n without any credit. In his text, Radcliffe tells us that he adapted his translation from Lambert's Angling Literature in England (1881). Prior to this, a Latin translation was available in Gesner's Historia Animalium, printed in 1558, where it lay unread for nearly three centuries until Oliver rediscovered it in 1834. If you want to read an early English translation, it can be found in Westwood and Satchell's Bibliotheca Piscatoria; and finally, there is an excellent modern translation in the Loeb Classical Library Aelian On Animals, which you can read here.
The Macedonian fly must be the most interesting flies of all time, but imagining what it looked like is very difficult, partly because of what Ælian leaves unsaid. My own reading of his description of the Hippouros is that:
- the fly probably didn't occur in Italy.
- it hovered.
- it was approximately midge-sized.
- it was coloured like a wasp (yellow and black), but with a body shape unlike one
- it made a humming noise.
- and it landed on the water and floated there for long enough for fish to take it (maybe he has this back to front and was actually describing hatching duns - easy mistake to make).
But, Ælian makes it clear that the fishermen didn't use this fly to fish with, so the description of the Hippouros is interesting but nothing to do with the fly pattern he describes. We can't call this fly "The Hippouros Fly" because if you read the text very critically, Aelian appears to be saying that fishermen did not imitate the Hippouros:
Now though the fishermen know this, they do not use these flies at all for bait for fish; for if a man's hand touch them, they lose their natural colour, their wings wither, and they become unfit food for the fish. For this reason they have nothing to do with them, hating them for their bad character...
So you could read the next bit as a description of the fly they do use, rather than imitating the Hippouros. This would make sense, because the imitation is brown and red, while the Hippouros is yellow and black. According to our man in Rome:
...but they have planned a snare for the fish, and get the better of them by their fisherman's craft.
They fasten red (crimson red) wool around a hook, and fix onto the wool two feathers which grow under a cock's wattles, and which in colour are like wax.
So you could argue on two counts that this fly is not a Hippouros imitation, in which case, it is only of theoretical interest what the Hippouros was.
If we do think it is a Hippouros imitation, then we have to square the difficult circle of reconciling a pattern with a red body with a natural fly which had a yellow body. The only way I can think of doing this is if there is a fly which changes its body colour from yellow to red, but if we think the Hippouros is being imitated here, we also have to consider Aelian's "hovering". The biggest problem here is that he was describing all this third hand. It might be that he was actually describing the ascent of duns - Ephemera danica duns and most spinners look as if they are hovering. On the other hand, it might be that he was describing a truly hovering fly; but I can't think of any patterns anywhere which imitate this sort of insect, chiefly because they are hardly of any importance to fish in their diet.
If you want to know about some interesting attempts to guess what the Macedonian fly looked like, click here.