Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

NUMBERS—MIGRATIONS—.ESCHYLUS 103trade. Tunny fishing still remains a lucrative industry in thePeninsula. 1Pliny bears witness to the full stream of Tunny in IX. 2,where he tells us the multitude of the fish which met the fleetof Alexander the Great under the command of Nearchus onone occasion was so vast, that only by advancing in battleline, as on an enemy, was he able to cut his way through :non voce, non sonitu, non ictu, sed fragore terrentur, nee nisiruinaturbantur.^Faber's account of the watchman, of the alarm causedby throwing in stones near the inlet through which the shoalof fish has just passed, of the raising of the hue and cry to driveit towards the end of the enclosure, the battering of the fishto death with oars, and of other devices might well pass, althoughwritten in the nineteenth century, for a description of theTunny fishing by an author of the first century.From this fishing ^Eschylus ^ drew his vivid image of thedestruction of the host of Xerxes at sea—an image placed withmore poetic than dramatic aptness in the mouth of the Persianmessenger who paints the battle to Atossa. " But the Greeks,"he tells her, " kept striking, hacking us with fragments ofoars and splinters of wrecks, as if we were Tunnies or a draftfish."The comparison strikes as all the more telling, when weremember that one of the most killing methods of capturingthe Tunny was and still is by stabbing with pikes and polesthe fish, after having driven them into a narrow space.Imagine the storm of applause, which that bold and glowingpicture (in but two lines !) of the common practice and of thewondrous victory must have aroused from an audience whoeight years before had either fought at or feared for Salamis,to an author whose conspicuous gallantry both there and atMarathon had earned for him the high honour of a place inthe great commemorative fresco in the Stoa Poikile at Athens !^ Cf. the allusion of Cervantes: dos cursos en la academia de la pesca delos atunos.* Arrian {Ind., XXX. i) and Strabo (XV. 12, p. 726) tell the same storyof whales in the Indian Ocean.^PerscB, 424 ff.of