i8o PLUTARCH— CLEOPATRA— OPPIAN—ATHEN^US 



rents the world over would speedily abate, and many a river 

 would know its tenant no more. 



For reading " at lairge " Oppian is admirable. At one 

 moment you are enjoying a vivid and passably accurate 

 account (IIL 149 ff.) of how the Cramp or Torpedo Fish 

 (vapKv), like Brer Fox, lies low in the sand and the mud, but on 

 a sudden " ejects his poisoned charms " with such effect that 

 soon 



" On every joint an Icy Stiffness steals. 

 The flowing spirit binds and blood congeals." ^ 



A fish stupefied by the shock is likened (IL 81 ff.) unto a man 

 who in dreams tries to escape from the threatening phantoms, 

 only to find his knees bound and his limbs incapable of flight. 



At another moment our poet (in L 217 ff.) is reproving 

 the increduHty of those who doubt the fact that a sucker fish 

 can stop a ship under full sail, by sticking to its keel ! - 



The peculiar powers of the Torpedo Fish command some 

 comment. Ancient authors galore, to whom, in the absence 

 of the more powerful electric Eel of Central America, the vapKti 

 must have appeared an amazing creature, have written and 

 differed about it. Aristotle had early noted that it caught 

 its prey by means of a stupefying apparatus in its mouth, or 

 rather at the back of its head. Claudian asks {Carm. Min. 

 Corp., XLIV. (XLVI.) i f.) : 



" Quis non indomitam mirae Torpedinis artem 

 Audiit et merito signatas nomine vires ? " 



Plato compares Socrates to the fish from his capability 

 of electrifying his audience in the strict, but not in the corrupt 



^ Cicero, de Nat. deor., II. 50, 127. 



2 Perhaps the best prose description of the power of the Echineis is to be 

 found in Cassiodorus, Var., I. 35. Phny, XXXII. i, solemnly asserts that the 

 death of the Emperor Caligula was presaged by a Remora stopping his great 

 galley, alone out of all the accompanying fleet, on his voyage to Antium. 

 Not only did the Remora stop a ship, but according to PUny, it could, from its 

 power of checking the natural actions of the body under excitement, hasten 

 or stay an accouchement as well as a lawsuit : hence plaintiffs seldom ventured 

 into the fish market, because the mere sight of a Remora at such a juncture 

 was most inauspicious! (Pliny, IX. 41, and XXXII. i). Cf. Aristotle, i/. /I ., 

 2. 14, " KaX -x^puvTai Tives aiiTCfi irphs SIkus Kal <pi\Tpa." For an explanation of 

 the myth of the Remora, see V. W. Ekman, "On Dead Water," in the Reports 

 of N onsen's Polar Expedition, Christiania, 1904. 



