122 TRAITS OF FISHERMEN— DEITIES OF FISHING 



prominently. I can only notice one or two of the passages 

 cited in support of each characteristic, but the evidence 

 adduced generally carries conviction. 



On the Hospitality of fishermen, poor though it were, 

 stress is laid by Greek and Roman writers. 



Bunsmann's citation of Petronius {Sat., 114) and Plutarch 

 {Vita Pompeii, y^) as witnesses to credit is, however, far from 

 happy, especially in the case of the former, who recounts that 

 when the boat had been so battered as to be a- wash " pro- 

 currere piscatores parvulis expediti navigiis ad prcedam 

 rapiendam." The lightning-like change of the fishermen, on 

 realising that their intended victims were ready to defend 

 themselves, from plunderers to helpers, and the non-denial 

 to the shipwrecked folk of the use of their hut for eating 

 some sea-sodden food, scarcely shine as exemplars of high 

 Hospitality. No wonder the guests dragged out a " most 

 miserable night." 



Tyrrhenus, the old deaf fisherman in The Ethiopian 

 History (omitted by Bunsmann), embodies a far better instance 

 of the characteristic HospitaUty. His glad welcome and the 

 surrender to his guests of " the cosier part of his dwelling " 

 betoken Nature's gentleman. 1 



A still better instance meets us in the Greek romance of 

 Apollonius of Tyre,^ possibly an imitation of the Heliodorus 

 idyll. The prince, sole survivor of a shipwreck, is found, fed, 

 clad, and afterwards directed by an old fisherman to Pentapolis, 

 where he wins a competition before the king. This romance, 

 which survives in a Latin version of the sixth century, became 

 in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries widely popular and 

 translated into most European languages. To it, as the 

 scenes and the characters prove, Shakespeare, or possibly 

 Wilkins, must have owed much of his Pericles. 



On the question whence originated their Piety to the 

 Gods, whether it sprang from or was only influenced by the 

 fact that their lives were passed amid the unknown but ever- 

 present and awful forces of Nature identified with certain gods, 



1 Heliod, /Ethiop., V. i8. 

 ^ De Apollonio Tyrio, 12. 



