[457] The biggest Pike ever caught in the United Kingdom seems to be the 72-pounder mentioned by Colonel Thornton in his “Sporting Tour.” Walton’s ring-decorated fish (see Gesner), three hundred years or so old, was no doubt heavier, if it were genuine. At any rate a Pike of 40-50 lbs. is very exceptional.
[458] The value of the herring (Clupea harengus) was unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and so remained generally till the Middle Ages. “Ignorance, presumably of the real nature of the Cetaceans betrayed our forefathers into breaking Lent, for under the impression that the whale, porpoise, and seal were fish, they ate them on fast days. High prices, moreover, were paid for such meats, and porpoise pudding was a dish of State as late as the sixteenth century” (P. Robinson, Fisheries Exhibition Literature, Pt. III. p. 42). Some laxity may, I think, be pardoned, for the very name “porpoise” (in Guernsey pourpeis)—derived apparently from porc-peis (porcum + piscem)—implies that the creature was regarded as a “pig-fish.”
[459] Cf. Chapter IV. Also Plutarch, Symp., VIII. 8, and Aristoph., Ach., 880.
[460] Akin to this we have the special prohibition—unique as far as I know—whereby priests at the temple of Leptis abstained from eating sea fish, because Poseidon was god of the sea, and owner and protector of its denizens. Plutarch, De solert. an., 35, 11. At other of his temples, e.g. in Laconia, the fate awaiting a violator of the sacred fish was that common to poachers of similar holy waters, death.
[461] The Love of Nature among the Romans (London, 1912), p. 300, n. 1.
[462] Passages which at first sight seem to conflict with this summary can often be ruled out from (A) geographical reasons, where (1) the fishing occurs in some non-Greek water, as in the Tiber (Galen, περὶ τροφῶν δυνάμεως, 3), or (2) the locality is not specified, as in Athen., VIII. 56, which is merely a quotation from a treatise of Mnesitheus, concerned with all kinds of fish from a digestive point of view; and (B) from the brackish nature of water.
[463] Dio. Cass. 76, 12, 2, speaks of the Scottish Seas as swarming and crammed with fish.
[464] Damm, p. 465, asserts that the order of eating of fish among the Greeks was (1) Fish from the sea, and then, but much later, (2) Fish from the rapids of a river. Daremberg and Saglio: “Pour les Grecs le poisson d’eau douce comptait à peine dans la consommation du poisson de mer: seules les anguilles du lac Copaïs avaient quelque renom. Mais la pêche maritime eut toujours beaucoup plus d’importance.” Pliny, XXXII. 10: Pisces marinos in usu fuisse protinus a condita Roma. Philemon the comedian makes the cook in his play, “The Soldier” (cited by Athen., VII. 32), bewail having for the feast mere,
“river fish, eaters of mud; If I had had a scare or bluebacked fish from Attic waters I should have been accounted an immortal!”
[465] See infra, p. 287.