Note 280 — Chapter VI · CHARACTERISTICS OF FISHERMEN IN GREECE AND ROME—POVERTY “THE BADGE OF ALL OUR TRIBE”—DEITIES OF FISHING

In the Anthologia Palatina there are some 3700 epigrams, etc., dating from 700 b.c. and ending about 1300 a.d.; none of these, as far as I can recall, contradict the poverty note. I have chosen 500 a.d. as being a convenient date, because it includes all Greek and Græco-Roman writers as distinct from the Byzantine, and includes also the earlier and better prose writers, like Heliodorus and Longus. Epigrams, it is true, continued to be written until the fourteenth century, but there is little, and that of no poetical account, after the tenth, when the popular or “political” verse began, with a few exceptions, to supplant the classical forms.