Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

AND FlRDAUSrS—//.4L/£:t7r/C^ 177—to which halting and involved translation we at least neitherbow laurels nor doff hats.The Halieutica is divided into five books. The first twotreat of the natural history of fishes, the other three of the artof fishing. Despite this proportion of space, fish rather thanfishermen are the heroes of the scenes. The work displaysconsiderable knowledge of zoology, coupled with absurd fables,which are adduced as grave matters of fact.In the fulness with which he enumerates the various kindsof fish, and methods of fishing, the technique, the weapons,the materials appropriate to each, Oppian stands pre-eminentamong our authors. Nor need we wonder at this fullness oftreatment. He was wedded heart and soul to all pertainingto fish, or fishing, which he calls the " lovely art."The kinds of fish mentioned by this " poeta doctissimus " 1number, according to Bishop Hieronymus, one hundred and fiftythree.This figure is verified by Ritter, who adds that " Pliny'slong list contains only twenty-three more, i.e. one hundred andseventy-six in all," a total which hardly warrants the naturalist'striumphal outburst, " In the sea and in the ocean, vast as itthere exists by Hercules ! nothing that is unknown to us,and a truly marvellous feat it is that we are best acquaintedwith those things which Nature has concealed in the deep." 2From the only English translation of the Halieutica (madein 1722 by Diaper and Jones, Fellows of Balliol) I take a fewpassages illustrating the character and methods of Oppianicfishing. 3The latter at once arrest our attention by their modernity.They are practically ours. Apostolides in his work describingfishing in modern Greece states that " les quatre enginsis,1 " De quibus Oppianus Cilix est, poeta doctissimus, 153 esse generapiscium, quce omnia capta sunt ab Apostolis, et nihil remansit incaptum, dumet nobiles et ignobiles, divites et pauperes, et omne genus hominum de marihujus saeculi extrahitur ad salutem." Comment, in Ezechiel. Cf. Ritter,op. cii., p. 376.- N. H.. XXXII. 53.* The great objection to this translation, owing probably to the difficultyof expressing—certainly of compressing—the " intractable " subject matterin the rhymed verse adopted by the translators, is its weary verbiage : forinstance, one passage of three lines in the translation needs twelve, and anotherof nine needs thirty! Diaper was the author of Nereides, or Sea-Eclogues.