The _Aethiopica_, by Heliodorus of Emesa, has been termed, perhaps with exaggeration, the most elaborate picture of a piscatory kind in ancient Greek. The influence of Theocritus is strongly suggested by the imagery incidental to the description of the cabin, the tackle, and the boat, as well as by the delineation of the character of Tyrrhenus, aged, sea-worn, wretchedly poor, yet content with his lot and hospitable to the stranger.[323] Agathias gives us one of the very few, perhaps the only, fisher epigram with a love motive. “A fisherman was employed in catching fish. Him did a damsel of property see, and was affected in her heart with desire, and made him the partner of her bed. But he, after a life of poverty, took on himself the swell of all kinds of high bearing, and Fortune with a smile was standing by, and said to Venus,—‘This is not your contest, but mine.’”[324] Lastly it is of interest to note that one of the few Greek poetesses concerned herself with a love-tale of the sea. Hedyle, who came of a poetic stock (for she was daughter of Moschine the iambist and mother of Hedylus the epigrammatist), penned a poem on Glaucus’ love for Scylla. In it she told how the love-sick swain would repair to the cavern of his mistress— “Bearing a gift of love, a mazy shell, Fresh from the Erythrean rock, and with it too The offspring, yet unfledged, of Alcyon, To win the obdurate maid. He gave in vain. Even the lone Siren on the neighbouring isle Pitied the lover’s tears.”[325] FOOTNOTES: [309] Although the Papyrists have as yet unearthed only some six lines of a _new_ poem by Theocritus (discovered by Mr. M. Johnson, and as yet unpublished), in _Pap. Oxyrhynchus_, XIII. No. 1618, we find parts of _Id._, V., VII., and XV. [310] Translated by Andrew Lang, 1889. The question whether Leonidas of Tarentum was, and Theocritus was not, the author of this Idyll is exhaustively treated by R. J. Cholmeley, _Theocritus_, pp. 54, 55. Whatever conclusion be reached, constant are the references in those Idylls whose authenticity is undoubted to fish and fishing; even in his familiar comparisons Theocritus thinks of the sea. Mr. Lang writes, “There is nothing in Wordsworth more real, more full of the incommunicable sense of Nature, rounding and softening the toilsome days of the aged and poor, than the Theocritean poem of _The Fisherman’s Dream_. It is as true to Nature as the statue of the naked fisherman in the Vatican.” [311] The meaning is as follows: Asphalion is complaining of wakefulness, and he compares his condition to two things; to a donkey in a furze-bush (as we might say), and to the light of the town-hall, whose sacred flame was perpetual (Snow).