Leaving now the Lore of fishing among the Greeks and Romans, let us turn, before examining the nature and number of their Lures, to their estimation of Fish as a food. We found, it will be remembered, that the Homeric poems make no mention of fish being served at a banquet of the heroes, or even appearing on the tables of people of position. Only poor or starving folk ate fish. Although fish became later an insensate luxury, the Greeks at first apparently abstained from all fish caught in fresh water, except the eels of Lake Copaïs, then as now far-famed.[459] This abstention from fresh-water fish originated (according to Plutarch) in the belief that every spring and every stream was sacred to some god or nymph, to catch whose property or progeny—the fish in them—would be an act of impiety.[460] This sounds like a laboured explanation of a fact really due to other causes. One of these is brought out clearly in Geikie. When noticing the difference which existed between the Greek and the Roman interest in and feeling for the sea, he, or rather Professor Mackail, attributes it largely to a question of food supply.[461] Greece proper, from its comparative sterility and poverty of water, was very limited in its capacity to grow crops or rear herds. It compulsorily fell back largely on fish. And principally sea-fish, because of their superior palatability, and because of the inadequacy, owing to scarcity of lakes and perennial rivers, of fresh-water fish. Whatever be the cause of the early abstention, three points arouse our interest. (A) The passages in Greek writers (previous to Ælian) that describe angling in _Greek fresh_ waters, reach but a scant half-dozen, while those that depict fishing in such waters—sacred lakes, temple stew-ponds, and eeling in Lake Copaïs excepted—can probably be reckoned on both hands.[462] (B) The _Palatine Anthology_ (at least in the period from 700 B.C. to 500 A.D.) contains no reference (as far as I know) to aught but sea-fishing. (C) The Greek comedians, Athenæus, the Greek opsophagic authors all almost always reserve their appreciations for food from ἰχθυόεις πόντος. The statement that the Romans abstained, like the Maeatæ or Celts[463] of North Britain, from fresh-water fish from similar, or any motives, cannot be established. It goes far beyond the evidence at our command, although some aversion may be possibly deduced from Ovid (_Fast._, VI. 173 f.), and as regards shellfish from Varro. Unlike the Greeks, however, they certainly in a very short period became great consumers of fish from the Tiber, the Po, the Italian Lakes, and afterwards from the Danube, Rhine, etc., but in their estimation, as in that of the Greeks, fish from the sea ever held the higher place.[464]