130 TRAITS OF FISHERMEN—DEITIES OF FISHING 
Sophocles (Ajax, 880) to the last Romanticist,! but also in the 
statuary, pictures, frescoes, mosaics of Greek and Roman Art. 
Numerous examples can be cited from the museums of Naples, 
Rome, Paris, and London sustaining the contention that all 
real fishermen were ever depicted old and careworn.? 
The fishing boys and women of the Amorini at Pompeii 
and elsewhere may be adduced as vitiating this statement : 
but these, it must be borne in mind, are merely artistic repre- 
sentations of Anglers and of dalliance, not of real fishermen 
toiling for their livelihood. So, too, in the Greek representa- 
tions where boys, not Putti or Amorini, figure as fishing, it will 
be found that they are helpers or “ fish-boys ”’ of the working 
fisherman. 
The explanations why fishermen are so rendered vary. 
Perhaps the truest, certainly the concisest, is Alciphron’s, 
Tpépec yap ovdév’ 4 O4Xar7za—the sea feeds no one. According 
to Bunsmann, fishermen are always represented as old and 
poor and worn, because their delineators desired by painting 
the career as blackly as possible to excite sympathy. For this 
purpose old age and poverty and heavy toil, which appeal 
unto all, stood ready as their most effective strokes. 
According to Hall, the fisher, a common character in all 
Greek literature, was in early times described with simple 
truth. Only later, when imitation took the place of originality, 
did conventionalism render him always as aged, pathetic, 
superstitious, wretchedly poor, yet patient and content.4 
1 To cite but one of the scores of intermediate authors as regards poverty, 
Ovid, Met., III. 586-01, 
Pauper et ipse fuit, linoque solebat et hamis 
Decipere, et calamo salientis ducere pisces. 
Ars illi sua census erat. Cum traderet artem, 
“* Accipe quas habeo, studii successor et heres,” 
Dixit, “ opes.’’ Moriensque mihi nihil ille reliquit 
Preter aquas: unum hoc possum appellare paternum. 
2 The véo: xaides in the oracles’ warning to Homer, which seem at first 
sight antagonistic to the above, become in Homer’s own words of greeting, 
&ySpes. Perhaps the employment of véwr naldwy by the Delphic priestess 
may be due (1) to the fact that they were ‘‘fish-boys” proper, (2) to an early 
and intelligent anticipation of the “ juvenescent”” tendency, or (3) to the 
exigency, not unknown to sixth form Hexameter-makers of the present, but 
(alas ! if Oxford and Cambridge be obeyed) not of the future day, of scansion! 
3 Cf. Mus. Borbon., 1V. 54, or Baumeister, Denkmdler Klass. Altert. (Munich, 
1885), i. 552, f. 588. 
« The happiest, perhaps the only happy, fishermen are those shown at the 
