The Friend: “Nay, never fear, thou art no more sworn than thou hast found the golden fish[315] of thy vision: dreams are but lies. But if thou wilt search these waters, wide awake and not asleep, there is some hope in thy slumbers: seek the fish of flesh, lest thou die of famine with all thy dreams of gold!”
The influence of Theocritus, though becoming less natural and rendered more conventional by the pretty conceits of the later Alexandrian period,[316] permeates the literature of Greece and Rome for many centuries. In none, perhaps, is this influence more marked than in his pupils Bion and Moschus, and in his younger contemporary, Leonidas of Tarentum.
Three fisher epigrams[317] by Leonidas suffice as evidence of this. The realism, the pathos, the detailed treatment, the subjects, lowly folk, all alike characterise the Sicilian.
In the first, the fisherman Diophantus on giving up his trade dedicates, according to custom, all the relics of his calling to the patron of his craft. The list of the implements, including a well-bent hook, long rod, and line of horse hair, here and in an epigram by Philippus of Thessalonica (which adds “the flint pregnant with fire, that sets alight the tinder”), corresponds in material and order of enumeration fairly closely with Asphalion’s in Theocritus.
Of the second I borrow a spirited translation of the last lines,
“Yet—not Arcturus, nor the blasts that blow Down-rushing, swept this aged man below: But like a lamp long burning, and whose light Flickers, self-spent, and is extinguished quite, In a rush hut he died:—to him this grave (No wife, no child he had) his brother fishers gave.”[318]
The third, which should be The Awful Warning, if any warning avail, to boys fishing in the middle of a burn and holding while changing their lure a fish in their teeth (who of us has not done this?), sets a picture of a more violent death, “for the slippery thing went wriggling down his narrow gullet,” and choked him on the spot.
The subjoined, somewhat loose, translation is from Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. XXXVIII.[319]
“Parmis, the son of Callignotus—he Who trolled for fish the margin of the sea, Chief of his craft, whose keen perceptive search, The kichlé, scarus, bait-devouring perch, And such as love the hollow clefts, and those That in the caverns of the deep repose, Could not escape—is dead! Parmis had lured A Julis from its rocky haunts, secured Between his teeth the slippery pert, when, lo! It jerked into the gullet of its foe, Who fell beside his lines and hooks and rod, And the choked fisher sought his last abode. His dust lies here. Stranger, this humble grave An angler to a brother angler gave.”
Alciphron, judging from his extant letters, seems the most prolific of the later Piscatory writers. His tribute to the veracity of Sosias, “who is famous for the delicious sauce made of the fish which he entices,” reads in such deadly opposition to the common but false impression that fishermen rank next to mining engineers as the biggest liars in the world, that it must be quoted, if only on the principle of “An angler to a brother angler gave.”