And the same poet says, subsequently—
He was the fish of which great Jupiter
Once bought a pair for money, and enjoin'd
His slaves to give him one, and Juno t'other.
But Dorion, in his treatise on Fish, says that the anthias and the callicthys are different fish; and also that the callionymus is not the same as the ellops.
18. But what is the fish which is called the Sacred fish? The author of the Telchinian History, whether it was Epimenides the Cretan, or Teleclides, or any one else, says,—"What are called the sacred fish, are dolphins and pompili." But the pompilus is a very amorous animal; as being sprung himself, at the same time with Venus, from heavenly blood. And Nicander, in the second book of his Œtaica, says—
The pompilus, who points the safest road
To anxious mariners who burn with love,
And without speaking warns them against danger.
And Alexander the Ætolian, in his Crica, if indeed it is a genuine poem, says—
Still did the pompilus direct the helm,
Swimming behind, and guide it down the gulf,
The minister of the gods, the sacred pompilus.
And Pancrates the Arcadian, in his work entitled "Works of the Sea," having first said—
The pompilus, whom all sea-faring men
Do call the sacred fish;
proceeds to say, "that the pompilus is not held in great esteem by Neptune only, but also by those gods who occupy Samothrace. At all events that some old fisherman once threatened to punish this fish, when the golden age still flourished among men; and his name was Epopeus, and he belonged to the island of Icarus. He therefore was one day fishing with his son, and they had no luck in their fishing, and caught nothing but pompili, and so did not abstain from eating them, but he and his son ate every one of them, and not long afterwards they suffered for their impiety; for a whale attacked the ship, and ate up Epopeus in the sight of his son." And Pancrates states, "that the pompilus is an enemy to the dolphin; and even the dolphin does not escape with impunity when he has eaten a pompilus, for he becomes unable to exert himself and tremulous when he has eaten
