Page:Constantinople by Brodribb.djvu/26

 dues levied on the corn ships. Another great source of wealth was in their fisheries. Huge shoals of fish used to pour down from the Euxine into the Bosporus, and then, for some reason or other, decidedly preferred the European to the Asiatic shore. A multitude of the poorer citizens, so we are told by Aristotle, gained a livelihood as fishermen. Riches, in fact, flowed into the city from all sides, and the deep and splendid harbour to the north was known to Pliny and the ancients, as it is to us, as the Golden Horn, the aptest phrase in the ancient mind for wealth and plenty. The Byzantines, too, had the good luck to have good wine within easy reach, as well as good fish. From Maronea on the Ægean and its neighbourhood came plentiful supplies of a wine so exquisite as to be the talk of the world, and so potent as to give the foreign merchant, after a dinner with his Byzantine friends and customers, little chance of returning sober to his ship. Homer makes Ulysses speak with rapture of its divine bouquet. Byzantium was indeed in air respects a highly favoured city, and life there must have been eminently enjoyable. We fear that they abused their privileges. At any rate, it was whispered that, in later days, they indulged themselves in strange and even shameful irregularities. But this, it seems, was not till democracy had been thoroughly established among them. It is fair to say that one of the writers who speaks unkindly of them was generally reputed to be too harsh and censorious. According to one statement, they came at last wholly to forget the commonest proprieties, and a Byzantine citizen was so immoderately jovial, that he made it a practice