The original habitat of the Scarus was in the seas off Asia Minor, especially in the Carpathian Sea. During the Augustan age it was rarely taken in Italian waters, and then only when driven thither by storms. Thus Horace complains that neither Lucrine oysters nor Rhombi come his way,
“aut scari, Si quos Eois intonata fluctibus Hiems ad hoc vertat mare.” (Ep., II. 50 ff.)
Pliny (IX. 29), after attributing to the Scarus the unique characteristic of being herbivorous and never feeding on other fish and asserting that of its own accord it never passes from the Carpathian Sea beyond Cape Troas, goes on to tell us that in the time of Tiberius (or Octavius, according to Macrobius) vast quantities at the Emperor’s command were collected by an Admiral of the Fleet and planted along the Ostian and Campanian shores.
Careful protection by land and sea rendered poaching almost impossible. For the period of five years any scarus caught in the nets had, under heavy penalties, to be returned straightway to the water. The enforcement of these wise regulations effected such mighty thriving of the fish, that “postea frequentes inveniuntur Italiæ in litore, non antea ibi capti; admovitque sibi gula sapores piscibus satis et novum incolam mari dedit.”
This operation commands our comment, not merely on account of its big success, but because it is the earliest and (as far as I can discover) the only instance in all ancient literature, certainly in Greek and Latin, of the acclimatisation of fish (not eggs) in the sea, and on a large scale.
I do not include, though I do not forget, the large lucrative planting of oysters in the Lucrine lake by Sergius Orata centuries before.[368] Later on we shall read of the Romans carrying eggs, naturally fertilised, from one water to another, and of the Chinese[369] transporting vast quantities of similar eggs considerable distances.
But their methods and operations differed from the Emperor’s. Pliny expressly states that the Admiral planted fish, not eggs of fish, in the sea, not in fresh water, and in a new habitat hundreds of miles from the old.
To this planting or involuntary colonisation, Petronius—seemingly, despite controversy, the “Elegantiæ Arbiter,” or the not altogether Admirable Crichton, of Tacitus—probably alludes:
“ultimus ab oris Attractus scarus atque arata Syrtis Si quid naufragio dedit, probatur.”[370]
Poets and gourmets have vied in singing the praises of the fish as the daintiest of dishes—“according to the Greeks to do justice to its flesh was not easy: to speak of its trail, as it deserved, was impossible, and to throw away even its excrement was a sin.” Confirmatory of Badham reads the pronouncement of magnus ille et subtilis helluo, “that great and exquisite gourmet” Archestratus, who from the grandiloquence and gravity of his Epic was evidently of opinion omne cum fidibus helluoni![371]