Like Scylla, who “fishes for dolphins and whatso greater beast she may anywhere take,” both the Thracians and Byzantines, despite the enormous annual revenues derived by the latter from their fisheries, caught and ate the Dolphin, and for so-doing are branded as impious and barbarian.[213] The more ancient Byzantine coins show a cow standing on a dolphin, which perhaps symbolises the heifer crossing the Bosporus.[214]
[Illustration: THE DOLPHIN AND THE BOY OF IASOS.
From Coin, British Museum, Cat. Pl. 21. 7.]
The ancient literature of the East also portrays Dolphins (_Ç i çumâras_) as the ready helpers of man, in rescuing lives, in drawing ships, etc.[215] The inhabitants of Isle Sainte Marie, near Madagascar, even now never harm or eat the fish, holding it as sacred, because they believe it rendered signal service to some ancestor.[216]
Herodotus mentions a tribe living round Lake Prasias, who in dwellings and food resemble the Wolga folk, and early Continental and English Lake-dwellers:—
“Platforms supplied by tall piles stand in the middle of the lake, which are approached from the land by a narrow single stage. At first the piles were fixed by all citizens, but since that time the custom that has prevailed about fixing them is this, every man drives in three for each wife he marries. Now the men all have many wives apiece, and this is the way they live. Each has his own hut (wherein he dwells) on one of the platforms, and each has a trap door, giving access to the lake beneath: their wont is to tie the baby children by the foot with a string, to save them from rolling into the water. They feed their horses and other beasts on fish, which abound in the lake in such a degree that a man has only to open his trap door, and let down a basket by a rope into the water, and then wait a very short time, when he draws it up quite full of fish.”[217]
Confirming and illustrating Herodotus’s account (I. 202) of how a tribe dwelling on the Araxes lived on raw fish,[218] but depicting more sharply how on fish a whole people were dependent for everything that made up their lives, comes Arrian’s description[219] of the Ichthyophagi of the Persian Gulf.
Denied by the barrenness of their country the ordinary sources of subsistence, they were compelled to use fish for every purpose—food, clothes, houses, etc. These peoples (for the Indian Ichthyophagi are quite distinct from the Arabian) find comment by many authors—_e.g._ Strabo, Pausanias, Diodorus Siculus. Although by their diet of fish comparatively free from disease, they were noted as short-lived. Alexander the Great, with a view to increasing their span of existence, forbade _all_ the Ichthyophagi an unmixed diet.