SIDONIUS— ^Z) MOSELLAM 195 



rate, no opsophagist or other author notices the fish. Their 

 silence is natural ; the high temperature of the water forbids 

 its frequenting the Mediterranean or its inflowing rivers. 1 



The length of the whole poem (483 lines) prevents entire 

 quotation, although the touch and movement all through display 

 fully the instinct and feehng for sport. 



Pictures of the scenery along the banks of the Moselle are 

 followed by the enumeration and characterisation of the fish 

 in its waters rendered after the manner of the didactic epic. 

 The poem furnishes a Hvely description of the fishermen of 

 the Moselle, made from actual observation. Men in boats 

 drag nets in mid-stream ; men watch the corks of little nets in 

 shallower water ; men perched on banks or on rocks armed 

 with rods scan the floats bobbing on the water, or jerk in the 

 prey. But we search for fly-fishing in vain. 



" And now, where the bank gives easy access, a host of 

 spoilers are searching all the waters. 2 Alas ! poor fish, ill 

 sheltered by thine inmost stream 1 One of them trails his 

 wet lines far out in mid-river, and sweeps off the shoals caught 

 in his knotty seine ; where the stream glides with placid course, 

 another spreads his drag-nets buoyed on their cork-floats. 



" A third, leaning over the waters beneath the rock, lowers 

 the arching top of his supple rod, as he casts the hooks sheathed 

 in deadly baits. The unwary rovers of the deep rush on them 

 with gaping mouth— too late, their wide jaws feel through 

 and through the stings of the hidden barb— they writhe— the 

 surface tells the tale, and the rod ducks to the jerky twitch 

 of the quivering horse-hair. Enough— with one whizzing 

 stroke the boy snatches his prey slant-wise from the water ; 



1 Salmon appear but infrequently in representations, but Plate 8 in 

 C. W. King's Roman Antiquities at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, London. 

 1879, shows in colours a mosaic dedicated to the god Nodons by Flavius 

 Senilis, an officer in command of the fleet stationed off the Severn: this 

 mosaic includes a number of salmon. King, ib. Plate 13, 2, is a diadem of beaten 

 bronze representing a fisherman with a pointed cap in the act of hooking 

 with undoubtedly a tight hne a fine salmon : cf. A. B. Cook's discussion of 

 these finds in Folk-Lore, 1906, XVI. 37 ff. Nodons was in fact, hke Nuada, a 

 fish god, indeed a Celtic understudy for Neptune. If salmon figure little m 

 representations, they bulk large in laws, and in commissariats for campaigns, 

 e.g. 3000 dried salmon were ordered by Edw. II. in his war with Bruce. 

 2 From Professor R. C. Jebbs' Translation, p. 176 (line 240 ff.). 



