478 PEOSE HAIilEUTICS. 



purchase Kara rpoirov, i. e. at a reasonable rate. The 

 least infringement of this ordinance subjected the dealer 

 to confinement in chains, besides a heavy mulct paid to 

 the state/ Such enactments no doubt would have some 

 good effect, and convince a few of these rogues, by per- 

 sonal experience (always the plainest), that honesty in 

 fish, as in everything else, was the best policy in the end. 

 But though the public was thus as far as possible secured 

 from wrong, yet various ways were found out to elude 

 the vigilance of the magistrate. Archippus speaks of an 

 Egyptian rogue who, iu the act of selling fish, and whilst 

 the customer was looking for his purse, would surrepti- 

 tiously filch the trail from a scarus, remove the liver 

 from a skate, or even cut off a glaucus' or conger's head, 

 and yet present it in such a way that the fraud was not 

 perceived. ' The ingenious devices had recourse to by 

 our fish-factors, plainly show,' observes a Greek poet, 

 ' the superiority of their tribe to our own : we can only 

 twist the same idea a hundred ways, but there is no end 

 to the inventiveness of the ichthyopolist. Look now at 

 their ingenuity : being prohibited by law from keeping 

 fish fresh by means of the watering-pot, and finding that 

 customers, as the day advances, become more and more 

 shy, two salesmen agree together to get up a mock fight ; 

 when, after squaring at one another for some time, one, 

 at a preconcerted signal, pretending to be hurt, falls un- 

 der the other's blows over his booth, and amongst his 

 fish. An immediate cry for water is raised {/3oa rt? 

 vSwp) ; the mock bruiser becomes a mock penitent, and 

 stands now over the body of his vanquished friend {rai- 

 nein) to rain restorative lymph upon him, and by the time 

 his clothes are completely saturated, the prostrate man 

 revives : when it is found that the fish also have revived 

 by the same process, and look almost as fresh and invit- 

 ing as when first taken out of the sea. Another trick of 

 the trade, a clever mode of extorting double change from 



