120 TRAITS OF FISHERMEN— DEITIES OF FISHING 



literary bucolic. Virgil, for instance, admits his model in 

 the opening lines of Eclogue IV. : 



Sicelides Muscb, paulo maiora canamus . . . 



A recent writer straightly asserts that " without Theocritus 

 the Bucolics (save the mark !) of Virgil could never have been 

 conceived, or, if conceived, would have miscarried." i 



Whether or not the offspring of this parentage is not too 

 savagely depreciated, we note with surprise that Virgil, 



" Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive 

 and horse and herd ; 

 All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word," 



a professed imitator of Theocritus, to whom fishermen were as 

 familiar as the waters by which they lived and figured in many 

 of his Idylls,^ never mentions fishermen in his Bucolics. 



His only (I believe) allusions to them — and the first is 

 merely incidental to an account of the primitive Arts of Man, 

 and how fishing as an Art came in only as the Golden Age 

 went out — are in Georgic, I. 141-2, Atque alius latum funda iam 

 verberai amnem \ Alia petens, pelagoque alius trahit Immida 

 Una, and in the Mneid (XII. 517 ff.) : 



Et iuvenem exosum nequiquam bella Menoeten, 

 Arcada, piscosae cui circum flumina Lernae 

 Ars fuerat, pauperque domus, nee nota potentum 

 Munera, conductaque pater tellure serebat.^ 



Even in these four lines observe how insistently rings out 

 the note of poverty ! — the constant characteristic, the almost 

 invariable badge, as we shall soon see, of every professional 



^ Moses Browne in the introductory essay to his Angling Sports in Nine 

 Piscatory Eclogues asserts that Servius allowed only seven of Virgil's Bucolics 

 to be pure pastorals, while Heinsius for similar reasons rejects all but ten of 

 Theocritus's Idylls. 



2 I. 39 ff. ; III. 25 f. ; IX. 25 ff. ; and especially in XXI. 



^ With the execrable taste of his age Sannazaro considered himself bound 

 to produce still paler shades of those pale shadows, the Eclogues of Virgil, 

 just as their author, the most precedent-loving of poets, rarely ventured to 

 introduce an image or an incident without the authority of some Greek 

 original (W. M. Adams, op. cit., p. 45). Moses Browne {ibid.) declares that 

 it would have been far better if Sannazaro had never written his " sea eclogues, 

 for the exercise of fishing appears so contemptible in him, that any that 

 writes on a subject, that seems to be of a similar aspect, must suffer dis- 

 advantage." 



