Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

MARTIAL AND JUVENAL—OYSTERS 145For in this same epigram and many others the poet is fain" Ante focum plenas explicuisse plagas,Et piscem tremula salientem ducere seta."To him these rank among the chief dehghts of country Hfe,which Hfe he, though an admirable flaneur, places higher thanall else.He ends his vivid sketch of it with the passionate burst" Let not the man who loves not this life, love me, and let himgo on with his city life—white as his own toga !Martial's charming picture of a Roman homestead, of its life,live-stock, of its pursuits, and of its fishing, 2 contrasts vividlywith his fawning eulogies of Emperors, and his savage satireon foes. It must be confessed, however, that some of hisprettiest appreciations of country life were written in or aboutthe large villas" ^with which his rich patrons had studded, tooclosely to be really rural, Baise and the Bay of Naples.His pleasure in this part of the coast was increased by thenearness of the baths of Baiae, and the Lacus Lucrinus, the homeof the famous Roman oyster.These oysters held, I think, the highest place in Martial'sgastronomic affections. Constant his references to them,frequent his assertions or assumptions that they excelled allother. 3 His well known lament for a beautiful little slave girl,who died when only six, employs as a term of highest praise^ The client had to be at his patron's house in the morning and attend him,there or anywhere, all day if necessary. It was an act of disrespect to appearbefore his patron without donning the toga. Cf. Juvenal, VII. 142, andVIII. 49 also ; I. 96 and iiy, and X. 45, and Martial, Ep., X. 10. In prose themost caustic description of the client-and-patron institution may be found inLucian, Nigrinus, 20-26. In Ep., XII. 18, to poor Juvenal dancing attendancein Rome on his patron and sweating in the requisite toga he recounts the manydelights of his home in Spain : among them " ignota est toga," a blazing fireof oak cut from the adjoining coppice, and lastly the venator or keeper, whoseattractions in hnes 22-3 do not appeal to the modern sportsman. I drawattention to these lines, because they reflect quite casually, but quite clearly,the decadent vices of the age : remember, they are not quotations from someobscure, if obscene, versifier, but were written (and published !) by the secondpoet to the first poet of that generation. It has been pointed out that in theepigrams of Martial with which Juvenal is connected some obscenity usuallycreeps in. Cf. Ep., VII. 91.Ep., III., 58, 26,"Sed tendit avidis rete subdolum turdisTremulave captum linea trahit piscem "a Cf. Ep. VI. II, 5, and III., 60 3, and XII., 48, 4.