330 SACRED FISH 
defiled by having at some time or other been employed in 
catching their favourite fish.’ ! Aflian goes farther: ‘ were 
but one of these fish taken in a net, the townsmen would let 
the whole catch free.’’ 2 
Holy Wars, even if unpreached by a tarbushed Kaiser, 
came to pass in Plutarch’s day ; “ within our memory, because 
the people of Kynopolis presumed to eat their fish, the Oxyrhyn- 
cites 3 in revenge seized on all the dogs, or sacred animals of 
their enemies that came in their way, offering them in sacrifice, 
and eating their flesh in like manner as they did that of their 
other victims: this drew on a war between the two cities, 
wherein both sides, after doing each other much mischief, 
were at last severely punished by the Romans.” 4 
To another religious war, between the Ombites and the 
Tentyrites, we owe the great Satire XV. of Juvenal, when 
banished to Egypt at the age of eighty.5 The poem ranks 
high, not only for its mordant irony but also for its description 
of the origin of civil society, ‘‘ a description infinitely superior 
to anything that Lucretius or Horace has delivered on the 
subject,” according to the not always laudatory Gifford. 
“Who knows not to what monstrous gods, my friend, 
The mad inhabitants of Egypt bend ? 
The snake-devouring ibis, These enshrine, 
Those think the crocodile alone divine.” 
“ Those’? were the Ombites, “ These’’ the Tentyrites, who 
hated the crocodile worshipped at Ombos: hence 
“ Blind bigotry, at first, the evil wrought, 
For each despised the other’s gods, and thought 
Its own the true, the genuine—in a word 
The only deities to be adored.” & 
1 Plut., 8. 
2N. H., X. 46. 
3 The Mormyri, to which the Oxyrhynchus belongs, figure on the walls, 
and in bronzes, O. kannum and O. caschive being most frequent; but the 
Bana (Petvociphalus bane) and Grathonemus aprinoides also occur. The best 
delineations are found in the tombs of Ti and of Gizeh—G. A. Boulenger, 
Fishes of the Nile, London, 1907. 
4 Plut., Ibid., ch. 72. 
5 The banishment is disputed by Franke and others. 
XV. 45. ‘‘ Aegyptus, sed luxuria, quantum ipse notavi,” 
° From Gifford’s Translation, 
Cf., however, Sat., 
