EELS.
The sweet Bœotian Copaic virgin;
For I do fear to name the Goddess.
And that the eels of the river Strymon were also celebrated, Antiphanes tells us in his Thamyras, saying—
And then your namesake river, far renown'd
In all the mouths of men, the mighty Strymon,
Who waters the rich warlike plains of Thrace,
Breeds mighty eels.
And Demetrius the Scepsian, in the sixteenth book of his Trojan Array, says that there were eels of surpassing excellence produced in the neighbourhood of the river Euleus (and this river is mentioned by Antimachus in his work entitled The Tablets, where he says—
Arriving at the springs
Where Euleus with his rapid eddies rises).
57. With respect to the ellops, some mention has already been made of him. But Archestratus also speaks in this way of him—
The best of ellopes which you can eat
Come from the bay of famous Syracuse.
Those eat whene'er you can. For that's the place
Whence this great fish originally came.
But those which are around the islands caught,
Or any other land, or nigh to Crete,
Too long have battled with the eddying currents,
And so are thin and harder to the taste.
58. The erythrinus, or red mullet, has been mentioned too. Aristotle, in his book on Animals, and Speusippus both say that the fishes called erythrinus, phagrus, and hepatus are all very nearly alike. And Dorion has said much the same in his treatise on Fish. But the Cyrenæans give the name of erythrinus to the hyca; as Clitarchus tells us in his Dialects.
59. The encrasicholi are also mentioned by Aristotle as fish of small size, in his treatise on What relates to Animals. But Dorion, in his book on Fishes, speaks of the encrasicholi among those which are best boiled, speaking in the following terms—"One ought to boil the encrasicholi, and the iopes, and the atherinæ, and the tench, and the smaller mullets, and the cuttle-fish, and the squid, and the different kinds of crab or craw-fish."
60. The hepsetus, or boiled fish, is a name given to several small fish. Aristophanes, in his Anagyrus, says—
There is not one dish of hepseti.
