Herodotus mentions a tribe living round Lake Prasias, who in dwellings and food resemble the Wolga folk, and early Continental and English Lake-dwellers:—
“Platforms supplied by tall piles stand in the middle of the lake, which are approached from the land by a narrow single stage. At first the piles were fixed by all citizens, but since that time the custom that has prevailed about fixing them is this, every man drives in three for each wife he marries. Now the men all have many wives apiece, and this is the way they live. Each has his own hut (wherein he dwells) on one of the platforms, and each has a trap door, giving access to the lake beneath: their wont is to tie the baby children by the foot with a string, to save them from rolling into the water. They feed their horses and other beasts on fish, which abound in the lake in such a degree that a man has only to open his trap door, and let down a basket by a rope into the water, and then wait a very short time, when he draws it up quite full of fish.”[217]
Confirming and illustrating Herodotus’s account (I. 202) of how a tribe dwelling on the Araxes lived on raw fish,[218] but depicting more sharply how on fish a whole people were dependent for everything that made up their lives, comes Arrian’s description[219] of the Ichthyophagi of the Persian Gulf.
Denied by the barrenness of their country the ordinary sources of subsistence, they were compelled to use fish for every purpose—food, clothes, houses, etc. These peoples (for the Indian Ichthyophagi are quite distinct from the Arabian) find comment by many authors—e.g. Strabo, Pausanias, Diodorus Siculus. Although by their diet of fish comparatively free from disease, they were noted as short-lived. Alexander the Great, with a view to increasing their span of existence, forbade all the Ichthyophagi an unmixed diet.
Solinus (56, 9) testifies as to their extreme swiftness in swimming: non secus quam marinæ beluæ nando in mari valent. Marco Polo (III. 41) found on the coast of Arabia an interesting survival of the Ichthyophagi. In consequence of the sterility of the soil they fed their cattle, camels, and horses on dried fish, “which being regularly served to them they eat without any signs of dislike. They are dried and stored, and the beasts feed on them from year’s end to year’s end. The cattle will also eat these fish just out of the water.”
Not dissimilar is the account given[220] some twelve centuries earlier of the people of Stobera in India. “They clothe themselves in the skins of very large fishes, and their cattle taste like fish and eat extraordinary things: for they are fed upon fish, just as in Cairo the flocks are fed on figs.”
In strong contrast with these Ichthyophagi other races abstained entirely, not as the Egyptians and Jews partially, from fish. Of such were the Syrians, either because they worshipped fish as gods or held them as sacred,[221] or because (as asserted by Anaximander) of the inhumanity, since mankind originally were born from fish, of devouring one’s fathers and mothers.[222]
Surprising, indeed, sounds the statement of Plutarch that among total abstainers in early times were the more religious-minded of the Greeks, among whom later the eating of fish developed into a passionate, almost cat-like, devotion. Invested though the abstentions, total or other, were with divine origin or armed with divine sanction, the root reason of all of them rested, I believe, on the terror of skin-diseases, attributable to a fish diet.[223] Others, however, hold that the ultimate reason of the tabu lay in the uncanny nature of creatures that can and do live under water, while we can not.
Fishermen rank higher in the time of Herodotus than in the Homeric era. Even the oracles and soothsayers now condescend to avail themselves of their technique and parlance for framing their answers. Thus Amphilytus the Acarnanian encourages Pisistratus before the battle of Pallene with
“The casting net is thrown down, and the fishing net spread wide. And the tunnies shall dart to and fro (therein) in the moonlight.”[224]