THE TUNNY-FISH.
Whoever has by chance bought dainty food
For these accursed and abandon'd women,
Such as [Greek: hypogastria], which may Neptune
Confound for ever; and who seeks to place
Beside them now a dainty loin of meat. . . .
And Alexis, in his Ulysses weaving, praises the head of the tunny; and says—
A. And I will throw the fishers headlong down
Into the pit. They only catch for me
Food fit for freed men; trichides and squids,
And partly fried fish.
B. But not long ago,
This man, if he could get a tunny's head,
Thought he was eating tunnies whole, and eels.
They praised also that part of the tunny which they called "the key," as Aristophon does, in his Peirithus:—
A. But now the dinner is all spoilt entirely.
B. Here are two roasted keys quite fit to eat.
A. What, keys to open doors?
B. No, tunny keys;
A dainty dish.
A. There is the Spartan key too.
66. But Antigonus the Carystian, in his treatise on Language, says that the tunny is sacrificed to Neptune, as we have already mentioned. But Heracleon the Ephesian says that the Attic writers call the tunny the orcynus. And Sostratus, in the second book of his treatise on Animals, says that the pelamys is called the thunnis, or female tunny-fish; but that when it becomes larger, it is called thunnus; and when it gets to a larger size still, it is called the orcynus; and that when it has grown to a size which is quite enormous, then it is called cetus. And Æschylus likewise mentions the tunny, saying—
I bid you take up hammers now, and beat
The fiery mass of iron, which will utter
No groan, but bear in silence like the tunny.
And in another place he says—
Turning his eye aside, just like the tunny;
because the tunny cannot see well out of his left eye, as Aristotle has said. Menander, in his Fishermen, says—
And the disturbed and muddy sea which breeds
The largest tunnies.
And in Sophron we find the word [Greek: thynnothêras] (a hunter of
