“Laud to the Lord, who gives to this, to that denies his wishes, And dooms one toil and catch the prey, another eat the fishes.”[266]
This seems the most convenient, if not quite the chronological, place for examining the position and attributes of fishermen in the poems, epigrams, and eclogues of Greek literature.
Of the two oldest of fisherfolk epigrams or epitaphs, the first is attributed to Sappho, the second to Alcæus of Mitylene. In these rings insistent the same note of hard toil and poverty, which permeates the piscatory eclogues of Theocritus and his followers.
From Sappho “the sole woman of any age or any country who gained and still holds an unchallenged place in the first rank of the world’s poets”[267] comes down
“Meniscus, mourning for his only son, The toil-experienced fisher Pelagon, Has placed upon his tomb a net and oar, The badges of a painful life and poor.”[268]
I cherished high hope of finding in the recently discovered Fragments of Sappho in Part X. of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, or in the articles on them by Mr. J. M. Edmonds in the Classical Review of May 1914 and June 1916, a second fisher epigram, or at any rate an allusion to fishing. Alas! the Papyri yield some amatory, but no piscatory verses. Apparently neither Sappho nor Alcæus make any other reference to fishing.
The verses of Alcæus stress poverty even more strongly:
“The fisher Diotimus had at sea And shore the same abode of poverty— His trusty boat—and when his days were spent, Therein self-rowed, to ruthless Dis he went: For that which did through life his woes beguile, Supplied the old man with a funeral pile.”[269]
“From fragments of Greek Comedy it is evident that fishers were among the familiar characters on the stage, and were sometimes the protagonists.” Examination of the Old, Middle and New Comedians confirm Dr. Hall.[270]
In Epicharmus (b.c. 540-450) the reputed founder of Comedy in Sicily; in Sophron’s The Fisherman and the Clown, where the former naturally outwits the country boor; in Plato the comedian’s Phaon, where he may have ridiculed the legend of Sappho’s vain love for the Lesbian fisherman; in The Fishes by Archippus, where people were satirised under the names of fishes spelled in the same way as their own; or (to pass from Old to Middle Comedy) in The Fisher-Woman by Antiphanes (in the fragments of which, however, we are confronted by no Sex problem, by no Suffragettism[271]); and (of the New Comedy authors) in Menander’s The Fishermen (where we gather from Pollux that a fisher came on the stage fully equipped for fishing), in all these plays and many more appear fisher folk.[272]