Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

130 TRAITS OF FISHERMEN—DEITIES OF FISHINGSophocles {Ajax, 880) to the last Romanticist, ^ but also in thestatuary, pictures, frescoes, mosaics of Greek and Roman Art.Numerous examples can be cited from the museums of Naples,Rome, Paris, and London sustaining the contention that allreal fishermen were ever depicted old and careworn.The fishing boys and women of the Amorini at Pompeiiand elsewhere may be adduced as vitiating this statementbut these, it must be borne in mind, are merely artistic representationsof Anglers and of dalliance, not of real fishermentoiling for their livelihood. So, too, in the Greek representationswhere boys, not Putti or Amorini, figure as fishing, it willbe found that they are helpers or " fish-boys " of the workingfisherman. 3The explanations why fishermen are so rendered vary.Perhaps the truest, certainly the concisest, is Alciphron's,Tpi(^H yap ovB(v 1) daXarra—the sea feeds no one. Accordingto Bunsmann, fishermen are always represented as old andpoor and worn, because their delineators desired by paintingthe career as blackly as possible to excite sympathy. For thispurpose old age and poverty and heavy toil, which appealunto all, stood ready as their most effective strokes.According to Hall, the fisher, a common character in allGreek literature, was in early times described with simpletruth. Only later, when imitation took the place of originality,did conventionalism render him always as aged, pathetic,superstitious, wretchedly poor, yet patient and content. ^^ To cite but one of the scores of intermediate authors as regards poverty,Ovid, Met.. III. 586-91,Pauper et ipse fuit, linoque solebat et hamisDecipere, et calamo salientis ducere pisces.Ars illi sua census erat. Cum traderet artem," Accipe quas habeo, studii successor et heres,"Dixit, " opes." Moriensque mihi nihil ille rehquitPraeter aquas : unum hoc possum appellare paternum.2 The vfoi ira7Ses in the oracles' warning to Homer, which seem at firstsight antagonistic to the above, become in Homer's own words of greeting,AvSpes. Perhaps the employment of veaiv TraiSuv by the Delphic priestessmay be due (i) to the fact that they were " fish-boys " proper, (2) to an earlyand intelligent anticipation of the " juvenescent " tendency, or (3) to theexigency, not unknown to sixth form Hexameter-makers of the present, but(alas ! if Oxford and Cambridge be obeyed) not of the future day, of scansion' Cf. Mus. Borbon., IV. 54, or Baumeister, Denkmdler Klass. Altert. (Munich,1885). i. 552. f. 588.* The happiest, perhaps the only happy, fishermen are those shown at the