can the fish love the fisherman?

Here is a poem about the lack of wisdom that old age can show - it appears first in its original form and then in an English translation:

Scis te captari, scis hunc qui captat, avarum, 
et scis qui captat quid, Mariane, velit. 
tu tamen hunc tabulis heredem, stulte, supremis 
scribis et esse tuo vis, furiose, loco. 
"Munera magna tamen misit." sed misit in ha mo;
et piscatorem piscis amare potest? 
hicine deflebit vero tua fata dolore? 
si cupis, ut ploret, des, Mariane, nihil.

You you are angled for, you know this fellow who angles is greedy, and you know, Marianus, what your angler wants; yet you write him down your heir, you fool, by your last will, and are willing he should step - you madman! - into your shoes. "Yet the presents he sent me were magnificent." But he sent them on a hook; and can a fish love the fisherman? Will this man weep for your death with genuine grief? If you want him to lament, leave him, Marianus, nothing.

This is Martial (86-103 AD), the great author of epigrams whose short sharp poems skewer the failings of the urban culture of Rome under the emperors. As in the Buddhist text, the Balisika Sutta, wisdom lies in swimming past the baited hooks. But here the hooks are - at least in the opinion of Marianus' adviser - dropped by the ambitious young man who wants the old man's fortune. It's a familiar story: the older person who needs companionship and the younger one who needs money.

Can we trust the adviser himself, though? The little dialogue shows him in action, arguing with the old man's optimism: '"The presents he sent me were magnificent." But he sent them on a hook.' Is he himself a rival for Marianus' fortune? Another fisherman?

The epigram-within-an-epigram - can a fish love the fisherman? - is quoted by one of the well-wishers whose poems begin the fifth edition of The Compleat Angler, Christopher Harvey, who sees Walton's book as 'hooking' the reader into the contemplation of a wide range of significant maters. In that poem, the answer to the question is 'yes', the fish should love the fisherman. But I prefer the nastiness of Martial - the warning that behind the gifts lie hooks and my own suspicion that Marianus' adviser is seeing off the opposition.

Photograph by Retama (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons.