e encompassed by another
world, and having their own proper bounds, which it is death for them
to pass, they afford our belly no pretence at all for their destruction;
and therefore to catch or be greedy after fish is plain deliciousness
and luxury, which upon no just reason unsettle the sea and dive into
the deep. For we cannot call the mullet corn-destroying, the trout
grape-eating, nor the barbel or seapike seed-gathering, as we do some
land-animals, signifying their hurtfulness by these epithets. Nay, those
little mischiefs which we complain of in these house-creatures, a
weasel or fly, none can justly lay upon the greatest fish. Therefore
the Pythagoreans, confining themselves not only by the law which forbids
them to injure men, but also by Nature, which commands them to do
violence to nothing, fed on fish very little, or rather not at all. But
suppose there were no injustice in this case, yet to delight in fish
would argue daintiness and luxury; because they are such costly and
unnecessary diet. Therefore Homer doth not only make the Greeks whilst
encamped near the Hellespont, eat no fish, but he mentions not any
sea-provision that the dissolute Phaeacians or luxurious wooers had,
though both islanders. And Ulysses's mates, though they sailed over so
much sea, as long as they had any provision left, never let down a hook
or net.

But when the victuals of their ship was spent,
("Odyssey," xii. 329-332.)

a little before they fell upon the oxen of the Sun, they caught fish,
not to please their wanton appetite, but to satisfy their hunger,--

With crooked hooks, for cruel hunger gnawed.

The same necessity therefore forced them to catch fish and devour the
oxen of the Sun. Therefore not only among the Egyptian and Syrians but
Greeks too, to abstain from fish was a piece of sanctity, they avoiding
(as I think), a superfluous curiosity in diet, as well as being just.

To this Nestor subjoining said: But sir, of my citizens as of the
Megarians in the proverb, you make no account; although you have heard
me often say that our priests of Neptune (whom we call Hieromnemons)
never eat fish. For Neptune himself is called the Breeder. And the
race of Hellen sacrificed to Neptune as the first father, imagining,
as likewise the Syrians did, that man rose from a liquid substance. And
therefore they worship a fish as of the same production and breeding
with themselves, in this matter being more happy in their