SIDONIUS—AD MOSELLAM 195 
rate, no opsophagist or other author notices the fish. Their 
silence is natural; the high temperature of the water forbids 
its frequenting the Mediterranean or its inflowing rivers. 
The length of the whole poem (483 lines) prevents entire 
quotation, although the touch and movement all through display 
fully the instinct and feeling for sport. 
Pictures of the scenery along the banks of the Moselle are 
followed by the enumeration and characterisation of the fish 
in its waters rendered after the manner of the didactic epic. 
The poem furnishes a lively description of the fishermen of 
the Moselle, made from actual observation. Men in boats 
drag nets in mid-stream ; men watch the corks of little nets in 
shallower water; men perched on banks or on rocks armed 
with rods scan the floats bobbing on the water, or jerk in the 
prey. But we search for fly-fishing in vain. 
“And now, where the bank gives easy access, a host of 
spoilers are searching all the waters.2 Alas! poor fish, ill 
sheltered by thine inmost stream! One of them trails his 
wet lines far out in mid-river, and sweeps off the shoals caught 
in his knotty seine ; where the stream glides with placid course, 
another spreads his drag-nets buoyed on their cork-floats. 
“A third, leaning over the waters beneath the rock, lowers 
the arching top of his supple rod, as he casts the hooks sheathed 
in deadly baits. The unwary rovers of the deep rush on them 
with gaping mouth—too late, their wide jaws feel through 
and through the stings of the hidden barb—they writhe—the 
surface tells the tale, and the rod ducks to the jerky twitch 
of the quivering horse-hair. Enough—with one whizzing 
stroke the boy snatches his prey slant-wise from the water ; 
1 Salmon appear but infrequently in representations, but Plate 8 in 
C. W. King’s Roman Antiquities at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, London, 
1879, shows in colours a mosaic dedicated to the god Nodons by Flavius 
Senilis, an officer in command of the fleet stationed off the Severn: this 
mosaic includes a number of salmon. King, ib. Plate 13, 2, is a diadem of beaten 
bronze representing a fisherman with a pointed cap in the act of hooking 
with undoubtedly a tight line a fine salmon: cf. A. B. Cook’s discussion of 
these finds in Folk-Lore, 1906, XVI. 37 ff. Nodons was in fact, like Nuada, a 
fish god, indeed a Celtic understudy for Neptune. If salmon figure little in 
representations, they bulk large in laws, and in commissariats for campaigns, 
e.g. 3000 dried salmon were ordered by Edw. II. in his war with Bruce. 
2 From Professor R. C. Jebbs’ Tvanslation, p. 176 (line 240 ff.). 
