Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

FISHING EPIGRAMS—LEONIDAS 137flint pregnant with fire, that sets ahght the tinder "), correspondsin material and order of enumeration fairly closely withAsphalion's in Theocritus.Of the second I borrow a spirited translation of the last lines," Yet—not Arcturus, nor the blasts that blowDown-rushing, swept this aged man below :But like a lamp long burning, and whose lightFlickers, self-spent, and is extinguished quite,In a rush hut he died :—to him this grave(No wife, no child he had) his brother fishers gave." 1The third, which should be The Awful Warning, if anywarning avail, to boys fishing in the middle of a burn and holdingwhile changing their lure a fish in their teeth (who of us has notdone this?), sets a picture of a more violent death, "for theslippery thing went wriggling down his narrow gullet," andchoked him on the spot.The subjoined, somewhat loose, translation is from Blackwood'sMagazine, Vol. XXXVIII." Parmis, the son of Callignotus—heWho trolled for fish the margin of the sea,Chief of his craft, whose keen perceptive search,The kichl^, scarus, bait-devouring perch.And such as love the hollow clefts, and thoseThat in the caverns of the deep repose,Could not escape— is dead !Parmis had luredA Julis from its rocky haunts, securedBetween his teeth the slippery pert, when, lo !It jerked into the gullet of its foe,^The following translation by Mr. Andrew Lang is truer"Theris the Old, the waves that harvestedMore keen than birds that labour in the sea.With spear and net, by shore and rocky bed.Not with the well-manned galley laboured heHim not the star of storms, nor sudden sweepOf wind with all his years hath smitten and bent,But in his hut of reeds he fell asleep,As fades a lamp when all the oil is spentThis tomb nor wife nor children raised, but weHis fellow-toilers, fishers of the sea."2 I n line 5 irpiir-ns, which makes nonsense, should certainly be corrected to