sposal of the wealthy, though from the
uncompromising nature of the tackle depicted and the apparent
simplicity of the fish it would scarcely be safe to assume that in
Egypt angling arrived at the dignity of becoming an "art." In Europe
it took very much longer for the taking of fish to be regarded even as
an amusement, and the earliest references to it in the Greek and Latin
classics are not very satisfying to the sportsman.

[v.02 p.0022]

There is, however, a passage in the _Odyssey_ (xii. 247) which is of
considerable importance, as it shows that fishing with rod and line
was well enough understood in early Greece to be used as a popular
illustration. It occurs in the well-known scene where Scylla seizes
the companions of Odysseus out of the ship and bears them upwards,
just as "some fisher on a headland with a long rod" brings small
fishes gasping to the shore. Another important, though comparatively
late, passage in Greek poetry is the twenty-first idyll of Theocritus.
In this the fisherman Asphalion relates how in a dream he hooked
a large golden fish and describes graphically, albeit with some
obscurity of language, how he "played" it. Asphalion used a rod and
fished from a rock, much after the manner of the Homeric angler. Among
other Greek writers, Herodotus has a good many references to fish and
fishing; the capture of fish is once or twice mentioned or implied by
Plato, notably in the _Laws_ (vii. 823); Aristotle deals with fishes
in his _Natural History_, and there are one or two fishing passages
in the anthology. But in Greek literature, as a whole the subject of
angling is not at all prominent. In writers of late Greek, however,
there is more material. Plutarch, for instance, gives us the famous
story of the fishing match between Antony and Cleopatra, which has
been utilized by Shakespeare. Moreover, it is in Greek that the first
complete treatise on fishing which has come down to us is written, the
_Halieutica_ of Oppian (c. A.D. 169). It is a hexameter poem in five
books with perhaps more technical than sporting interest, and not so
much even of that as the length of the work would suggest. Still it
contains some information about tackle and methods, and some passages
describing battles with big fish, in the right spirit of enthusiasm.
Also in Greek is what is famous as the first reference in literature
to fly-fishing, in the fifteenth book of Aelian's _Natural History_
(3rd century A.D.). It is there