CHAPTER XIII 
AUSONIUS—-SALMO, SALAR AND FARIO—FIRST MENTION 
OF THE PIKE 
AUSONIUS (¢. 310-c. 393 A.D.) is practically the last Latin 
writer within my time-limit (A.D. 500) who has allusions of 
interest to Fishing. In the fifth century, however, Sidonius, 
whose fishing and hunting interest apparently equalled his 
diocesan—his ‘Nolo Episcopari’ was, if fruitless, at once 
exceptional and genuine, for the see of Clermont had to be 
forced on his acceptance—tells us in a letter and in his poems 
of the catching of fish, especially by night lines in a lake on his 
wife’s property in the Auvergne.! 
The tenth Idyll of Ausonius (“Ad Mosellam,’”’ a great 
favourite with Izaak Walton), ranks, according to Mackail, 
‘the writer not merely as the last or all but last of Latin, but 
also as the first of French poets.’’ It demands mention, quite 
apart from the vividness of its pictures, because it is the only 
fisher poem of any length in classical Latin, and because in 
it occurs the first mention of the Salar and the Fario. 
Of the Salmo Pliny three hundred years previously was the 
first to speak.2 The Greeks knew not the Salmon: at any 
1 Ep., 11.2; Carmina, XIX. and XXI. Fortunately for Sidonius, Clermont 
was in the Auvergne, so he could be at once piscatory and episcopus. 
2 1X. 32. ‘‘In Aquitania salmo fluvialis marinis omnibus prefertur.’’ 
To make this clear piscibus should be understood after omnibus. The salmon 
is the fish most frequently found in the débris of the French caves, many of 
which are in Aquitania, so Paleolithic and Plinian man at any rate ate tooth 
to tooth in their preference. See Introduction. It is somewhat amazing, 
considering their opsophagy and the excellence of the fish, that down to 
500 A.D. no Greek, and no Latin writer, except Pliny, Ausonius, and Sidonius, 
Ep. II. 2, mentions the Salmonide, I cannot forgo Ausonius’s epithet— 
mouth-filling yet appropriate—for us, who dwell in ‘‘ this blessed Isle, this 
England,” Aquilonigenasque Britannos. 
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