[401] Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act II. Sc. 5. Weigall, The Life and Times of Cleopatra, pp. 245-6, makes the locus the harbour of Alexandria, not the Nile, and the modus, Antony’s diver affixing fresh fish to his hook. Cleopatra, guessing Antony’s ruse, assembled next day a party of notables to applaud the angler, but instructed a slave to dive from the other side of the vessel and the instant the hook touched the water attach to it a pickled Pontic fish. Cleopatram “ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?”
[402] A century or so before Oppian, Demostratus, a Roman Senator, wrote also Ἁλιευτικά—a work on Fishing of twenty books—which, although often quoted by ancient writers, is now not extant. From the extracts given by Ælian (XIII. 21, XV. 4 and 19) we gather that Demostratus, who wrote in Greek, had even more than a Greek love of the marvellous and cared nothing for the sober scientific study of his subject. It is noteworthy that an alternative title of his work was λόγοι ἁλιευτικοί, or, say, Fishing Yarns.
[403] Suetonius, Augustus, c. 83, classes fishing as one of Octavian’s chief relaxations.
[404] W. Christ, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur, ed. 3 (München, 1898), p. 629, decides for Marcus Aurelius.
[405] As there are 3506 hexameters, the reward was over 3506 guineas sterling, which, without allowing for the increase in value of money between the second century and the twentieth, contrasts remarkably with the fourpence halfpenny a volume of Martial. According to Suidas, however, Oppian received from the Emperor 20,000 staters, which would be a far larger reward than Octavia bestowed on Virgil for his Æneid. It has been suggested that this largesse was not paid on all the verses of the Halieutica, but only on those in which Oppian records the prowess and sport of the Emperor in “The Virginia Water” of the Cæsars—where we learn from Eutropius (VII. 14) that Nero fished with golden nets drawn by purple ropes. If so the total would be a mere fraction of either the 3506 guineas or of the 16,000 guineas. Great doubt exists as to whether or not there were two poets named Oppian; and if there were, to which does the anonymous Greek Life of Oppian refer, and which of the two was the author of Ixeutica, for possibly it was to the author of this poem that the Imperial payment of gold was made. See W. H. Drummond’s paper in Royal Irish Academy, 1818. Also A. Ausfeld, De Oppiano et scriptis sub eius nomine traditis, Gotha, 1876.
[406] Cf. Prof. E. Browne, Literary History of Persia, vol. II., pp. 128-138, and Sir Gore Ouseley’s Biographies of Persian Poets, for the various Firdausi versions.
[407] “De quibus Oppianus Cilix est, poeta doctissimus, 153 esse genera piscium, quæ omnia capta sunt ab Apostolis, et nihil remansit incaptum, dum et nobiles et ignobiles, divites et pauperes, et omne genus hominum de mari hujus sæculi extrahitur ad salutem.” Comment. in Ezechiel. Cf. Ritter, op. cit., p. 376.
[408] N. H., XXXII. 53.
[409] The great objection to this translation, owing probably to the difficulty of expressing—certainly of compressing—the “intractable” subject matter in the rhymed verse adopted by the translators, is its weary verbiage: for instance, one passage of three lines in the translation needs twelve, and another of nine needs thirty! Diaper was the author of Nereides, or Sea-Eclogues.
[410] N. C. Apostolides, La Pêche en Grèce (Athènes, 1907), p. 31. The selection of Aristotle as the prototype of philosophical inveighers against Tobacco by Thomas Corneille (Act I., Sc. 1, of Le Festin de Pierre),