120 TRAITS OF FISHERMEN—DEITIES OF FISHING 
literary bucolic. Virgil, for instance, admits his model in 
the opening lines of Eclogue IV. : 
Sicelides Muse, paulo matora canamus . . . 
A recent writer straightly asserts that ‘‘ without Theocritus 
the Bucolics (save the mark !) of Virgil could never have been 
conceived, or, if conceived, would have miscarried.” 1 
Whether or not the offspring of this parentage is not toc 
savagely depreciated, we note with surprise that Virgil, 
“Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive 
and horse and herd ; 
All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word,” 
a professed imitator of Theocritus, to whom fishermen were as 
familiar as the waters by which they lived and figured in many 
of his Jdylls,2 never mentions fishermen in his Bucolics. 
His only (I believe) allusions to them—and the first is 
merely incidental to an account of the primitive Arts of Man, 
and how fishing as an Art came in only as the Golden Age 
went out—are in Georgic, I. 141-2, Atque alius latum funda tam 
verberat amnem | Alta petens, pelagoque alius trahit humida 
lina, and in the Zneid (XII. 517 ff.): 
Et iuvenem exosum nequiquam bella Meneeten, 
Arcada, piscose cui circum flumina Lerne 
Ars fuerat, pauperque domus, nec nota potentum 
Munera, conductaque pater tellure serebat.3 
Even in these four lines observe how insistently rings out 
the note of poverty !—the constant characteristic, the almost 
invariable badge, as we shall soon see, of every professional 
1 Moses Browne in the introductory essay to his Angling Sports in Nine 
Piscatory Eclogues asserts that Servius allowed only seven of Virgil’s Bucolics 
to be pure pastorals, while Heinsius for similar reasons rejects all but ten of 
Theocritus’s Idylls. 
2 1. 39 ff.; II]. 25 f.; IX. 25 ff.; and especially in XXI. 
3 With the execrable taste of his age Sannazaro considered himself bound 
to produce still paler shades of those pale shadows, the Eclogues of Virgil, 
just as their author, the most precedent-loving of poets, rarely ventured to 
introduce an image or an incident without the authority of some Greek 
original (W. M. Adams, op. cit., p. 45). Moses Browne (ibid.) declares that 
it would have been far better if Sannazaro had never written his ‘ sea eclogues, 
for the exercise of fishing appears so contemptible in him, that any that 
writes on a subject, that seems to be of a similar aspect, must suffer dis- 
advantage.” 
