CHAPTER XI 
PLUTARCH : THE CHARGE AGAINST HIM OF CONTEMNING 
FISHING QUITE FALSE—CLEOPATRA’S FISHING— 
OPPIAN—THE TORPEDO FOR GOUT—ATHENAZUS 
Our next two authors, Plutarch (a little later than Martial) 
and Oppian (c. 170 A.D.), both wrote in Greek. 
Plutarch for centuries has been misrepresented and maligned 
as an opponent and contemptuous disdainer of fishing, but 
quite inaccurately. I am not of the class of writers who invest 
Nero with a halo, or canonise Clytemnestra. I am no Knight 
of the Round Table on a quest to redeem lost characters, but 
I feel it a duty and a pleasure on behalf of Plutarch to fling 
down the glove and challenge his traducers to a duel @ outrance. 
Modern English writers, 
“to the listening earth 
Repeat the story,” 
but not, like the Moon, the story of “ the birth ” of their error. 
Inevitably in their pages crop up Burton’s words, ‘‘ Plutarch, 
in his book De Sol. Anim., speaks against all fishing as a 
filthy, base, illiberal employment, having neither wit nor 
perspicacity in it, nor worth the labour.” ! 
_} The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1806), I. 406. If Burton, ‘‘ that 
universal plunderer ’’ has cribbed from Dame Juliana Berners her eloquent 
eulogy on the secondary pleasures of angling, this book, in turn, till its resurrec- 
tion in the eighteenth century was ruthlessly pillaged without acknowledgment. 
Warton, Milton, 2nd edition, p. 94, suggests that Milton seems to have borrowed 
the subject of L’Allegro and Ii Pensevoso, together with some thoughts and 
expressions, from a poem prefixed to the book, while a writer in The Angler’s 
Note Book, March 31, 1880, believes that ‘‘ Walton probably drew the inspira- 
tion of his Angler’s song from the wonderful storehouse of this quaint and 
original author.” 
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