Note 278 — Chapter VI · CHARACTERISTICS OF FISHERMEN IN GREECE AND ROME—POVERTY “THE BADGE OF ALL OUR TRIBE”—DEITIES OF FISHING

With the execrable taste of his age Sannazaro considered himself bound to produce still paler shades of those pale shadows, the Eclogues of Virgil, just as their author, the most precedent-loving of poets, rarely ventured to introduce an image or an incident without the authority of some Greek original (W. M. Adams, op. cit., p. 45). Moses Browne (ibid.) declares that it would have been far better if Sannazaro had never written his “sea eclogues, for the exercise of fishing appears so contemptible in him, that any that writes on a subject, that seems to be of a similar aspect, must suffer disadvantage.”