a professed imitator of Theocritus, to whom fishermen were as familiar as the waters by which they lived and figured in many of his Idylls,[277] never mentions fishermen in his Bucolics.
His only (I believe) allusions to them—and the first is merely incidental to an account of the primitive Arts of Man, and how fishing as an Art came in only as the Golden Age went out—are in Georgic, I. 141-2, Atque alius latum funda iam verberat amnem | Alta petens, pelagoque alius trahit humida lina, and in the Æneid (XII. 517 ff.):
Et iuvenem exosum nequiquam bella Menœten, Arcada, piscosæ cui circum flumina Lernæ Ars fuerat, pauperque domus, nec nota potentum Munera, conductaque pater tellure serebat.[278]
Even in these four lines observe how insistently rings out the note of poverty!—the constant characteristic, the almost invariable badge, as we shall soon see, of every professional fisherman in Greek poems, plays, or writers from Homer down to the later Greek Romanticists,[279] or (as far as I know) in the epigrams from 700 b.c. to 500 a.d., of the Anthologia Palatina.[280]
“The figure of the weather-beaten fisher is a favourite one in the old poets, and we meet it constantly in Art; in Greek, and in Roman Art especially, it was a very favourite subject.”[281]
M. Campaux, Mr. Hall, and Herr Bunsmann confirm and amplify this sentence of Blümner’s. The thesis of Bunsmann—not easy to obtain, although published in 1910 at Münster in Westphalia—seems within its limited scope (he scarcely touches on the methods or craft of fishing) perhaps the best little treatise De Piscatorum in Græcorum atque Romanorum litteris usu.
He sets out to discover and formulate a list of the characteristics most frequently attributed to fishermen. He proceeds to establish each of the dozen selected by buttressing questions from Homer down to Sidonius.
Hospitality, Piety to the Gods and Dead, Shrewd (almost Pawky) Humour, Old Age, Toil and Poverty figure most prominently. I can only notice one or two of the passages cited in support of each characteristic, but the evidence adduced generally carries conviction.
On the Hospitality of fishermen, poor though it were, stress is laid by Greek and Roman writers.
Bunsmann’s citation of Petronius (Sat., 114) and Plutarch (Vita Pompeii, 73) as witnesses to credit is, however, far from happy, especially in the case of the former, who recounts that when the boat had been so battered as to be a-wash “procurrere piscatores parvulis expediti navigiis ad prædam rapiendam.” The lightning-like change of the fishermen, on realising that their intended victims were ready to defend themselves, from plunderers to helpers, and the non-denial to the shipwrecked folk of the use of their hut for eating some sea-sodden food, scarcely shine as exemplars of high Hospitality. No wonder the guests dragged out a “most miserable night.”