PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN SYMBOLS 275 
Such seems to have been the trend, possibly from pursuing 
a policy of compromise, more probably from following the 
line of least resistance, of most religious changes or revivals. 
But while the attributes of many of the Greek gods were, at 
least in certain of their attributes, assimilated to Syrian and 
Eastern divinities, and while the Roman pantheon made room 
for various Egyptian new-comers, the Jew’s conception of his 
Deity remained practically unaffected and uninfected. 
A fish frequently figures on the tombs of the early Christians 
in the catacombs at Rome: sometimes it bears on its back a 
bowl with wine and wafers of bread. Many tombs contain 
small fish of wood or ivory. Such fish served, we are told, as 
emblems and acrostics, pointing out to his co-religionists the 
burial place of a Christian without betraying the fact to the 
persecutors. 
This explanation lacks confirmation, and carries little 
conviction, for two (among other) reasons. First: critical 
statistics show that fish as symbols in Christian art figured 
frequently both before and after Constantine. Second: fish 
as indicative of a burial place would by their very presence 
quickly defeat the object aimed at. They would indicate, as 
surely as pointers game, the secret grave, for the persecutors 
of the Christians, as history shows, were not all exactly 
fools. 
Some authors trace back not a few of the signs ! and usages 
adopted and perpetuated by the Christians to the worship of 
Venus, of which, when in conjunction with a fish, the under- 
lying idea was the adoration—nearly universal—of fecundity. 
Two instances, which I give for what they are worth, must 
suffice. 
As regards Lent, A. de Gubernatis contends that Aphrodite 
or Venus, the goddess of Love2, frequently represented the 
Spring. Hence it is that in Lent, appointed by the Church to 
be observed in Spring, and again on Friday (or the day of Freya) 
* See C. Cahier, Cavactéivistiques des Saints dans Vart populaive (Paris, 1867), 
Vol. II. 691 if., for illustrations of Saints accompanied by fishes. 
2 Op. cit., II. 340. “ The gemini pisces, the two fishes joined in one, were 
sacred to her, and the joke of the poisson d’Auril . . . is a jest of phallical 
origin, and has a scandalous significance.” 
