Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

96 THE DOLPHIN—ICHTHYOPHAGI—THE TUNNYdid the legend continue to be held that even up to the thirdcentury b.c. the lasians struck coins with the device of a youthswimming beside a dolphin, which he clasps with one arm.^Like Scylla, who " fishes for dolphins and whatso greaterbeast she may anywhere take," both the Thracians and Byzantines,despite the enormous annual revenues derived by thelatter from their fisheries, caught and ate the Dolphin, and forso-doing are branded as impious and barbarian. 2 The moreancient Byzantine coins show a cow standing on a dolphin,which perhaps symbolises the heifer crossing the Bosporus. ^The ancient literature of the EastTHE DOLPHIN AND THE BOYOF lASOS.From Coin, British Museum,Cat. PI. 21. 7.alsoportrays Dolphins {^ i gumdras)as the ready helpers of man, in rescuinglives, in drawing ships, etc.^Theinhabitants of Isle Sainte Marie, nearMadagascar, even now never harmor eat the fish, holding it as sacred,because they believe it renderedsignal service to some ancestor.^Herodotus mentions a tribe livinground Lake Prasias, who in dwellingsand food resemble the Wolga folk,and early Continental and EnglishLake-dwellers :" Platforms suppHed by tall piles stand in the middle ofthe lake, which are approached from the land by a narrow^ Brit. Mus. Cat., pi. XXI. 7. B. V. Head, Historia Numonim, 620 f.(ed. 2, Oxford, 1911). In Plutarch's {de Sol. Anini., 36) the lad was thrownfrom the fish's back by a terrible shower of hail and was drowned.2 Oppian, hal., V. 521 ff.^ B. V. Head, op. cit. p. 266 flP. As an emblem of the sea the dolphinis very general, from the rude sculpturings of Etruscan sarcophagi, the latermural adornments at Pompeii, down to the paintings of the walls of theVatican by Raphael. In all, the striking dissemblancy to the actual dolphinof natural history can be remarked at a glance. In the case of Raphael,however, it must be remembered that the designs are modelled on the classicaldecorations which were discovered in the Baths of Titus, where the Dolphinhad been with propriety introduced as a marine symbol (Moule, Heraldryof Fish, p. 8).•*De Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology (London, 1872), ii. 336.^ Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (London, 1910), ii. 636. W. A. Cork,op. cit., p. 96, states that the Karayds of the Amazon Valley, although eatingnearly every other lish, abstain from the Dolphin.