CHAPTER 2 



Historical 



a. Greeks and Romans 



Sea urchins were well known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and 

 have been frequently mentioned in their writings as a food, together 

 with oysters, snails, and other sea food. Even before Aristotle, the 

 Echini were well recognized as a food, e.g., by Epicharmus (born ca. 

 540 B.C.) in his comic poem The Marriage of Hebe, and Archippus in 

 his comic play The Fishes, written ca. 415 B.C. Hippocrates (ca. 460- 

 377 B.C.) also mentions them in his Dediaeta. (See D'Arcy Thompson's 

 Greek Fishes, p. 72). 



But we owe to Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) the first very detailed de- 

 scription of the sea urchin, some of which is quite correct. Aristotle 

 writes in his Historia Animalium iv. 5 (translation by D'Arcy Thompson, 

 1910, p. 530^-53 1 a): "The urchins are devoid of flesh, and this is a 

 character peculiar to them... There are several species {'^bir{) of the 

 urchin, and one of these is that which is made use of for food ; this is 

 the kind in which are found the so-called eggs, large and edible, in the 

 larger and smaller specimens alike; for even when as yet very small 

 they arc provided with them. There are two other species, the spatan- 

 gus, and the so-called bryssus ; these animals are pelagic and scarce. 

 Further, there are the echinometrae, or 'mother urchins', the largest in 

 size of all the species. In addition to these there is another species, 

 small in size, but furnished with large hard spines; it lives in the sea at 

 a depth of several fathoms; and it is used by some people as a specific 

 for cases of strangury. In the neighborhood of Torone ' there are sea 



' Torone (now Toron) was a prominent ancient town near the tip of Sithonia (or Langos) , 

 the middle of the three peninsulas projecting from Chalcidice, the southern part of Mace- 

 donia, into the Aegean Sea, southeast of Salonika. Aristotle was born (384 B.C.) not far 

 from here, at Stagira (or Stavros), also in Chalcidice, his father being physician to the king 

 of Macedonia, the father of Philip. After studying with Plato in Athens (367-347), Aristotle 

 returned to Macedonia to instruct the son of Philip, Alexander the Great, who was later of 

 great assistance in providing him with money and collections of animals. Pliny says (viii. 17; 

 Bostock and Riley, vol. 2, p. 265) that Alexander employed some thousands of men in 

 every region of Asia and Greece to collect animals for Aristotle. 



