THE FAMILY OF EEI.S. 307 



come to a conclusion was that they formed a highly-esteemed 

 and expensive article of fashionable food. Fish of all kinds 

 were in high favour in Greece in the days of its prosperity, 

 so that the word opson, which originally comprised every sort 

 of food except bread, at last became applied only to fishj but 

 the Eel was among the highest of these delicacies, and 

 Aristophanes may be referred to, to shew that a sum equal to 

 half a crown was demanded for an Eel which had been 

 brought from Lake Copias, in Boeotia, Avhich country was 

 believed to produce them of the most delicious sort. And 

 loud, as well as frequent were the denunciations raised against 

 the fishmongers of these times, as being extortioners who took 

 advantage of the luxurious cravings of their customers to their 

 own extravagant profit. 



But there was at least a prominent exception to this bias 

 in favour of these fish in an eminent people of antiquity, and 

 the Egyptians held them even in abhorrence; for which the 

 reason assigned by Herodotus is that in that country they 

 were regarded as sacred to the deity of the Nile, but which 

 Lucian appears to explain by intimating that some evil demon 

 was embodied in the fish; and this explanation is countenanced 

 by what is said by Anaxandrides, the Rhodian poet, to an 

 Egyptian : 



"You fancy in the little Eel some power 

 Of demon huge and terrible;" 



and it may have been for the same reason that Numa forbad 

 its being ofifered on the altar of a god; while on the other 

 hand, as I quote from Bloch, the Boeotians, whose Eels were 

 best esteemed, were accustomed to use them as sacred offerings. 

 Whether its being tabooed as food in the Islands of the South 

 Sea, (and the only fish that is so,) may be due to the same 

 idea, derived from a remote ancestry, appears uncertain. 



With the ancients also the way in which the race was con- 

 tinued was eminently a subject of doubt or mistake; as indeed 

 It remained to a very modern date; and several Avriters of some 

 eminence have been so far in error as to have mistaken parasitic 

 animals in Eels, and even those of other fishes, for the young 

 of these species. Lacepede believed them to be bred within the 

 body of the parent, allhough after diligent search he was not 



