Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

98 THE DOLPHIN—ICHTHYOPHAGI—THE TUNNYfeed on them from year's end to year's end.The cattle willalso eat these fish just out of the water."Not dissimilar is the account given i some twelve centuriesearlier of the people of Stobera in India. " They clothe themselvesin the skins of very large fishes, and their cattle tastelike fish and eat extraordinary things : for they are fed uponfish, just as in Cairo the flocks are fed on figs."In strong contrast with these Ichthyophagi other racesabstained entirely, not as the Egyptians and Jews partially,from fish. Of such were the Syrians, either because they worshippedfish as gods or held them as sacred, 2 or because (asasserted by Anaximander) of the inhumanity, since mankindoriginally were born from lish, of devouring one's fathers andmothers. 3Surprising, indeed, sounds the statement of Plutarch thatamong total abstainers in early times were the more religiousmindedof the Greeks, among whom later the eating of fishdeveloped into a passionate, almost cat-Hke, devotion. Investedthough the abstentions, total or other, were with divine originor armed with divine sanction, the root reason of all of themrested, I beheve, on the terror of skin-diseases, attributable to a1 Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, III. 48."^Xenophon, Anab., I. 4 ; Cicero, de nat. Deorum, III. 39 ; Ovid, Fasti,II. 473-4.3 Very different was the behaviour of the first generation of Man (whoaccording to Philo's Translation of Sanchuniathon, quoted by Eusebius, prcep.ev., I. 9, 5), " consecrated the plants shooting out of the earth, judged themgods, worshipped them, but yet Hved upon them" (Cf. de Brosses, Cultedes Dieux Fetiches). In Plutarch, Symp., VIII. 8. 4, Nestor states that " thepriests of Poseidon never eat fish, for Poseidon is called the Generator ; andthe race of Hellen sacrificed to him as the first father, imagining, as hkewisedid the Syrians, that Man rose from a hquid substance, and therefore theyworship a fish as of the same production and breeding as themselves, beingin this matter more happy in their philosophy than Anaximander : for hesays that fish and men were not produced in the same substance, but thatmen were first produced in fishes and, when they were grown up and able tofend for themselves, were thrown out and so lived on the land. Therefore,as fire devours its parents, that is the matter out of which it was first kindled,so Anaximander, asserting that fish were our common parents, condemnethour feeding upon them." The belief in the descent of man from fish existsin the present day among the Ponapians of the Caroline Islands, and elsewhere(J. G. Frazer, Folk Lore in the Old Testament (London, 1918), i. 40). As regardsthe changes in our development which make the whole world kin, Empedocles,(KaBap/xol, frag. 117, Diels) sings,^5ij yap •nor' iyu yev6fj.riu Kodp6s re Kupr] redifxvos r olotyds re Kal e^a\os eWonos IxQvs.