Ancient Fish History

By Rosie S.

My name is Gyro Fish.  I am an orange fish and I live in the Aegean Sea.  Today, I am hoping that I will be able to swim in open water.  The problem is the Greeks.  Those guys are always sailing all over the place in giant fleets.  I loath the Greeks because they are always in the water.  I can’t even visit my friend who lives across the reef because the Greeks with their boats are always in the water overhead, blocking the sunlight in the water. Who do they think they are!?!? I mean just because they conquered Persia and a bit of India doesn’t mean they can go cavorting about naming everything! We already have names, thank you.

Greece is supposed to be great because of the great men there, like Homer, Socrates, Solon, Pericles and Alexander the “Great.” Down here, in the sea, we have many great fish!  Homer is famous for telling long poems, but you should hear some of the great fish-tales that my friend Hammer, the shark, tells under the sea!  Socrates was wise; well, so is the sea tortoise who has been alive for a hundred years!  Solon was a reformer who started the idea of democracy. My friend Sammy the Stingray is a reformer too, and he started the idea of avoiding fish-nets!  Pericles was the king of Athens.  He was interested in the arts.  But we have better than a king.  We have a king fish, and we also have a god named Poseidon. 

And what did Alexander the Great do to make himself great?  How about we just drop him in the water and see how great he is!  I bet Alexander the Great isn’t as great as my friend, Alex the Great White Shark.  Now he really is great!  Alexander conquered Persia, but Alex conquered all of the surrounding reefs that were a threat.  Now our reef is the greatest one in the empire. 

Then there is my sister, Baklava.  She is the most beautiful fish in the ocean.  We call her the fish that launched a thousand schools of fish!  She was fish-napped by the prince of a recently conquered reef.  We dealt with him, though.  We brought Baklava back home, but she was so distressed, she ran away again. When we came back to rescue her, we all hid in a giant seahorse.  She said that if we were really in there, when she said Marco, we would all answer Polo, since we had all been trained to do that.  So she went around the giant seahorse saying Marco, but none of us said Polo because we didn’t want anyone to know we were in there.

I’ve also heard about a man named Odysseus who was sailing back from the Trojan War.  On his way home, terrible things kept happening to him and his crew, all because he didn’t say thank you. They were turned into pigs and eaten by a giant Cyclops.  They blinded the Cyclops who turned out to be the son of the sea-god, and the sea-god killed a lot of the crew.  More proof that we fish and sea creatures are better than the Greeks!  Odysseus made it home about 20 years after the war ended with only a few of his crew.  Well we fish are a lot smarter than that.  We always say thank you!  When we went off to fight the Fish Wars, we said thank you to the gods and made it home in 20 minutes instead of 20 years.