"The "Helops

THE FISH known to the ancients as helops has traditionally been identified as the Acipenser (sturgeon). Discovery of what is virtually an unknown source bearing on this problem' suggests that further consideration is needed, and a more detailed examination has raised unsuspected difficulties underlying the traditional identification. However, since the insights gained in regard to the transmission of scientific facts by the scholarship of antiquity seem as important as the new facts which were uncovered, the information obtained on both matters is here relayed. The difficulty in identifying the helops springs from three causes. Firstly, the most obvious candidate for identification, the sturgeon, seems not to have been perceived by the ancients in the way in which one might suppose. Only one genus of sturgeon (Acipenser) occurs within the oecumene of the ancients, but it has at least three species with which they are known to have come in contact: the sturio (possibly Ausonius' mustela), the huso (Pliny's attilus), and ruthenus, the Sterlet (possibly Athenaeus' akkipesios).2 These fish, found now in river now in sea (they are anadromous), differ in provenance, size, colour, and taste.3 Also, the pointedness of the fish's triangular head differs between species, between sexes within a species (the female's being the more pointed), and according to age (the snout serves as a scoop, since the fish is a bottom-feeder, so

Epistemology · Political science · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Sociology of scientific knowledge · Transmission (telecommunications) · Computer Science · History · Identification and Quantification in Food · Law · Philosophy

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