A not dissimilar use of the Sole is instanced in Polynesian theology. Ina the daughter of Vaitooringa attempted flight to the sacred island. Fish after fish essayed to bear her thither, but unequal to the burden dropped her in the shallow water. At last she besought the Sole, who managed to carry her as far as the breakers. Here, again unshipped, she lost her divine temper, and stamped with such fierceness on the head of the unfortunate helper of distressful maids that its under eye was squeezed right through to the upper side. “Hence the Sole is now obliged to swim flat on one side of its face, having no eye.”[669] Plautus puns or makes play on _Solea_, which means, first, a shoe or sandal (as does σανδάλιον), and, second, the fish, and _sculponeæ_, a kind of wooden shoe (which Cato[670] remembers being worn only by country folk) often employed for striking a person.[671] Then comes the other play on _Lingulaca_, which in its first sense equals a chatterbox, and in its second the fish. _Lysidamus_: Soleas. _Chalinus_: Qui, quæso, potius quam sculponeas, Quibus battuatur tibi os, senex nequissime? _Olympio_: Vin’ lingulacas? _Lysidamus_: Quid opust, quando uxor domi est? Ea lingulaca est nobis, nam numquam tacet.[672] To render the double punning of these lines has been a task too hard even for the excellent Loeb Library. But Badham, perhaps _poeta nascitur_, but here _non fit_, comes to the fore: “Fresh tongues for sale, who’ll buy, who’ll buy? Come, Sir, will you? No, friend, not I; Of tongue enow at home I’ve got In my old wife, Dame Polyglot.” The _Cestreus_, or _Mugil_. My inclination to include this fish among “The Nine Fish most highly prized” was checked in part by Faber’s placing it only in Class II., and in part by the possible reproach, seeing that the glories of its cousin the Mullus had been fully recounted, of “too much one family.” But as the fish possesses traits very individual, if not always engaging, and as Athenæus devotes to its gastronomic and other properties no less than four chapters,[673] I cannot pass by it without some comment. Its edible qualities vary with the place of its capture. While the _Mugil_ of Abdera, Sinope, and other clear-watered places achieved high praise, its more frequent but muddy-tasting brother of the lagoons formed the staple of one kind of τάριχος. Their predilection for lagoons and brackish water—evidenced by writers as far apart as Aristotle and Apostolides (1900 A.D.)—came about possibly from the fish “breeding best where rivers run into the sea,” or can be accounted for by the belief that “Some of the grey mullet species are not produced by copulation, but grow spontaneously from mud and sand.”[674]