Tyrrhenus, the old deaf fisherman in The Ethiopian History (omitted by Bunsmann), embodies a far better instance of the characteristic Hospitality. His glad welcome and the surrender to his guests of “the cosier part of his dwelling” betoken Nature’s gentleman.[282]
A still better instance meets us in the Greek romance of Apollonius of Tyre[283] possibly an imitation of the Heliodorus idyll. The prince, sole survivor of a shipwreck, is found, fed, clad, and afterwards directed by an old fisherman to Pentapolis, where he wins a competition before the king. This romance, which survives in a Latin version of the sixth century, became in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries widely popular and translated into most European languages. To it, as the scenes and the characters prove, Shakespeare, or possibly Wilkins, must have owed much of his Pericles.
On the question whence originated their Piety to the Gods, whether it sprang from or was only influenced by the fact that their lives were passed amid the unknown but ever-present and awful forces of Nature identified with certain gods, or sprang rather from a gratitude proportioned to future benefits, Bunsmann is discreetly non-committal.
But of outward and visible signs of such Piety the Anthologia Palatina is eloquent. Their Piety towards the dead is strikingly attested by Hegesippus, the simplicity of whose style in his eight epigrams in Anth. Pal. betokens an early date. “The fishermen brought up from the sea in their net a half-eaten man, a most mournful relic of some voyage. They sought not for unholy gain, but him and the fishes too they buried under this light coat of sand.”[284]
Bunsmann furnishes two records of impiety among fishermen. The first occurs in the well-known Baiano procul a lacu recede of Martial (Epigr., IV. 30), where an impious poacher in the very act of landing his fish from the Emperor’s lake is stricken with blindness. The second, in Athen., VII. 18, and Ælian, XV. 23, where Epopeus, a fisherman of the island of Icarus, enraged by taking nothing but sacred or tabu Pompili, turned to with his son and devoured them, only themselves in turn to be devoured by a whale.[285]
But the impietas charged from Anth. Pal., VI. 24, is fantastic. The indictment has been drawn owing either to mistranslation of the passage or inability to appreciate the rather heavy-handed humour (frequent in the Greek and Roman writers of the time) of Lucilius, a conjectured author of the Epigram.
Heliodorus lays down at the portals of the temple of “the Syrian goddess” a votive offering of his fishing net worn out, not by catches of fish, but of seaweed “from the beaches of goodly havens.” This dedication, as fish were sacred to the goddess and in Syria were forbidden as a food, has been imputed as an affront to the deity, but quite incorrectly. Heliodorus in offering his net intended no disrespect, nor offended any law of the temple. Since its sole catch had been seaweed, his net could plead “pure from the prey of fishery.”
The point of the pleasantry is akin to the caustic defence offered on behalf of a Jewish portrait painter, “as none of the pictures are likenesses, he is guiltless of breaking the Second Commandment!”
Ovid’s pretty fancy to account for the Syrian abstention doubtless hangs together with the Greek conception of Atargatis and Aphrodite being one and the same. When the Giants revolted against the Gods, Venus fleeing with Cupid reaches, but is stayed by, the Euphrates: thither, Palæstinæ margine aquæ, in answer to her piteous plaints to heaven above and earth below, two fish approach and convey mother and child safely across the flood.[286]
“Inde nefas ducunt genus hoc imponere mensis Nec violant timidi piscibus ora Syri.” Fasti, II. 473-4.