NUMBERS—MIGRATIONS—#SCHYLUS 103 
trade. Tunny fishing still remains a lucrative industry in the 
Peninsula.! 
Pliny bears witness to the full stream of Tunny in IX. 2, 
where he tells us the multitude of the fish which met the fleet 
of Alexander the Great under the command of Nearchus on 
one occasion was so vast, that only by advancing in battle 
line, as on an enemy, was he able to cut his way through: 
non voce, non sonitu, non ictu, sed fragore terrentur, nec nist 
ruina turbantur.? 
Faber’s account of the watchman, of the alarm caused 
by throwing in stones near the inlet through which the shoal 
of fish has just passed, of the raising of the hue and cry to drive 
it towards the end of the enclosure, the battering of the fish 
to death with oars, and of other devices might well pass, although 
written in the nineteenth century, for a description of the 
Tunny fishing by an author of the first century. 
From this fishing Aischylus 3 drew his vivid image of the 
destruction of the host of Xerxes at sea—an image placed with 
more poetic than dramatic aptness in the mouth of the Persian 
messenger who paints the battle to Atossa. ‘‘ But the Greeks,”’ 
he tells her, “ kept striking, hacking us with fragments of 
oars and splinters of wrecks, as 1f we were Tunnies or a draft of 
fish.” 
The comparison strikes as all the more telling, when we 
remember that one of the most killing methods of capturing 
the Tunny was and still is by stabbing with pikes and poles 
the fish, after having driven them into a narrow space. 
Imagine the storm of applause, which that bold and glowing 
picture (in but two lines !) of the common practice and of the 
wondrous victory must have aroused from an audience who 
eight years before had either fought at or feared for Salamis, 
to an author whose conspicuous gallantry both there and at 
Marathon had earned for him the high honour of a place in 
the great commemorative fresco in the Stoa Poikile at Athens ! 
1 Cf. the allusion of Cervantes: dos cursos en la academia de la pesca de 
los atunos. 
2 Arrian (Ind., XXX. 1) and Strabo (XV. 12, p. 726) tell the same story 
of whales in the Indian Ocean. 
3 Pers@, 424 ff. 
