202 FISH MANIA—VITELLIUS—APICIUS—COOKS 
Greece proper, from its comparative sterility and poverty 
of water, was very limited in its capacity to grow crops or 
rear herds. It compulsorily fell back largely on fish. And 
principally sea-fish, because of their superior palatability, 
and because of the inadequacy, owing to scarcity of lakes and 
perennial rivers, of fresh-water fish. 
Whatever be the cause of the early abstention, three points 
arouse our interest. (A) The passages in Greek writers 
(previous to lian) that describe angling in Greek fresh 
waters, reach but a scant half-dozen, while those that depict 
fishing in such waters—sacred lakes, temple stewponds, and 
eeling in Lake Copais excepted—can probably be reckoned on 
both hands.1 
(B) The Palatine Anthology (at least in the period from 
700 B.C. to 500 A.D.) contains no reference (as far as I know) 
to aught but sea-fishing. 
(C) The Greek comedians, Athenzus, the Greek opsophagic 
authors all almost always reserve their appreciations for food 
from ixOudac mévroc. 
The statement that the Romans abstained, like the Maeate 
or Celts 2 of North Britain, from fresh-water fish from similar, 
or any motives, cannot be established. It goes far beyond 
the evidence at our command, although some aversion may 
be possibly deduced from Ovid (Fast., VI. 173 f.), and as 
regards shell-fish from Varro. Unlike the Greeks, however, 
they certainly in a very short period became great consumers 
of fish from the Tiber, the Po, the Italian Lakes, and after- 
wards from the Danube, Rhine, etc., but in their estimation, 
as in that of the Greeks, fish from the sea ever held the higher 
place. 
* Passages which at first sight seem to conflict with this summary can often 
be ruled out from (A) geographical reasons, where (1) the fishing occurs in 
some non-Greek water, as in the Tiber (Galen, wep) tpopdv duvduews, 3), OF 
(2) the locality is not specified, as in Athen., VIII. 56, which is merely a 
quotation from a treatise of Mnesitheus, concerned with all kinds of fish 
from a digestive point of view; and (B) from the brackish nature of water. 
2 Dio. Cass. 76, 12, 2, speaks of the Scottish Seas as swarming and crammed 
with fish. 
3 Damm, p. 465, asserts that the order of eating of fish among the Greeks 
was (1) Fish from the sea, and then, but much later, (2) Fish from the rapids 
of a river. Daremberg and Saglio: ‘‘ Pour les Grecs le poisson d’eau douce 
