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Eels in Roman Gardens

© Kirk Johnson

I expect that many of the people who visit Pompeii imagine that the pools in Pompeiian gardens were stocked with goldfish. Actually, goldfish are native to China and the Chinese seem to have domesticated the goldfish about a thousand years ago, so you shouldn't picture them in Pompeii's pools.

Goldfish (Carassius auratus) are members of the carp family and are closely related to common carp (Cyprinus carpio). Ancient Greeks and Romans were familiar with common carp, so I was surprised that James Higginbotham didn't mention carp in his book Piscinae. Brightly colored Japanese koi are really just common carp which have been selectively bred. Common carp often produce brightly colored mutants; you would think that the ancient Romans would have noticed this characteristic and bred brightly colored carp, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

Professor Higgenbotham was focusing on the fish with ancient Roman authors mention in connection with Italian fishponds, and carp were not among them.

I expect that many of you will be surprised to learn that the fish which ancient Roman authors mention most often as being kept in fishponds are eels.

Eels were a popular food among wealthy Romans, but a number of Romans seem to have really loved their pet eels. The orator Quintus Hortensius was very fond of the eels which he kept in the fishpond of his villa, he is reported to have wept when one of his eels died. Antonia (the daughter of Marc Antony and mother of the Emperor Claudius) is said to have fastened earrings to the pectoral fins of her favorite eel. This was probably a moray or conger eel, since they are the only eels which have pectoral fins that earrings could be attached to.

According to Pliny the Elder, L. Licinus Murena "invented" the fishpond early in the first century B.C.E. I am not sure what he meant by that, since the ancient Egyptians had been raising fish in ponds for centuries. Marcus Terentius Varro (116 - 27 BCE) said that Murena got his cognomen (meaning eel) because of his fondness for eels, but he doesn't seem to have specialized in the raising of eels. Pliny the Elder said that it was C. Hirrius who first used fishponds solely for the raising of eels.

Eels are especially well suited to being raised in artificial ponds. Ponds in which eels are raised can be stocked more densely than with any other species of fish. In some modern eel ponds the annual yield per thousand square meters of pond area is about four tons.