The rich Patricians were not satisfied with a single pond; their fish preserves were divided into compartments where they kept different kinds. In case any reader, like the Third Fisherman in Shakespeare’s _Pericles_,
_First Fisherman_: “Why as men do on land; the great ones eat up the little ones,”
and to add that the fish confined in these separate ponds found in the waters their business and livelihood from the _testaceæ_ purposely planted.
This passion for _piscinæ_ gradually impoverished the Mediterranean and other seas. Fish in the Tyrrhenian Sea had no time to come to maturity, because as Columella complains, “Maria ipsa Neptunumque clauserunt!”[543] While Varro and Columella give careful directions as to the making and keeping of practical fish stews, they keep silence as to methods of capturing the inhabitants.
I have come across no notice of _vivaria_ among the Greeks:[544] their kinsman in Sicily erected at least one magnificent example. Diodorus Siculus (XI. 2) tells us that the Agrigentines (probably by the labour of the Carthaginian prisoners) “sunk a fishpond, with great costs and expenses, seven furlongs in compass, and twenty cubits in depth: in this water, brought both from fountains and rivers, fish were planted which soon supplied them with an ample stock both for food and pleasure.”
To the great Archimedes is due the unique achievement of a _vivarium_ on board ship. It is impossible here to set forth all the glories of this wonderful vessel, intended for the corn traffic between Egypt and Sicily, and propelled by means of huge sweeps—every sweep worked by a team of twenty men (εἰκοσόρος).
Her Gymnasium, her three Baths, her Flower Garden, her trellised Vineyard, her Temple to Venus, her Library with its floor of mosaics exhibiting a series of subjects taken from the _Iliad_, and, lastly, in the bow by the side of the huge reservoir of 21,000 gallons, her water-tight well, made of planks lined with lead, and filled with _sea_-water, in which a great number of fish were always kept—if all these wonders of a ship, launched over 2200 years ago, do not cause us to think a little, and to abate our boasts over our _Imperators_ and _Olympics_, then to the cocksure conceit of the twentieth century naught is of avail, not even the account given by Moschion.[545]