Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

CHAPTER VIITHEOCRITUS —THE GREEK EPIGRAMMATISTSBut to return to our second locus classicus, The Fisherman's''Dream of Theocritus. i The whole Idyll (XXL), an exquisitepiece of word painting, deserves careful reading as a study ofthe piscatory genre, but room can only be found for part of ithere. 2" 'Tis poverty alone, Diophantus, that awakens the arts ;Poverty, the very teacher of labour.Nay, not even sleep ispermitted by weary cares to men that live by toil, and if,for a little while, one closes his eyes in the night, cares throngabout him and suddenly disquiet his slumber." Two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay downand slept—they had strown the dry sea-moss for a bed in theirwattled cabin, and there they lay against the leafy wall. Besidethem were strewn the instruments of their toilsome hands, thefishing creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggledwith sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster pots woven ofrushes, the seines, two oars, and an old coble upon props.Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, theirsailor's caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth.1 Although the Papyrists have as yet unearthed only some six lines of a newpoem by Theocritus (discovered by Mr. M. Johnson, and as yet unpublished),in Pap. Oxyrhynchus, XIII. No. i6i8, we find parts of Id., V., VII., and XV.* Translated by Andrew Lang, 1889. The question whether Leonidas ofTarentum was, and Theocritus was not, the author of this Idyll is exhaustivelytreated by R. J. Cholmeley, Theocritus, pp. 54, 55. Whatever conclusion bereached, constant are the references in those Idylls whose authenticity isundoubted to fish and fishing ; even in his familiar comparisons Theocritusthinks of the sea. Mr. Lang writes, " There is nothing in Wordsworth morereal, more full of the incommunicable sense of Nature, rounding and softeningthe toilsome days of the aged and poor, than the Theocritean poem of TheFisherman s Dream. It is as true to Nature as the statue of the naked fishermanin the Vatican."