Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

^—I ySPLUTARCH—CLEOPATRA—OPPIAN—ATHEN.EUSd'Oppien, les filets, les hame9ons, les harpons et les nasses,"with the addition of " les claies de roseau, d'importation romainesans doute," are the weapons of Hellas in the present day.The tricks of Oppian prevail in the Peloponnese : to-day, asnearly two millenniums back,the Scarus and the Mullet arecaught by using the female as decoy.The procedure of taking the Octopus (which Aristotle picturesfor us in IV. 8), " when clinging so tightly to the rocks thatit cannot be pulled off, but remains attached, even when theknife is employed to sever it : and yet if one employ fieabane(kovu^o) to the creature, it drops off at once," remains thesame in Greece to-day. Apostolides writes (p. 50)," Commeon voit, non seulement le procede de peche aux poulpes apersiste jusqu'a nos jours, mais la plante (Conyse) qu'onemploie a cet effet porte encore le meme nom."But as Canning called into existence a new world to redressthe balance of power in the old,so too the Attic fisherman todislodge the Octopus has, Raleigh-like, imported to the aidof his old herb, American tobacco.The devices for fishing, which in Oppian, L 54-5, are" The slender-woven Net, Viminious Weel,^The Taper Angle, Line and Barbed SteelAre all the Tools his constant Toil employs,On arms like this, the Fishing Swain relies,"are amplified in IIL 73 ff.in number and detail.^ N. C. Apostolides, La Peche en Grhe (Athenes, 1907), p. 3i- The selectionof Aristotle as the prototype of philosophical inveighers against Tobacco byThomas Corneille (Act I., Sc. i, of Le Festin de Pierre)," Quoi qu'en dise Aristote, et sa digne cabale,Le tabac est divin, il n'est rien qui I'egale,"is hardly happy, for, as the weed nicotine only reached Europe some nineteencenturies after the philosopher's death, his " dise " equals rien I^ With 5({ra| and Kvpros, cf. the irKiKThv v(pa(Tfia in Archestratus {frag.XV. 6). See pp. 147 and 176 ff. of Paulus Brandt's Parodoriim epicorumGrcBcorum et Archestrati ReliquicB, Leipzig, 1888. Brandt argues that theexpression describes a nassa, qua retis loco piscatores utebantur, and on theanalogy of the Dalmatian fishermen (cf. Brehm, Thierleben, IV., vol. IL p. 533)who, when the sea is not quite calm, drop from the bow of the boat pebblesdipped in oil to make smooth the surface, and so more easily detect the fish,explains SoveTv }f/-fi(f>ovs in Frag. XV. line 8. Although Archestratus's statementthat the fish are not to be seen (ov5' eai^fTv oa-o-oiixii'), except by thosewho resort to the nXtKrov v