described how the Macedonians captured
a certain spotted fish in the river Astraeus by means of a lure
composed of coloured wool and feathers, which was presumably used in
the manner now known as "dapping." That there were other Greek writers
who dealt with fish and fishing and composed "halieutics" we know from
Athenaeus. In the first book of his _Deipnosophistae_ he gives a list
of them. But he compares their work unfavourably with the passage of
Homer already cited, in a way which suggests that their knowledge of
angling was not a great advance upon the knowledge of their remote
literary ancestors. In Latin literature allusions to angling are
rather more numerous than in Greek, but on the whole they are
unimportant. Part of a poem by Ovid, the _Halieuticon_, composed
during the poet's exile at Tomi after A.D. 9, still survives. In
other Roman writers the subject is only treated by way of allusion or
illustration. Martial, however, provides, among other passages, what
may perhaps be entitled to rank as the earliest notice of private
fishery rights--the epigram _Ad Piscatorem_, which warns would-be
poachers from casting a line in the Baian lake. Pliny the elder
devoted the ninth book of his _Natural History_ to fishes and
water-life, and Plautus, Cicero, Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Pliny
the younger and Suetonius all allude to angling here and there.
Agricultural writers, too, such as Varro and Columella, deal with the
subject of fish ponds and stews rather fully. Later than any of these,
but still just included in Latin literature, we have Ausonius (_c_.
A.D. 320) and his well-known idyll the _Mosella_, which contains a
good deal about the fish of the Moselle and the methods of catching
them. In this poem is to be found the first recognizable description
of members of the salmon family, and, though the manner of their
application is rather doubtful, the names _salmo, salar_ and _fario_
strike a responsive note in the breast of the modern angler.

_Post-classical Literature_.--As to what happened in the world of
angling in the first few centuries of the Christian era we know
little. It may be inferred, however, that both fish and fishermen
occupied a more honourable position in Christendom than they ever did
before. The prominence of fishermen in the gospel narratives would in
itself have been enough to bring this about, but it also happened
that the Greek word for fish, [Greek: ICHTHUS], had an anagrammatic
signifi