FISHES IN ARTS AND SCIENCES. 



45 



country never touched any kind whatever ; and the other 

 statement, that Queen Atergatis was so passionately fond 

 of the food that she allowed none to be sold till the refusal 

 of it had been offered to the royal kitchen. It is possible 

 that the two traditions are really halves of a third, which 

 states that Queen Gatis, who was also said to be inordi- 

 nately addicted to fish-eating (tunny, conger, and carp, her 

 favourites), was put to death by Mopsus the Lydian, who had 

 her thrown into Lake Ascalon. That the princess should 

 be deified and the fish of the lake abstained from, is strictly 

 in sympathy with contemporary sentiment, and the con- 

 flicting testimony of the ancients I have quoted would thus 

 be reconciled. But of course this is mere surmise. 



That the Greeks ate fish, and had their fashions therein, 

 is notorious, yet Homer never mentions fish in his ban- 

 quets, and Ulysses is depicted as resorting to that diet 

 only when in great extremity. In Rome, the fish mania, 

 both as pets and as delicacies, was carried to such a pitch 

 of insane, criminal extravagance, as to have been incredible, 

 had not the savage satire and the fierce denunciation of 

 contemporary literature assured us of the facts. It is 

 enough to say that a single dish of fish might cost from 

 ;ioo to jiooo, and that pet eels were fed with human 

 slaves. It is worth noting also that, in spite of the intoler- 

 able affectations of Roman connoisseurs as to the niceties of 

 flavour between this fish, that had been caught on one side 

 of a river, and that, which had been caught on the other, 

 they all drenched their subtly-flavoured dishes with halec, 

 garum, and other sauces, which were so strong and com- 

 posite that it would have been hardly possible to distin- 

 guish a fresh fish from a putrid cat except by the 

 bones. 



The ancient Britons were not, as a nation, fish-eaters, due 



