348 VARRO ON FARMING [bk. 



quantity of fish in its waters. So with good reason 

 is the inland pond, owned by common people, called 

 "sweet" and the other *' bitter," for which of us is 

 not contented with a single fish-pond of the former 

 kind, and on the other hand, what man that has 

 begun with a single salt-water pond, but goes on to 

 4 have a regular suite of them? For just as Pausias ^ 

 and the other painters of his school have large paint- 

 boxes divided into compartments in which to keep 

 their wax-pigments of different colours, so our 

 wealthy men possess fish-ponds having similar 

 compartments for keeping separate different kinds 

 of fish, these fish being sacred and more inviolable 

 than those Lydian ones that you used to tell us 



^ Pausias. Pliny (xxxv, ii, beginning) gives an interesting 

 account of him. He was a native of Sicyon, which he made 

 for a long time "the home of painting," and was a con- 

 temporary of Apelles, and taught by the same master, Pam- 

 phylus. He was the first to become famous as a painter of 

 encaustic pictures (Ceris pingere ac picturam inurere). The 

 most interesting fact about him, however, is that, according to 

 Pliny, he discovered fore-shortening : Earn enim picturam 

 primus invenit quam postea imitati sunt multi, aequavit nemo. 

 Ante omnia, cum longitudinem bovis ostendere vellet, adversum 

 eum pinxit non transversum unde et ahunde intelligitur ampli- 

 tudo . . . magna prorsus arte in aequo exstantia ostendens et in 

 confracto omnia solida. Did he show the naive delight, one 

 wonders, in his invention, which Uccello, who re-discovered 

 the art some eighteen centuries later, displays in his pictures? 

 Varro was doubtless familiar with his original works, for in 

 the aedileship of Aemilius Scaurus, who was consul in the 

 year of Varro's birth, Sicyon being unable to pay its debts, 

 they were forfeited and taken to Rome. 



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