The Strange Love of the Fish and the Goat: Regional Contexts and Rough Cilician Religion in Oppian's Halieutica 4.308-73

Abstract

This paper examines one of the better-known episodes in Oppian's Halieutica, an unusual account that describes first the strange desire of a fish, the σαργός, for the goat, and then the bizarre way in which that desire is manipulated by humans to capture the fish (4.308-73). Although it has been dismissed by most previous scholars as the product of ignorance, misunderstood source material or poetic imagination, I argue that this account can be elucidated by evidence for social, economic and religious contexts in the poet's native Rough Cilicia.