180 PLUTARCH—CLEOPATRA—OPPIAN—ATHENEUS 
rents the world over would speedily abate, and many a river 
would know its tenant no more. 
For reading “at lairge’’ Oppian is admirable. At one 
moment you are enjoying a vivid and passably accurate 
account (III. 149 ff.) of how the Cramp or Torpedo Fish 
(vapxn), like Brer Fox, lies low in the sand and the mud, but on 
a sudden “ ejects his poisoned charms ’”’ with such effect that 
soon 
“On every joint an Icy Stiffness steals, 
The flowing spirit binds and blood congeals.” 4 
A fish stupefied by the shock is likened (II. 81 ff.) unto a man 
_ who in dreams tries to escape from the threatening phantoms, . 
only to find his knees bound and his limbs incapable of flight. 
At another moment our poet (in I. 217 ff.) is reproving 
the incredulity of those who doubt the fact that a sucker fish 
can stop a ship under full sail, by sticking to its keel ! 2 
The peculiar powers of the Torpedo Fish command some 
comment. Ancient authors galore, to whom, in the absence 
of the more powerful electric Eel of Central America, the vapxn 
must have appeared an amazing creature, have written and 
differed about it. Aristotle had early noted that it caught 
its prey by means of a stupefying apparatus in its mouth, or 
rather at the back of its head. Claudian asks (Carm. Min. 
Corp., XLIV. (XLVI.) 1 f.): 
“ Quis non indomitam mire Torpedinis artem 
Audiit et merito signatas nomine vires ? ”’ 
Plato compares Socrates to the fish from his capability 
of electrifying his audience in the strict, but not in the corrupt 
1 Cicero, de Nat. deor., II. 50, 127. 
2 Perhaps the best prose description of the power of the Echineis is to be 
found in Cassiodorus, Var., 1.35. Pliny, XXXII. 1, solemnly asserts that the 
death of the Emperor Caligula was presaged by a Remora stopping his great 
galley, alone out of all the accompanying fleet, on his voyage to Antium. 
Not only did the Remora stop a ship, but according to Pliny, it could, from its 
power of checking the natural actions of the body under excitement, hasten 
or stay an accouchement as well as a lawsuit: hence plaintiffs seldom ventured 
into the fish market, because the mere sight of a Remora at such a juncture 
was most inauspicious! (Pliny, IX. 41, and XXXII. 1). Cf. Aristotle, H. A., 
2.14, “Kal xpovral tiwes ab’r@ mpds Slkas nal piarpa.” For an explanation ot 
the myth of the Remora, see V.W. Ekman, ‘‘On Dead Water,” in the Reports 
of Nansen's Polay Expedition, Christiania, 1904. 
