CHAPTER XIII 



AUSONIUS — SALMO, SALAR AND FARIO — FIRST MENTION 



OF THE PIKE 



AusoNlus (c. 310-C. 393 A.D.) is practically the last Latin 

 writer within my time-limit (a.d. 500) who has allusions of 

 interest to Fishing. In the fifth century, however, Sidonius, 

 whose fishing and hunting interest apparently equalled his 

 diocesan — his ' Nolo Episcopari ' was, if fruitless, at once 

 exceptional and genuine, for the see of Clermont had to be 

 forced on his acceptance — tells us in a letter and in his poems 

 of the catching of fish, especially by night lines in a lake on his 

 wife's property in the Auvergne.^ 



The tenth Idyll of Ausonius (" Ad Mosellam," a great 

 favourite with Izaak Walton), ranks, according to Mackail, 

 " the writer not merely as the last or all but last of Latin, but 

 also as the first of French poets." It demands mention, quite 

 apart from the vividness of its pictures, because it is the only 

 fisher poem of any length in classical Latin, and because in 

 it occurs the first mention of the Salar and the Fario. 



Of the Salmo Pliny three hundred years previously was the 

 first to speak. 2 The Greeks knew not the Salmon : at any 



^ Ep., II. 2 ; Carniina, XIX. and XXI. Fortunately for Sidonius, Clermont 

 was in the Auvergne, so he could be at once piscator and episcopus. 



2 IX. 32. " In Aquitania salmo fluvialis marinis omnibus prefertur." 

 To make this clear piscibus should be iinderstood after omnibus. The salmon 

 is the fish most frequently found in the debris of the French caves, many of 

 which are in Aquitania, so Palaeolithic and Plinian man at any rate ate tooth 

 to tooth in their preference. See Introduction. It is somewhat amazing, 

 considering their opsophagy and the excellence of the fish, that down to 

 500 A.D. no Greek, and no Latin writer, except Pliny, Ausonius, and Sidonius, 

 Ep. II. 2, mentions the Sahnonidcs. I cannot forgo Ausonius's epithet — 

 mouth-filling yet appropriate — for us, who dwell in " this blessed Isle, this 

 England," Aquilonigenasque Britatmos. 



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