil ille reliquit Præter aquas: unum hoc possum appellare paternum.
[306] The νέοι παῖδες in the oracles’ warning to Homer, which seem at first sight antagonistic to the above, become in Homer’s own words of greeting, ἅνδρες. Perhaps the employment of νέων παίδων by the Delphic priestess may be due (1) to the fact that they were “fish-boys” proper, (2) to an early and intelligent anticipation of the “juvenescent” tendency, or (3) to the exigency, not unknown to sixth form Hexameter-makers of the present, but (alas! if Oxford and Cambridge be obeyed) not of the future day, of scansion!
[307] Cf. Mus. Borbon., IV. 54, or Baumeister, Denkmäler Klass. Altert. (Munich, 1885), i. 552, f. 588.
[308] The happiest, perhaps the only happy, fishermen are those shown at the bottom of drinking cups, etc.! In P. Hartwig’s (Die griechischen Meisterschalen (Stuttgart-Berlin, 1893), p. 37 ff.) collection of red-figured Greek vases representing fishermen at work, there is an Attic kylix (fifth cent. b.c.) with such a fisherman, who (the idea ran) was only in his element, when the cup was filled with wine. Cf. Theocritus, I. 39 ff., for another old fisherman in the bottom of a herdsman’s cup.
[309] Although the Papyrists have as yet unearthed only some six lines of a new poem by Theocritus (discovered by Mr. M. Johnson, and as yet unpublished), in Pap. Oxyrhynchus, XIII. No. 1618, we find parts of Id., V., VII., and XV.
[310] Translated by Andrew Lang, 1889. The question whether Leonidas of Tarentum was, and Theocritus was not, the author of this Idyll is exhaustively treated by R. J. Cholmeley, Theocritus, pp. 54, 55. Whatever conclusion be reached, constant are the references in those Idylls whose authenticity is undoubted to fish and fishing; even in his familiar comparisons Theocritus thinks of the sea. Mr. Lang writes, “There is nothing in Wordsworth more real, more full of the incommunicable sense of Nature, rounding and softening the toilsome days of the aged and poor, than the Theocritean poem of The Fisherman’s Dream. It is as true to Nature as the statue of the naked fisherman in the Vatican.”