NUMBERS— MIGRATIONS— .ESCHYLUS 103 



trade. Tunny fishing still remains a lucrative industry in the 

 Peninsula. 1 



Pliny bears witness to the full stream of Tunny in IX. 2, 

 where he tells us the multitude of the fish which met the fleet 

 of Alexander the Great under the command of Nearchus on 

 one occasion was so vast, that only by advancing in battle 

 line, as on an enemy, was he able to cut his way through : 

 non voce, non sonitu, non ictu, sed fragore terrentur, nee nisi 

 ruina turbantur.^ 



Faber's account of the watchman, of the alarm caused 

 by throwing in stones near the inlet through which the shoal 

 of fish has just passed, of the raising of the hue and cry to drive 

 it towards the end of the enclosure, the battering of the fish 

 to death with oars, and of other devices might well pass, although 

 written in the nineteenth century, for a description of the 

 Tunny fishing by an author of the first century. 



From this fishing ^Eschylus ^ drew his vivid image of the 

 destruction of the host of Xerxes at sea — an image placed with 

 more poetic than dramatic aptness in the mouth of the Persian 

 messenger who paints the battle to Atossa. " But the Greeks," 

 he tells her, " kept striking, hacking us with fragments of 

 oars and splinters of wrecks, as if we were Tunnies or a draft of 

 fish." 



The comparison strikes as all the more telling, when we 

 remember that one of the most killing methods of capturing 

 the Tunny was and still is by stabbing with pikes and poles 

 the fish, after having driven them into a narrow space. 



Imagine the storm of applause, which that bold and glowing 

 picture (in but two lines !) of the common practice and of the 

 wondrous victory must have aroused from an audience who 

 eight years before had either fought at or feared for Salamis, 

 to an author whose conspicuous gallantry both there and at 

 Marathon had earned for him the high honour of a place in 

 the great commemorative fresco in the Stoa Poikile at Athens ! 



^ Cf. the allusion of Cervantes: dos cursos en la academia de la pesca de 

 los atunos. 



* Arrian {Ind., XXX. i) and Strabo (XV. 12, p. 726) tell the same story 

 of whales in the Indian Ocean. 



^ PerscB, 424 ff. 



