But if the reader should be disposed to infer from these testimonies that the fishmongering race were saucy only at Athens, he will be in danger of falling into error. Throughout the ancient world they were the same, and we fear that should any poor devil from Grub-street, or the _Quartier Latin_, presume to dispute respecting the price of salmon with one of their cockney or Parisian descendants, he would meet with little more politeness. At all events their manners had not improved in the Eternal city,[586] for it is _a propos_ of the Roman fishfags that Athenæus brings forward his examples of like insolence elsewhere. The poet Diphilos would appear, like Archestratos, to have travelled in search of good fish and civil fishmongers, but his labours were fruitless; he might as well have peregrinated the world in the hope of finding that island where soles are caught ready-fried in the sea. Such at least is the tenour of his own complaint: Troth, in my greener days I had some notion That here at Athens only, rogues sold fish; But everywhere, it seems, like wolf or fox, The race is treacherous by nature found. However, we have one scamp in the agora Who beats all others hollow. On his head A most portentous fell of hair nods thick And shades his brow. Observing your surprise, He has his reasons pat; it grows forsooth To form, when shorn, an offering to some god! But that’s a feint, ’tis but to hide the scars Left by the branding iron upon his forehead. But, passing that, you ask perchance the price Of a sea-wolf—“Ten oboli”—very good. You count the money. “Oh not those,” he cries, “Æginetan I meant.” Still you comply. But if you trust him with a larger piece, And there be change to give; mark how the knave Now counts in Attic coin, and thus achieves A two-fold robbery in the same transaction![587] ----- Footnote 586: Deipnosoph. vi. 4. Footnote 587: Athen. vi. 6. ----- Xenarchos paints a little scene of ingenious roguery with a comic extravagance altogether Shakespearian, and incidentally throws light on a curious law of Athens, enacted to protect the citizens against stinking fish.[588] The power of invention, he observes—willing to kill two birds with one stone—had totally deserted the poets in order to take up with the fishmongers; for while the former merely hashed up old ideas, the latter were always hitting upon new contrivances to poison the Demos: