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Updated: June 15, 2025
We are all familiar with the couplet from Oppian: Nature her bounty to his mouth confined, Gave him a sword, but left unarmed his mind. It surely seems as if temporary insanity sometimes takes possession of the fish. It is not strange that when harpooned it should retaliate by attacking its assailant. An old swordfisherman told Mr. Blackman that his vessel had been struck twenty times.
The consul Marcus Porcius, as soon as the Oppian law was abolished, sailed immediately, with twenty-five ships of war, of which five belonged to the allies, to the port of Luna, where he ordered the troops to assemble; and having sent an edict along the sea-coast, to collect ships of every description, at his departure from Luna he left orders that they should follow him to the harbour of Pyrenaeus, as he intended to proceed thence against the enemy with his collective fleet.
In the memory of our fathers, Pyrrhus, by his ambassador Cineas, made trial of the dispositions, not only of our men, but of our women also, by offers of presents: at that time the Oppian law, for restraining female luxury, had not been made; and yet not one woman accepted a present. What, think you, was the reason?
The Oppian Laws were once thought necessary, because the exigencies of the State required their severity: they were afterwards relaxed and mollified, because that too was expedient for the State. In vain we covered our own sloth with borrowed names: if the wife broke bounds, the husband ought to bear the blame.
If Windham and Fox began to talk of horses, they seemed to fall naturally into what had been said about horses by the old writers. Fox held that long ears were a merit, and Windham met him by the authority of Xenophon and Oppian in favour of short ones, and finally they went off into what it was that Virgil meant when he called a horse's head argutum caput.
It is safer that a wicked man should even never be accused, than that he should be acquitted; and luxury, if it had never been meddled with, would be more tolerable than it will be, now, like a wild beast, irritated by having been chained, and then let loose. My opinion is, that the Oppian law ought, on no account, to be repealed.
Athenæus, if we may judge from Iris writings, was then the brightest of the Alexandrian wits and men of learning. We learn from his own pages that he was born at Naucratis, and was the friend of Pancrates, who lived under Hadrian, and also of Oppian, who died in the reign of Caracalla.
In the second Punic war, the Oppian law prohibited the women, from riding in carriages and wearing certain articles of dress; which was, however, afterward repealed. The ancient laws considered children as slaves, and women as children who ought to remain in a state of perpetual tutelage.
Oppian thus describes the hunting dog as he finds him in Britain: "There is, besides, an excellent kind of scenting dogs, though small, yet worthy of estimation. They are fed by the fierce nation of painted Britons, who call them 'agasoei'. In size they resemble worthless greedy house-dogs that gape under tables.
Marcus and Publius Junius Brutus, plebeian tribunes, supported the Oppian law, and declared, that they would never suffer it to be repealed; while many of the nobility stood forth to argue for and against the motion proposed.
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