“Bold in the front the little pilot glides, Averts each danger, every motion guides; With grateful joy the willing whales attend, Observe the leader and revere the friend; True to the little chief obsequious roll, And soothe in friendship’s charms their savage soul. Between the distant eyeballs of the whale The watchful pilot waves his faithful tail, With signs expressive points the doubtful way, The bulky tyrants doubt not to obey, Implicit trust repose in him alone, And hear and see with senses not their own; To him the important reins of life resign, And every self-preserving care decline.”[422]
Some of Oppian’s best bits contain animated portraits of sea-fights. The combatants are as intensely personified as Homer’s Greeks and Trojans in their hand-to-hand fight on the banks of the Scamander. But unlike the Heroes, the belligerents of Oppian pull each other to pieces without any responsibility on their part, or shock to moral sense on ours:
“Unwise we blame the rage of warring fish Who urged by hunger must supply the wish; While cruel man, to whom his ready food Kind Earth affords, yet thirsts for human blood.”
In proportion as fish, which according to the earliest authors was despised or disregarded, grew in favour with the Greeks, the frequency of its mention in Greek literature increased apace.
The Deipnosophistæ by Athenæus, to which belongs the distinction of being one of the earliest collections of Ana, is a curious sort of philosophers’ feast. It quotes from nearly every writer on nearly every topic; it discusses almost every conceivable subject, especially gastronomy. It weighs the qualities of all things edible. Comments on fish, taken from plays, histories, treatises, etc., are plentifully, if incongruously, scattered.[423]
Everything goes in this work; grammatical problems are mixed up with gastronomic; the discursiveness of Athenæus races from grave to gay, grim death to any story, however apparently disconnected.
His tale of the Pinna (III. 46), a bivalve shellfish, and the Pinnothere (a small crab who inhabits the shell of the Pinna) resembles many of the fables current among the West Indian negroes as regards the cleverness of the Crab. As soon as the small fish, on which the Pinna subsists, have swum within the shell side, the Pinnothere nips the Pinna as a signal to him to close his shell and secure them.
Plutarch (De Sol. Anim., 30) shows that the habit was not entirely altruistic, for “this being done, they feed together upon the common prey.” From the Pinna which haunts the bottom of the sea. From the Pinna which haunts the bottom of the sea came ”the most transparent pearls, very pure and very large.”[424]
The enormous industry of Athenæus, who (VIII. 15) speaking of the materials he had amassed for this one book, casually states that he himself “had read and made extracts from 800 plays of the Middle Comedy alone,” and in it cites nearly 800 authors, and over 1200 separate books, has undoubtedly preserved to us many valuable passages of the ample literature and numerous plays in which fishermen once figured. My many quotations from and references to his Deipnosophistæ make it unnecessary to deal with this author[425] at greater length.