ALTHOUGH Epicurean readers of this column will be more familiar with him as the author of Deipnosophistai, or Connoisseurs at Dining, the Greek writer Athanaseus is recalled by meteorologists for De Pluvia Piscium On the Rain of Fishes.
This ever popular work, written about the second century AD, is remarkable for providing the first detailed account of that strange and rare phenomenon a shower of small animals descending from the sky in rain.
"The roads were blocked", he wrote in Greek, of course and people were unable to open the doors of their houses the smell of fish endured for many weeks.
Perhaps we must allow for some hyperbole in this description but, on a more modest scale, such happenings, while unusual, are not as rare as one might think. They are assumed to be the result of localised whirlwinds waterspouts or tornadoes capable of sucking up small objects in their path.
The objects may then be suspended for some considerable time in the powerful up drafts of a thunderstorm, before being deposited quite some distance away in the course of a heavy, thundery shower.
On May 23rd, 1661, for example, Samuel Pepys noted in his diary "Elias Ashmole, the antiquary, did today assure me that frogs and many insects do often fall from the sky, already formed."
More recently, on June 17th, 1939, the caretaker of the local swimming pool in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, was running for shelter from a sudden downpour when he "turned and was amazed to see hundreds off tiny frogs falling on the concrete path around the pool".
And on a June morning in 1984, the owner of a service station in the north of England, some 30 miles from the coast, arose to find the forecourt of his garage awash with winkles and starfish many of which were still alive.
Such occurrences are not unknown in Ireland. As early as 1224, the Fours Masters wrote of an "awful and strange shower" in Connacht, followed by "terrible diseases and distempers among the cattle that grazed on the lands where this shower fell". In this case, we are not told the nature of the precipitant, but the report of an occurrence on Achill Island in the 18th century was more specific it was a shower of sprats.
Then on May 9th, 1867, large quantities of berries descended on Dame Street and Capel Street in Dublin with a heavy shower of rain while, in 1895, a shower of fish up to 2 in long fell from the skies in Co Clare.