FISHERS' HOSPITALITY, PIETY 123 



or sprang rather from a gratitude proportioned to future 

 benefits, Bunsmann is discreetly non-committal. 



But of outward and visible signs of such Piety the Anthologia 

 Palatina is eloquent. Their Piety towards the dead is strikingly 

 attested by Hegesippus, the simplicity of whose style in his 

 eight epigrams in Anth. Pal. betokens an early date. " The 

 fishermen brought up from the sea in their net a half-eaten 

 man, a most mournful relic of some voyage. They sought 

 not for unholy gain, but him and the fishes too they buried 

 under this light coat of sand." ^ 



Bunsmann furnishes two records of impiety among fisher- 

 men. The first occurs in the well-known Baiano procul a lacu 

 recede of Martial {Epigr., IV. 30), where an impious poacher 

 in the very act of landing his fish from the Emperor's lake is 

 stricken with blindness. The second, in Athen., VII. 18, and 

 ^han, XV. 23, where Epopeus, a fisherman of the island of 

 Icarus, enraged by taking nothing but sacred or tahu Pompili, 

 turned to with his son and devoured them, only themselves 

 in turn to be devoured by a whale. ^ 



But the impietas charged from Anth. Pal., VI. 24, is fantastic. 

 The indictment has been drawn owing either to mistranslation 

 of the passage or inability to appreciate the rather heavy- 

 handed humour (frequent in the Greek and Roman writers of 

 the time) of Lucilius, a conjectured author of the Epigram. 



Heliodorus lays down at the portals of the temple of " the 

 Syrian goddess " a votive offering of his fishing net worn out, 

 not by catches of fish, but of seaweed " from the beaches of 

 goodly havens." This dedication, as fish were sacred to the 

 goddess and in Syria were forbidden as a food, has been 

 imputed as an affront to the deity, but quite incorrectly. 

 HeUodorus in offering his net intended no disrespect, nor 

 offended any law of the temple. Since its sole catch had been 

 seaweed, his net could plead " pure from the prey of fishery." 



1 VII. 276, W. R. Paton's Translation. 



2 Cf. Pausanias, III. 21, 5: " Men fear to fish in the Lake of Poseidon, 

 for they think he ■who catches fish in it is turned into a fish called The Fisher." 

 In I. 38, I, we find that only the priests were allowed to fish, because the 

 rivers were sacred to Demeter, and in VII. 22, 4, that the fish at Pharae were 

 sacred to Hermes, and so inviolate. 



K 



