Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

Alia120 TRAITS OF FISHERMEN—DEITIES OF FISHINGliterary bucolic. Virgil, for instance, admits his model inthe opening lines of Eclogue IV.Sicelides Muscb, paulo maiora canamus . . .A recent writer straightly asserts that " without Theocritusthe Bucolics (save the mark !) of Virgil could never have beenconceived, or, if conceived, would have miscarried." iWhether or not the offspring of this parentage is not toosavagely depreciated, we note with surprise that Virgil," Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hiveand horse and herd ;All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word,"a professed imitator of Theocritus, to whom fishermen were asfamiliar as the waters by which they lived and figured in manyof his Idylls,^ never mentions fishermen in his Bucolics.His only (I believe) allusions to them—and the first ismerely incidental to an account of the primitive Arts of Man,and how fishing as an Art came in only as the Golden Agewent out—are in Georgic, I. 141-2, Atque alius latum funda iamverberai amnem petens, pelagoque alius trahit Immida\Una, and in the Mneid (XII. 517 ff.)Et iuvenem exosum nequiquam bella Menoeten,Arcada, piscosae cui circum flumina LernaeArs fuerat, pauperque domus, nee nota potentumMunera, conductaque pater tellure serebat.^Even in these four lines observe how insistently rings outthe note of poverty !—the constant characteristic,the almostinvariable badge, as we shall soon see, of every professional^ Moses Browne in the introductory essay to his Angling Sports in NinePiscatory Eclogues asserts that Servius allowed only seven of Virgil's Bucolicsto be pure pastorals, while Heinsius for similar reasons rejects all but ten ofTheocritus's Idylls.2 I. 39 ff. ; III. 25 f. ; IX. 25 ff. ; and especially in XXI.^ With the execrable taste of his age Sannazaro considered himself boundto produce still paler shades of those pale shadows, the Eclogues of Virgil,just as their author, the most precedent-loving of poets, rarely ventured tointroduce an image or an incident without the authority of some Greekoriginal (W. M. Adams, op. cit., p. 45). Moses Browne {ibid.) declares thatit would have been far better if Sannazaro had never written his " sea eclogues,for the exercise of fishing appears so contemptible in him, that any thatwrites on a subject, that seems to be of a similar aspect, must suffer disadvantage."