VIRGIL—ANTHOLOGIA PALATINA—PAPYRI 121 
fisherman in Greek poems, plays, or writers from Homer 
down to the later Greek Romanticists,! or (as far as I know) 
in the epigrams from 700 B.c. to 500 A.D., of the Anthologia 
Palatina.? 
“ The figure of the weather-beaten fisher is a favourite one 
in the old poets, and we meet it constantly in Art; in Greek, 
and in Roman Art especially, it was a very favourite subject.” § 
M. Campaux, Mr. Hall, and Herr Bunsmann confirm and 
amplify this sentence of Bliimner’s. The thesis of Bunsmann 
—not easy to obtain, although published in 1910 at Minster 
in Westphalia—seems within its limited scope (he scarcely 
touches on the methods or craft of fishing) perhaps the best 
little treatise De Piscatorum in Grecorum atque Romanorum 
litteris usu. 
He sets out to discover and formulate a list of the charac- 
teristics most frequently attributed to fishermen. He proceeds 
to establish each of the dozen selected by buttressing questions 
from Homer down to Sidonius. 
Hospitality, Piety to the Gods and Dead, Shrewd (almost 
Pawky) Humour, Old Age, Toil and Poverty figure most 
1 They must, however, now according to the evidence of the Papyri be 
dated back some three centuries, i.e. from the usually accepted date of the 
sixth to about the third century a.p. 
As regards some of the Romance writers, the Papyri are a revelation 
and compel apparently much revision of dates. Thus Chariton (whom “ the 
critics place variously between the fifth and the ninth centuries a.p.”) is 
fixed by Pap., Faydm Towns, as before 150 a.p. Achilles Tatius, whose 
allotted span, owing to his imitation of Heliodorus (who hitherto has been 
dated about the end of the fourth century), was run ‘' about the latter half of 
the fifth or beginning of the sixth century,” is now placed by Pap., Oxyrh., 
1250, as living before 300, and thus Heliodorus is removed up to (c.) 250 A.D. 
2 In the Anthologia Palatina there are some 3700 epigrams, etc., dating 
from 700 B.c. and ending about 1300 a.p.; none of these, as far as I can recall, 
contradict the poverty note. I have chosen 500 a.p. as being a convenient 
date, because it includes all Greek and Greco-Roman writers as distinct 
from the Byzantine, and includes also the earlier and better prose writers, 
like Heliodorus and Longus. Epigrams, it is true, continued to be written 
until the fourteenth century, but there is little, and that of no poetical account, 
after the tenth, when the popular or “ political’? verse began, with a few 
exceptions, to supplant the classical forms. 
3-H. Blimner, Rémische Privataltertimer, p. 329. ‘It is noteworthy 
that as Virgil omitted all mention of fishermen in his Bucolics, his imitators 
have followed his example, and in consequence in classical Latin the fisherman 
has no place as a pastoral character. The hut and tackle in the Theocritean 
story of Asphalion was foreign to Virgil’s conception of the province of 
pastoralism”’ (Hall, op. cit., 1914, p. 28). 
