At the death of Oppian in his thirtieth year, the citizens of his native place in Cilicia erected a statue to his memory. It bore the most laudatory of inscriptions, of which the last two lines have been Englished—“All” (i.e. preceding poets)
“All the inspired him their chief allowed And all to him their humbler laurels bowed,”
—to which halting and involved translation we at least neither bow laurels nor doff hats.
The Halieutica is divided into five books. The first two treat of the natural history of fishes, the other three of the art of fishing. Despite this proportion of space, fish rather than fishermen are the heroes of the scenes. The work displays considerable knowledge of zoology, coupled with absurd fables, which are adduced as grave matters of fact.
In the fulness with which he enumerates the various kinds of fish, and methods of fishing, the technique, the weapons, the materials appropriate to each, Oppian stands pre-eminent among our authors. Nor need we wonder at this fullness of treatment. He was wedded heart and soul to all pertaining to fish, or fishing, which he calls the “lovely art.”
The kinds of fish mentioned by this “poeta doctissimus”[407] number, according to Bishop Hieronymus, one hundred and fifty-three. This figure is verified by Ritter, who adds that “Pliny’s long list contains only twenty-three more, i.e. one hundred and seventy-six in all,” a total which hardly warrants the naturalist’s triumphal outburst, “In the sea and in the ocean, vast as it is, there exists by Hercules! nothing that is unknown to us, and a truly marvellous feat it is that we are best acquainted with those things which Nature has concealed in the deep.”[408]
From the only English translation of the Halieutica (made in 1722 by Diaper and Jones, Fellows of Balliol) I take a few passages illustrating the character and methods of Oppianic fishing.[409]
The latter at once arrest our attention by their modernity. They are practically ours. Apostolides in his work describing fishing in modern Greece states that “les quatre engins d’Oppien, les filets, les hameçons, les harpons et les nasses,” with the addition of “les claies de roseau, d’importation romaine sans doute,” are the weapons of Hellas in the present day. The tricks of Oppian prevail in the Peloponnese: to-day, as nearly two millenniums back, the Scarus and the Mullet are caught by using the female as decoy.
The procedure of taking the Octopus (which Aristotle pictures for us in IV. 8), “when clinging so tightly to the rocks that it cannot be pulled off, but remains attached, even when the knife is employed to sever it: and yet if one employ fleabane (κόνυζα) to the creature, it drops off at once,” remains the same in Greece to-day. Apostolides writes (p. 50), “Comme on voit, non seulement le procédé de pêche aux poulpes a persisté jusqu’à nos jours, mais la plante (Conyse) qu’on emploie à cet effet porte encore le même nom.”
But as Canning called into existence a new world to redress the balance of power in the old, so too the Attic fisherman to dislodge the Octopus has, Raleigh-like, imported to the aid of his old herb, American tobacco.[410]