Phoenix, Turtle - and a Parrot! - in Ovid's poetry
Minerva
Book II Elegy VI: The Death of Corinna's Pet Parrot
Parrot, the mimic, the winged one from India's Orient,
is dead - Go, birds, in a flock and follow him to the grave!
Go, pious feathered ones, beat your breasts with your wings
and mark your delicate cheeks with hard talons:
tear out your shaggy plumage, instead of hair, in mourning:
sound out your songs with long piping!
Philomela, mourning the crime of the Thracian tyrant,
the years of your mourning are complete:
divert your lament to the death of a rare bird -
Itys is a great but ancient reason for grief.
All who balance in flight in the flowing air,
and you, above others, his friend the turtle-dove, grieve!
All your lives you were in perfect concord,
and held firm in your faithfulness to the end.
What the youth from Phocis was to Orestes of Argos,
while she could be, Parrot, turtle-dove was to you.
What worth now your loyalty, your rare form and colour,
the clever way you altered the sound of your voice,
what joy in the pleasure given you by our mistress? -
Unhappy one, glory of birds, you're certainly dead!
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You could dim emeralds matched to your fragile feathers,
wearing a beak dyed scarlet spotted with saffron.
No bird on earth could better copy a voice -
or reply so well with words in a lisping tone!
You were snatched by Envy - you who never made war:
you were garrulous and a lover of gentle peace.
Behold, quails live fighting amongst themselves:
perhaps that's why they frequently reach old age.
Your food was little, compared with your love of talking
you could never free your beak much for eating.
Nuts were his diet, and poppy-seed made him sleep,
and he drove away thirst with simple draughts of water.
Gluttonous vultures may live and kites, tracing spirals
in air, and jackdaws, informants of rain to come:
and the raven detested by armed Minerva lives too -
he whose strength can last out nine generations:
but that loquacious mimic of the human voice,
Parrot, the gift from the end of the earth, is dead!
The best are always taken first by greedy hands:
the worse make up a full span of years.
Thersites saw Protesilaus's sad funeral,
and Hector was ashes while his brothers lived.
Why recall the pious prayers of my frightened girl for you -
prayers that a stormy south wind blew out to sea?
The seventh dawn came with nothing there beyond,
and Fate held an empty spool of thread for you.
Yet still the words from his listless beak astonished:
dying his tongue cried: 'Corinna, farewell!'
A grove of dark holm oaks leafs beneath an Elysian slope,
the damp earth green with everlasting grass.
If you can believe it, they say there's a place there
for pious birds, from which ominous ones are barred.
There innocuous swans browse far and wide
and the phoenix lives there, unique immortal bird:
There Juno's peacock displays his tail-feathers,
and the dove lovingly bills and coos.
Parrot gaining a place among those trees
translates the pious birds in his own words.
A tumulus holds his bones - a tumulus fitting his size -
whose little stone carries lines appropriate for him:
'His grave holds one who pleased his mistress:
his speech to me was cleverer than other birds'.
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P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses (ed. Brookes More)
Book 15
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Ov.+Met.+15.335
"Now these I named derive their origin
from other living forms. There is one bird
which reproduces and renews itself:
the Assyrians gave this bird his name--the Phoenix.
He does not live either on grain or herbs,
but only on small drops of frankincense
and juices of amomum. When this bird
completes a full five centuries of life
straightway with talons and with shining beak
he builds a nest among palm branches, where
they join to form the palm tree's waving top.
"As soon as he has strewn in this new nest
the cassia bark and ears of sweet spikenard,
and some bruised cinnamon with yellow myrrh,
he lies down on it and refuses life
among those dreamful odors.--And they say
that from the body of the dying bird
is reproduced a little Phoenix which
is destined to live just as many years.
"When time has given to him sufficient strength
and he is able to sustain the weight,
he lifts the nest up from the lofty tree
and dutifully carries from that place
his cradle and the parent's sepulchre.
As soon as he has reached through yielding air
the city of Hyperion, he will lay
the burden just before the sacred doors
within the temple of Hyperion."
Pliny the Elder (d. A.D. 79) mentions in his Natural History the
supposed appearance of the Phoenix with respect to
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Minerva
(quote, excerpts)
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The myth of the Phoenix recurs throughout the next centuries,
appearing in a Shakespearean poem, for instance, coupled with a turtle
dove,
and in the Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Vulgar Errors) of Sir Thomas
Browne, a 17th Century physician. Browne gave a valuable and succinct
history of the story as it was known down to his time.
CHAP. XII.
Of the Phoenix.
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/pseudodoxia/pseudo312.html
Taken altogether, there is no evidence to connect the myth of the
Phoenix as it has been transmitted since its first appearance in Greek
literature to the present with any of the phenomena of the Question.
However, if one were to accept the identification of the Phoenix with
the benu of Egypt, supposing that Herodotus saw a painting of the blue
heron, then in the most tangential sense, one might say that the
ultimate source of the story is connected to the flooding of the Nile,
and thus to the seasonal rains in the African interior that feed the
source of the Nile. This is, of course, speculation.
Phoenix
http://www.livius.org/phi-php/phoenix/phoenix.html
"In Egyptian mythology, the bird benu (or purple heron) played an
important role. During the flood of the Nile, this beautiful, bluish
bird rests on high places and resembles the sun floating over the
waters. Therefore this bird, sometimes called 'the ascending one', was
associated with the sun god Ra, whose ba (soul) it was thought to be.
The benu was especially venerated in the town that is usually called
Heliopolis ('city of the Sun')."
W. W. How, J. Wells, A Commentary on Herodotus
Commentary on Herodotus, Histories. book 2, chapter 73:section 1
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0028&query=chapter%3D%23285
"LXXIII. The account of the phoenix is one of the passages which
Porphyry says was stolen by H. from Hecataeus. The phoenix is usually
said to correspond to the bennu of Egyptian theology. It was
represented on the monuments as a heron, and was the symbol of the
rising sun, and also of the resurrection. It was especially reverenced
at Heliopolis.
Round this symbolic bird grew up a great mass of myth
(cf. e.g. Plin. N. H.x.2; Tac. Ann. vi. 28). H. reproduces one
specimen of this, but expressly says that he does not believe it. The
later and more familiar form of the story is that the phoenix came to
Heliopolis and burned itself on the altar, and that from the ashes the
new phoenix arose; it was this myth which was used by the Fathers to
illustrate the Resurrection."
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=290520
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