Archippus’ drama deserves a moment’s notice, because in imitation of Aristophanes’ _Birds_ the poet ventured on a chorus composed exclusively of _Fishes_. Extant fragments of the play (performed probably in 413 B.C.) tell of war being declared by the fish against their oppressors the Athenians, who were passionate opsophagists. The principal condition of the Peace Points—whether _Fourteen_ or more our data do not determine—secured the prompt delivery to the Fishes of the head of their chief foe, Melanthios. If the protocol of this Treaty had attracted the notice of President Wilson, who as a constitutional historian attaches importance to the “broadening down from precedent to precedent,” the demands of the Allies for the immediate surrender of our arch-enemy, the Kaiser, might have been more insistent and scarcely less successful. And so from the first _loci classici_ of fishing in Homer we journey on through the succeeding centuries. In nearly all we encounter fishing and fishermen in literature or play. In the third B.C. we reach the next _locus classicus_—“The Fisherman’s Dream,” Idyll XXI. of Theocritus. “Theocritus is the creator of the literary piscatory, as he is also of the literary bucolic.” This dictum would, I think, be rendered more accurate by the substitution of modeller in place of creator. Theocritus, even if we allow for Stesichorus, Epicharmus, and Sophron, stands out the first, not to create but to gather, and by his genius reduce to regular literary shape, the existent poems and songs (_Volkslieder_) which formed the stock in trade of the Bucoliastæ in Cos, Sicily, and Magna Græcia.[273] The influence of Theocritus on fishing literature in mime, epigram, or romance is writ large in the pages not only of Moschus, Leonidas of Tarentum, Alciphron, Plautus, Ovid, but also of Sannazaro in the fifteenth, of our Spenser[274] and his followers in the sixteenth and subsequent centuries, and even of Keats.[275] This influence shows most widely in the more abundant literary bucolic. Virgil, for instance, admits his model in the opening lines of _Eclogue_ IV.: _Sicelides Musæ, paulo maiora canamus ..._ A recent writer straightly asserts that “without Theocritus the Bucolics (save the mark!) of Virgil could never have been conceived, or, if conceived, would have miscarried.”[276] Whether or not the offspring of this parentage is not too savagely depreciated, we note with surprise that Virgil, “Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd; All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word,” a professed imitator of Theocritus, to whom fishermen were as familiar as the waters by which they lived and figured in many of his _Idylls_,[277] never mentions fishermen in his _Bucolics_.