174 PLUTARCH— CLEOPATRA— OPPIAN—ATHEN^US 



laughter and ridicule. " Leave," cried Cleopatra, " leave the 

 fishing rod to us ; your game is Cities, Provinces, and King- 

 doms." ^ 



Shakespeare makes Cleopatra's diver attach the salted 

 fish: 



" Cleo : Give me mine angle, we'll to the river : there, 

 My music playing far ofi, I will betray 

 Tawny finn'd fishes ; my bended hook shall pierce 

 Their slimy jaws, and as I draw them up, 

 I'll think them every one an Antony, 

 And say ' Ah, ha ! you're caught.' 



" Charmian : 'Twas merry when 



You wager'd on your angling ; when your diver 

 Did hang a salt-fish on his hook, which he 

 With fervency drew up. 



" Cleo : That time !— times !— 



I laughed him out of patience, and that night 

 I laugh'd him into patience ; and next morn, 

 Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed." 



We owe most of our knowledge as to the technical methods, 

 the varying minutiae, and the numerous materials employed by 

 the Greeks and Latins in Fishing and Angling, to Oppian, to 

 ^lian, Pliny the Elder, and Plutarch. 



" Bearing somewhat the same relationship to Eclogues of 

 Fishermen that Virgil's Georgics do to those of Shepherds, were 

 the Greek verse treatises on fish and fishing. No fewer than 

 six didactic Epics of the sort were composed, but only that of 

 Oppian is extant in complete form. 2 It is wTitten in hexameter, 



1 Shakespeare. Antony and Cleopatra, Act II. Sc. 5. Weigall, The Lije 

 and Times of Cleopatra, pp. 245-6, makes the locus the harbour of Alexandria, 

 not the Nile, and the modus, Antony's diver affixing fresh fish to his hook. 

 Cleopatra, guessing Antony's ruse, assembled next day a party of notables to 

 applaud the angler, but instructed a slave to dive from the other side of the 

 vessel and the instant the hook touched the water attach to it a pickled Pontic 

 fish. Cleopatram " ridentem dicere verum quid vetat ? " 



* A century or so before Oppian, Demostratus, a Roman Senator, wrote 

 also 'AAi«i/TiKa — a work on Fishing of twenty books — which, although often 

 quoted by ancient writers, is now not extant. From the extracts given by 

 iEUan (XIII. 21, XV. 4 and 19) we gather that Demostratus, who wrote in Greek, 

 had even more than a Greek love of the marvellous and cared nothing for the 

 sober scientific study of his subject. It is noteworthy that an alternative 

 title of his work was \6yoi a.\t*vrtKoi, or, say, Fishing Yarns. 



