7. The _Muræna_—_M. serpens_ or _helena_—(frequently but quite erroneously called the “Lamprey”), with whose taming, teaching, and fighting I have dealt, was on the _menu_ a most welcome and eagerly anticipated item.[657] Of the _Murænidæ_, at Athens the Eel, at Rome the _Muræna_ was, as the last chapter shows, the greater favourite. Archestratus, it is true, commands men of taste to buy at all hazards the _Muræna_ of “the Straights”[658]; but the Latin authors sing its praise frequently and fervently. The comparative want of appreciation of the Eel at Rome may have been merely masculine, and evolved from the Latin boy (_prætextatus_) regarding “this cousin of the snake” not as a dainty for his palate, but as a scourge for his body! Early association counts for much in later life: so his back’s memory of a flogging with a whip made of eel-skins, twisted tightly together, may have caused the male adult to approach delicately, or not at all, the fish with his freeborn palate.[659] At the _tripatinium_, which marked the height of delight at a supper,[660] the _Muræna_ gave the choicest morsel. Horace, Martial, and others not only sing its fame, but give its proper dressing. To Martial’s taste that from Sicily ranked first, but Varro—was it because these, as Suidas asserts, were the largest?—votes for the Spanish fish. While Apicius (X. 8) hands down various recipes for the proper frying and boiling of the other parts, he distinctly discards, on account of its reputed poisonous properties, the head of the _Muræna_. But among the Greeks direction follows direction for cooking the Conger’s “exquisite head.” Philemon rhapsodises over— “noble conger From Sicyon’s bay, the conger which the God Of the deep sea doth bear aloft to Heaven Fit banquet for his brethren.”[661] 8. The κάπρος—by some identified with the _Aper_, by some translated the “Sea-Hog.” Neither scientifically, nor in my list can I place this fish; it was apparently unknown to the Romans. Of the fish as _Caper_, except in Ennius,[662] “Caproque apud Ambracienses,” and Pliny, XI. 112, “et is qui caper vocatur,” Latin literature is silent. Nor do these two quotations aid, because the first occurs in the poet’s imitation or translation of Archestratus (Apul., _Apol._, p. 384), while Pliny simply transliterates Aristotle’s κάπρος.[663] Of its right to be near the top of the list, the words of Nonnius bear high proof: “Among the fishes which the Greeks sought with mad desire, and at any cost to procure, was first and foremost the κάπρος, which, though called _Aper_, was unknown to the Romans.” Archestratus[664] outdoes even himself in his eulogy of this fish, for he straightly enjoins any one lucky enough to be in Ambracia, “Buy it at once, and let it not escape you, Not if you buy it at its weight in gold; Else will the indignation of the gods O’erpower you: for ’tis the Flower of Nectar.”