174 PLUTARCH—CLEOPATRA—OPPIAN—ATHENAUS 
laughter and ridicule. “ Leave,’’ cried Cleopatra, ‘‘ leave the 
fishing rod to us; your game is Cities, Provinces, and King- 
doms.” ! 
Shakespeare makes Cleopatra’s diver attach the salted 
fish : 
“‘Cleo: Give me mine angle, we'll to the river : there, 
My music playing far off, I will betray 
Tawny finn’d fishes ; my bended hook shall pierce 
Their slimy jaws, and as I draw them up, 
T’ll think them every one an Antony, 
And say ‘ Ah, ha! you’re caught.’ 
** Charmian : ’Twas merry when 
You wager’d on your angling ; when your diver 
Did hang a salt-fish on his hook, which he 
With fervency drew up. 
“* Cleo: That time !—O times !— 
J laughed him out of patience, and that night 
I laugh’d him into patience ; and next morn, 
Ere the ninth hour, I drunk him to his bed.” 
We owe most of our knowledge as to the technical methods, 
the varying minutie, and the numerous materials employed by 
the Greeks and Latins in Fishing and Angling, to Oppian, to 
ZElian, Pliny the Elder, and Plutarch. 
‘“‘ Bearing somewhat the same relationship to Eclogues of 
Fishermen that Virgil’s Georgics do to those of Shepherds, were 
the Greek verse treatises on fish and fishing. No fewer than 
six didactic Epics of the sort were composed, but only that of 
Oppian is extant incomplete form.? It is written in hexameter, 
1 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act II. Sc. 5. Weigall, The Life 
and Times of Cleopatra, pp. 245-6, makes the locus the harbour of Alexandria, 
not the Nile, and the modus, Antony’s diver affixing fresh fish to his hook. 
Cleopatra, guessing Antony’s ruse, assembled next day a party of notables to 
applaud the angler, but instructed a slave to dive from the other side of the 
vessel and the instant the hook touched the water attach to it a pickled Pontic 
fish. Cleopatram ‘‘ ridentem dicere verum quid vetat ? ” 
2 A century or so before Oppian, Demostratus, a Roman Senator, wrote 
also 'AArevrind—a work on Fishing of twenty books—which, although often 
quoted by ancient writers, is now not extant. From the extracts given by 
lian (XIII. 21, XV. 4 and 19) we gather that Demostratus, who wrote in Greek, 
had even more than a Greek love of the marvellous and cared nothing for the 
sober scientific study of his subject. It is noteworthy that an alternative 
title of his work was Adyo: GAtevrixol, or, say, Fishing Yarns, 
