262 THE NINE FISH MOST HIGHLY PRIZED 
teaching, and fighting I have dealt, was on the menu a most 
welcome and eagerly anticipated item.! 
Of the Murenida, at Athens the Eel, at Rome the Muvena 
was, as the last chapter shows, the greater favourite. Arch- 
estratus, it is true, commands men of taste to buy at all hazards 
the Murena of “the Straights’’?; but the Latin authors 
sing its praise frequently and fervently. 
The comparative want of appreciation of the Eel at Rome 
may have been merely masculine, and evolved from the Latin 
boy (pretextatus) regarding ‘‘ this cousin of the snake” not 
as a dainty for his palate, but as a scourge for his body! 
Early association counts for much in later life: so his back’s 
memory of a flogging with a whip made of eel-skins, twisted 
tightly together, may have caused the male adult to ap- 
proach delicately, or not at all, the fish with his freeborn 
palate. 
At the tvipatinium, which marked the height of delight at 
a supper,t the Murena gave the choicest morsel. Horace, 
Martial, and others not only sing its fame, but give its proper 
dressing. To Martial’s taste that from Sicily ranked first, 
but Varro—was it because these, as Suidas asserts, were the 
largest ?—votes for the Spanish fish. 
While Apicius (X. 8) hands down various recipes for the 
proper frying and boiling of the other parts, he distinctly 
discards, on account of its reputed poisonous properties, the 
head of the Murena. But among the Greeks direction follows 
direction for cooking the Conger’s “‘ exquisite head.’’ Philemon 
thapsodises over— 
1 The Lamprey, Pride, and Murena are different fish. They are all 
engraved in Nash’s book, who lays down that the Murena is not the lamprey— 
as indeed a representation (from Herculaneum) of the former done with great 
exactness serves to establish. See T. D. Fosbroke, Encyl. of Antig. (London, 
1843), p. 1033, and p. 402, figure 3. 
2 Ap. Athen., VII. 91. 
3 The toga pretexta was worn by the higher magistrates, certain priests, 
and free-born children. Isidorus, in Gloss., ‘‘ Anguilla est qua coercentur in 
scholis pueri,” and Pliny, N. H., 1X., 39, ‘“‘ eoque verberari solitos tradit 
Verrius pretextatos.” Under the old law pretextati were unamerceable; non 
in ave, sed in cute soluebant! Our Saxon forbears adopted the whip of eels; 
see Fosbroke, op. cit., p. 303. Rabelais (II. 30) continues the tradition— 
‘‘ Whereupon his master gave him such a sound thrashing with an eel-skin, 
that his own would have been worth nought for bagpipes,”’ 
4 Pliny, N. H. 35; 46; quoting from Fenestella. 
