228 FISH IN SACRIFICES—VIVARIA—ARCHIMEDES 
Antonia, to whom the lands and villa of Hortensius 
descended, even stripped herself of her earrings to put them ona 
murena. This lady, apart from this anecdote, was no ordinary 
person. We find her passing from the positive of celebrated 
renown for her beauty, her virtue, her chastity (no mean feat 
in that day !), through the comparative of being the mother of 
Germanicus Caesar and Claudius, and the grandmother of 
Caligula (which last, in slang parlance, ‘“‘ wanted a bit of 
doing !’’), unto the superlative of deathless fame in Pliny’s 
“Nunquam exspuisse’”’ (never spat !).! 
The savage use, to which Vedius Pollio put his vivarza, can be 
learnt from the pages of Pliny 2 and Seneca.3 A slave, for 
breaking a crystal decanter at a banquet given to Augustus, 
was ordered to be thrown instantly into a piscina, there to be 
eaten alive by the nibbling voracious Mureng. Escaping 
from his guards he threw himself at the Emperor’s feet, 
“‘beseeching nothing else except that he should die otherwise 
than as food for fish’’4. Casar moved “ novitate crudelitatis ”’ 
(he little knew that this was his host’s cheery custom) com- 
manded the crystals of Pollio to be smashed on the spot, the 
slave to be freed, and all the fishponds to be filled up. 
As conducive to la joie de vivre of the other slaves, the 
command was commendable, for the bite of the Murena’s 
serrated teeth, according to Nicander’s Theriaca—that “‘ nullius 
fidei farrago ’’—owing to its mating with the viper, dealt 
poisonous death and destruction to the fishermen driven by 
its pursuit ‘‘ headlong from their boats,’ and was only curable 
by a mixture made of ashes from its own burnt head! So 
dreaded was this fish—curious is it not, to read, although from 
Chinese proverb. ‘‘In Japan fish are summoned to dinner by melodious gongs. 
In India, I have seen them called out of the muddy depths of the river at 
Dohlpore by the ringing of a handbell, while carp in Belgium answer at once 
to the whistle of the monks who feed them, and in far away Otaheite, the 
chiefs have pet eels, whom they whistle to the surface’ (Robinson, op. cit., 
p. 14). Cf. Athen., VIII. 3, ‘and I myself and very likely many of you too 
have seen eels having golden and silver earrings, taking food from any one 
whofoffered it to them.’’ The Egyptians similarly adorned their crocodiles 
with gold earrings. Herod. 2. 69. 
1 VII. 38, 
2 IX. 39. 
3 De Ira, III. 4o. 
4 For eels devouring the flesh of a corpse, see Iliad, 203 and 353. 
