CHAPTER XIV 
INFATUATION FOR FISH—EXTRAVAGANT PRICES—COSTLY 
ENTERTAINMENTS — VITELLIUS —- CLEOPATRA — API- 
CIUS—COOKS—SAUCES 
LEAVING now the Lore of fishing among the Greeks and Romans, 
let us turn, before examining the nature and number of their 
Lures, to their estimation of Fish as a food. 
We found, it will be remembered, that the Homeric poems 
make no mention of fish being served at a banquet of the 
heroes, or even appearing on the tables of people of position. 
Only poor or starving folk ate fish. Although fish became later 
an insensate luxury, the Greeks at first apparently abstained 
from all fish caught in fresh water, except the eels of Lake 
Copais, then as now far-famed.! 
This abstention from fresh-water fish originated (according to 
Plutarch) in the belief that every spring and every stream was 
sacred to some god or nymph, to catch whose property or 
progeny—the fish in them—would be an act of impiety.? 
This sounds like a laboured explanation of a fact really due 
to other causes. One of these is brought out clearly in Geikie. 
When noticing the difference which existed between the 
Greek and the Roman interest in and feeling for the sea, he, 
or rather Professor Mackail, attributes it largely to a question 
of food supply.? 
se 1 Cf. Chapter IV. Also Plutarch, Symp., VIII. 8, and Aristoph., Ach., 
0. 
2 Akin to this we have the special prohibition—unique as far as I know— 
whereby priests at the temple of Leptis abstained from eating sea fish, because 
Poseidon was god of the sea, and owner and protector of its denizens. 
Plutarch, De soleyt. an., 35, 11. At other of his temples, e.g. in Laconia, the 
fate awaiting a violator of the sacred fish was that common to poachers of 
similar holy waters, death. 
3 The Love of Nature among the Romans (London, 1912), p. 300, n. Tf. 
201 
