122 TRAITS OF FISHERMEN—DEITIES OF FISHING 
prominently. I can only notice one or two of the passages 
cited in support of each characteristic, but the evidence 
adduced generally carries conviction. 
On the Hospitality of fishermen, poor though it were, 
stress is laid by Greek and Roman writers. 
Bunsmann’s citation of Petronius (Saé., 114) and Plutarch 
(Vita Pompett, 73) as witnesses to credit is, however, far from 
happy, especially in the case of the former, who recounts that 
when the boat had been so battered as to be a-wash “ pro- 
currere piscatores parvulis expediti navigiis ad predam 
vapiendam.”’ The lightning-like change of the fishermen, on 
realising that their intended victims were ready to defend 
themselves, from plunderers to helpers, and the non-denial 
to the shipwrecked folk of the use of their hut for eating 
some sea-sodden food, scarcely shine as exemplars of high 
Hospitality. No wonder the guests dragged out a “ most 
miserable night.’ 
Tyrrhenus, the old deaf fisherman in The Ethiopian 
History (omitted by Bunsmann), embodies a far better instance 
of the characteristic Hospitality. His glad welcome and the 
surrender to his guests of ‘‘ the cosier part of his dwelling ” 
betoken Nature’s gentleman.! 
A still better instance meets us in the Greek romance of 
Apollonius of Tyre,2 possibly an imitation of the Heliodorus 
idyll. The prince, sole survivor of a shipwreck, is found, fed, 
clad, and afterwards directed by an old fisherman to Pentapolis, 
where he wins a competition before the king. This romance, 
which survives in a Latin version of the sixth century, became 
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries widely popular and 
translated into most European languages. To it, as the 
scenes and the characters prove, Shakespeare, or possibly 
Wilkins, must have owed much of his Pericles. 
On the question whence originated their Piety to the 
Gods, whether it sprang from or was only influenced by the 
fact that their lives were passed amid the unknown but ever- 
present and awful forces of Nature identified with certain gods, 
1 Heliod, Ethiop., V. 18. 
2? De Apollonio Tyrio, 12. 
