196 AUSONIUS—SALMO—FIRST MENTION OF PIKE 
the blow vibrates on the breeze, as when a lash snaps in the 
air with a crack, and the wind whistles to the shock. 
“The finny captives bound on the dry rocks, in terror at 
the sunlight’s deadly rays; the force which stood to them in 
their native stream languishes under our sky, and wastes their 
life in struggles to respire.! Now, only a dull throb shudders 
through the feeble frame, the sluggish tail flaps in the last 
throes, the jaws gape, but the breath which they inhale returns 
from the gills in the gaspings of death: as, when a breeze 
fans the fires of the forge, the linen valve of the bellows plays 
against its beechen sides, now opening, and now shutting, to 
admit or to confine the wind. 
“Some fish have I seen who, in the last agony, gathered 
their forces, sprang aloft, and plunged head foremost into the 
river beneath, regaining the waters for which they had ceased 
to hope. Impatient of this loss, the thoughtless boy dashes 
in after them from above and strikes out in wild pursuit. 
Even thus Glaucus of Anthedon, the old man of the Beeotian 
Sea, when, after tasting Circe’s deadly herbs, he ate of the 
grass which dying fish had nibbled,? passes, a strange denizen, 
into the Carpathian deep. Armed with hook and net, a fisher- 
man in the depths of that realm whose upper waters he had been 
wont to plunder, Glaucus glided along, the pirate of those 
helpless tribes.”’ 
Whether the Salay and the Fario of the Idyll are, or are 
not, identical with the burn trout or salmon trout of modern 
days affords a problem for ichthyologists, not for me. 
Ausonius is the first to mention not only the Salar and 
Fario 3 but also our Pike—Esox lucius.4 
1 Cf. Plutarch, Symp., IV. 4. ‘‘ The place where we live is to fish no less 
than Hell: for no sooner come they unto it, but dead they immediately be.” 
Holland’s Translation. 
2 For the story of Glaucus, see #sch., Frag. 28; Paus, IX. 22, 6 and 7; 
Virgil, n., VI. 36; and Athen., VII. 47, 8. Ausonius follows the version 
according to which Glaucus had been metamorphosed by Circe, and then on 
tasting the herb regained his human form as the ‘‘ Old Man of the Sea.” 
Ovid, Met., XIII. 898 ff. 
3 Mosella, 88. ‘‘Purpureisque Salar stellatus tergora guttis,"”” and ibid., 
129 £., “Qui necdum Salmo, necdum Salar, ambiguusque Amborum medio, 
sario, intercepte sub evo.” 
4 Mosella, 122 ff. Polemius Silvius, Index Dierum Festorum, more than 
half a century later, seems the second—such is the infrequency of mention. 
