[701] P. Robinson, International Fisheries Exhibition (London, 1883), Part III. p. 43. “The representations of the Virgin in a canopy or vesica piscis are supposed to have a specially Christian significance: if they have any at all, it is a very heathenish one.”
[702] Mundus Symbolicus, a rare folio, of which two editions, 1681 and 1694, exist, is a translation of Il Mondo Simbolico (written by Picinelli Filippi, and published at Milan 1653, 1669, and 1680), made by Aug. Erath. Cf. Trésor des livres rares et précieux, tom. v. (Dresde, 1859-69), p. 282. The Bodleian possesses only the 1694 edition of Mundus Symbolicus, while apparently the British Museum lacks both.
[703] The bronze statuette found at Hartsbourg showing the Germanic god Chrodo, standing on a fish, while holding in his uplifted left hand a wheel, and in his lowered right a basket of fruit and vegetables, is not at all on all fours. Cf. Montfaucon, Antiquity Explained, trans. D. Humphreys (London, 1921), II. 261, pl. 56, 3.
[704] The construction of ‘Rosa, Piscis’ is not discernible. Perhaps (‘Rosa Piscis’) would be less obscure.
[705] To Galen alone 149 works are attributed.
[706] For a list of practitioners, medical authors, and quacks before Pliny, and the enormous fees sometimes paid them, see N. H., XXIX. 1, 7. Not inappropriate, and probably not infrequent, when we read of their number and their disagreements, was the epitaph—Turba se medicorum perisse. This attribution of death to too many doctors is accredited to Hadrian, but is probably a Latin adaptation of Menander’s πολλῶν ἰατρῶν εἴσοδος μ’ ἀπώλεσεν.
[707] It is with some surprise that we read of Galen being one of the original Deipnosophistæ (I. 2), and with more still that we find the omnivorous and omniscient Athenæus quoting but once from this most prolific author, and that a passage which lays down, let us trust from the experience of his patients, that Falernian wine over twenty years old causes headaches.
[708] Empedocles, albeit no doctor, is said to have delivered Selinus in Sicily from malaria by drainage, etc., and so roughly anticipated the triumphs of Ross and Gorgas over the mosquito by some 2400 years. See Diog. Laert. VIII. 70, s.v. “Empedocles.”
[709] De Alim. Fac., 3, 28. Cf. De Attenuante victus ratione, vol. vi. ed. Chartier, which confirms and amplifies the above.
[710] Athen., op. cit., VIII., chs. 51-56, which discuss various fishes from a health point of view.