FISHERS’ HOSPITALITY, PLETY 123 
or sprang rather from a gratitude proportioned to future 
benefits, Bunsmann is discreetly non-committal. 
But of outward and visible signs of such Piety the Anthologia 
Palatina iseloquent. Their Piety towards the dead is strikingly 
attested by Hegesippus, the simplicity of whose style in his 
eight epigrams in Anth. Pal. betokens an early date. ‘‘ The 
fishermen brought up from the sea in their net a half-eaten 
man, a most mournful relic of some voyage. They sought 
not for unholy gain, but him and the fishes too they buried 
under this light coat of sand,” ! 
Bunsmann furnishes two records of impiety among fisher- 
men. The first occurs in the well-known Baiano procul a lacu 
recede of Martial (Epigy., IV. 30), where an impious poacher 
in the very act of landing his fish from the Emperor’s lake is 
stricken with blindness. The second, in Athen., VII. 18, and 
Elian, XV. 23, where Epopeus, a fisherman of the island of 
Icarus, enraged by taking nothing but sacred or tabu Pompili, 
turned to with his son and devoured them, only themselves 
in turn to be devoured by a whale.? 
But the impietas charged from Anth. Pal., VI. 24, is fantastic. 
The indictment has been drawn owing either to mistranslation 
of the passage or inability to appreciate the rather heavy- 
handed humour (frequent in the Greek and Roman writers of 
the time) of Lucilius, a conjectured author of the Epigram. 
Heliodorus lays down at the portals of the temple of “ the 
Syrian goddess ”’ a votive offering of his fishing net worn out, 
not by catches of fish, but of seaweed “‘ from the beaches of 
goodly havens.” This dedication, as fish were sacred to the 
goddess and in Syria were forbidden as a food, has been 
imputed as an affront to the deity, but quite incorrectly. 
Heliodorus in offering his net intended no disrespect, nor 
offended any law of the temple. Since its sole catch had been 
seaweed, his net could plead “ pure from the prey of fishery.” 
1 VII. 276, W. R. Paton’s Translation. 
? Cf. Pausanias, III. 21, 5: ‘‘ Men fear to fish in the Lake of Poseidon, 
for they think he who catches fish in it is turned into a fish called The Fisher.” 
In I. 38, 1, we find that only the priests were allowed to fish, because the 
rivers were sacred to Demeter, and in VII. 22, 4, that the fish at Pharae were 
sacred to Hermes, and so inviolate. 
K 
