Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

CHAPTER XII^LIAN—THE MACEDONIAN INVENTION, OR THEFIRST MENTION OF AN ARTIFICIAL FLY" They knew 'e stole ; 'e knew they knowed ;They did not tell, or make a fuss,But winked at iElian down the road.And 'e winked back—the same as us " ^!^LIAN (170-230 A.D.), who, though bom in Italy and broughtup in the Latin tongue, acquired so complete a command ofGreek that he could speak it as well as an Athenian gentleman(hence his sobriquet fxeXiyXtoTTog) , composed his works inGreek.His Natural History 2 soon became a standard work onZoology, although in arrangement it is very defective : forinstance, he skips from elephants (XL 15) to dragons in thevery next chapter, and from the livers of mice in II.56 to theuses of oxen in II. 57. This treatment of things, woiKiXaTroiKi\u>i-, is asserted by the author to be intentional, so as toavoid boring the reader. For his part he avows that he prefersobserving the habits of animals and fish,listening to thenightingale, or studying the migration of cranes, to heapingup riches ^!Whether as a Naturalist ^Elian possesses any value, whetherhis work is " scrappy and gossiping, and largely collected fromolder and more logical writers," ^ or " from the industry^After Kipling.^ Xlepl Zci5a>i/ lSi6TrjTOS.* See Smith's Diet. Gk. and Rom. Biog. and Myth., s.v.'^lian.'* Perizonius has proved that M\ia.n transferred large portions of theDeipnosophistcB of Athenaeus to his Varia Historia, a robbery which musthave been committed almost in the lifetime of the pillaged author • that185