FISHING EPIGRAMS—LEONIDAS 137 
flint pregnant with fire, that sets alight the tinder ’’), corre- 
sponds in material and order of enumeration fairly closely with 
Asphalion’s in Theocritus. 
Of the second I borrow a spirited translation of the last lines, 
“Yet—not Arcturus, nor the blasts that blow 
Down-rushing, swept this aged man below : 
But like a lamp long burning, and whose light 
Flickers, self-spent, and is extinguished quite, 
In a rush hut he died :—to him this grave 
(No wife, no child he had) his brother fishers gave.” } 
The third, which should be The Awful Warning, if any 
warning avail; to boys fishing in the middle of a burn and holding 
while changing their lure a fish in their teeth (who of us has not 
done this?), sets a picture of a more violent death, “for the 
slippery thing went wriggling down his narrow gullet,’ and 
choked him on the spot. 
The subjoined, somewhat loose, translation is from Black- 
wood’s Magazine, Vol. XX XVIII? 
“ Parmis, the son of Callignotus—he 
“Who trolled for fish the margin of the sea, 
Chief of his craft, whose keen perceptive search, 
The kichlé, scarus, bait-devouring perch, 
And such as love the hollow clefts, and those 
That in the caverns of the deep repose, 
Could not escape—is dead ! 
Parmis had lured 
A Julis from its rocky haunts, secured 
Between his teeth the slippery pert, when, lo ! 
It jerked into the gullet of its foe, 
1 The following translation by Mr. Andrew Lang is truer: 
“Theris the Old, the waves that harvested 
More keen than birds that labour in the sea, 
With spear and net, by shore and rocky bed, 
Not with the well-manned galley laboured he; 
Him not the star of storms, nor sudden sweep 
Of wind with all his years hath smitten and bent, 
But in his hut of reeds he fell asleep, 
As fades a lamp when all the oil is spent : 
This tomb nor wife nor children raised, but we 
His fellow-toilers, fishers of the sea.” 
2 In line 5 pérys,which makes nonsense, should certainly be corrected to 
TAWTHS. 
