PILOT-FISH—ATHENAUS—CRABS 183 
Some of Oppian’s best bits contain animated portraits 
of sea-fights. The combatants are as intensely personified as 
Homer’s Greeks and Trojans in their hand-to-hand fight on 
the banks of the Scamander. But unlike the Heroes, the 
belligerents of Oppian pull each other to pieces without any 
responsibility on their part, or shock to moral sense on ours: 
“ Unwise we blame the rage of warring fish 
Who urged by hunger must supply the wish ; 
While cruel man, to whom his ready food 
Kind Earth affords, yet thirsts for human blood.” 
In proportion as fish, which according to the earliest 
authors was despised or disregarded, grew in favour with the 
Greeks, the frequency of its mention in Greek literature 
increased apace. 
The Detpnosophiste by Atheneus, to which belongs the 
distinction of being one of the earliest collections of Axa, is 
a curious sort of philosophers’ feast. It quotes from nearly 
every writer on nearly every topic ; it discusses almost every 
conceivable subject, especially gastronomy. It weighs the 
qualities of all things edible. Comments on fish, taken from 
plays, histories, treatises, etc., are plentifully, if incongruously, 
scattered.! 
Everything goes in this work; grammatical problems are 
mixed up with gastronomic; the discursiveness of Athenzus 
races from grave to gay, grim death to any story, however 
apparently disconnected. 
His tale of the Pinna (III. 46), a bivalve shell-fish, and the 
Pinnothere (a small crab who inhabits the shell of the Pinna) 
resembles many of the fables current among the West Indian 
negroes as regards the cleverness of the Crab. As soon as the 
small fish, on which the Pinna subsists, have swum within 
the shell side, the Pinnothere nips the Pinna as a signal to 
him to close his shell and secure them. 
Plutarch (De Sol. Anim., 30) shows that the habit was not 
entirely altruistic, for ‘‘ this being done, they feed together 
claimed that this fish, Kai Kai-a-wavo, was not only the embodiment of his 
tribal Mana and his family guardian angel, but had guided his ancestor eleven 
generations before in his exploring of Cook Sound, etc. 
1 See W. Smith, Dict. Gk.-Rom. Biog. and Myth., s.v.° Athenzus.’ 
