From this fishing Æschylus[235] drew his vivid image of the destruction of the host of Xerxes at sea—an image placed with more poetic than dramatic aptness in the mouth of the Persian messenger who paints the battle to Atossa. “But the Greeks,” he tells her, “kept striking, hacking us with fragments of oars and splinters of wrecks, as if we were Tunnies or a draft of fish.”
The comparison strikes as all the more telling, when we remember that one of the most killing methods of capturing the Tunny was and still is by stabbing with pikes and poles the fish, after having driven them into a narrow space.
Imagine the storm of applause, which that bold and glowing picture (in but two lines!) of the common practice and of the wondrous victory must have aroused from an audience who eight years before had either fought at or feared for Salamis, to an author whose conspicuous gallantry both there and at Marathon had earned for him the high honour of a place in the great commemorative fresco in the Stoa Poikile at Athens!
Phædimus states: “The Tunny is so sensible of the equinoxes and solstices that he teaches even men themselves without the help of any astrological table.”[236] Further, that being dim sighted, or as according to Æschylus “casting a squint-eye like a Tunny,” the fish always coast the Euxine Sea on the right side and contrariwise when they come forth—“prudently committing the care of their bodies to their best eye!”
Again, although the fish lack knowledge of arithmetic, they are yet so endowed that “they arrive in such a manner to the perfection of that science,” that for mutual love and protection “they always make up their whole fry into the form of a cube and make a solid of the whole number consisting of six equal planes, and swim in such order as to present an equal front in each direction.”
“The Tunny more than any other fish delights in the heat of the sun. It will burrow for warmth in the sand in shallow waters near the shore, or will, because it is warm, disport itself on the surface of the sea.”[237] With this pleasure inevitably surgit aliquid amari, for about the rising of the Dog-star this fish, as well as the sword fish, became the prey of a piercing parasite, which was nicknamed the “gadfly.”
The ordinary weights and sizes to which the Tunny attained are uncertain. The passages in Arist., N. H., VIII. 30, and in Pliny, IX. 17, on account of the doubt whether the span of tail should be two or five cubits are not authoritative. Richter records the capture in 1565 of a fish thirty-two feet long and sixteen feet thick, on whose skin a ship of war was depicted in its entirety.[238]
The power of the skin to expand seems the only limitation of their size and weight, for they take on fat till they burst.[239] No wonder that for beasts of such dimensions the Celtæ used great iron hooks,[240] which elsewhere were double.[241] But their devices met defeat by these “Fat” (if not somnolent) “Boys” of the Sea, for teste Oppian,
“Oft on the Spikes that arm the indented Chine Rolling averse they sawed the trembling Line.”
The Tuna of the Canadian and Californian coasts run very heavy: one of the former caught on a Rod and Line weighed 707 lbs.