CHAPTER XI 



PLUTARCH : THE CHARGE AGAINST HIM OF CONTEMNING 

 FISHING QUITE FALSE— CLEOPATRA'S FISHING — 

 OPPIAN— THE TORPEDO FOR GOUT— ATHEN^US 



Our next two authors, Plutarch (a httle later than Martial) 

 and Oppian (c. 170 a.d.), both wrote in Greek. 



Plutarch for centuries has been misrepresented and maligned 

 as an opponent and contemptuous disdainer of fishing, but 

 quite inaccurately. I am not of the class of writers who invest 

 Nero with a halo, or canonise Clytaemnestra. I am no Knight 

 of the Round Table on a quest to redeem lost characters, but 

 I feel it a duty and a pleasure on behalf of Plutarch to fling 

 down the glove and challenge his traducers to a duel a outrancc. 



Modern English writers, 



" to the listening earth 

 Repeat the story," 



but not, like the Moon, the story of "[the birth " of their error. 

 Inevitably in their pages crop up Burton's words, " Plutarch, 

 in his book De Sol. Anim., speaks against all fishing as a 

 filthy, base, illiberal employment, having neither wit nor 

 perspicacity in it, nor worth the labour." ^ 



1 The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1806), I. 406. If Burton, " that 

 universal plunderer " has cribbed from Dame Juliana Berners her eloquent 

 eulogy on the secondary pleasures of angling, this book, in turn, till its resurrec- 

 tion in the eighteenth century was ruthlessly pillaged without acknowledgment. 

 Warton, Milton, 2nd edition, p. 94, suggests that Milton seems to have borrowed 

 the subject of L' Allegro and // Penseroso. together with some thoughts and 

 expressions, from a poem prefixed to the book, while a writer in The Angler's 

 Note Book, March 31, 1880, believes that " Walton probably drew the inspira- 

 tion of his Angler's song from the wonderful storehouse of this quaint and 

 original author." 



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