A Little Research Project That Made Me Wish I'd Taken GARM!!!

Greeks of a Feather: Aesop and the Birds

“[Man] is terrified by the doleful hoot of the owl, or finds a suggestion of victory in the fierce swoop of the hawk…”(247). So notes archeologist and historian Sir William Reginald Halliday of King’s College in London. In ancient Greece, the prophetic flights and songs of birds were interpreted in formal ceremonies. They were seen as embodiments of the gods and bringers of signs: “The type of bird one saw made a difference. Unquestionably, the powerful birds of prey, and especially Zeus’ eagle, were at the top of the list as far as portentousness went, but even the woodpecker had its place as a bird of good omen for carpenters, hunters and those on their way to feasts” (Johnston, 129). The Greek slave Aesop, credited with the didactic and somewhat cynical fables, frequently features birds as characters in his stories, and specific types of birds at that. If the stories are compared side-to-side, patterns begin to emerge. The raven, for example, is a powerful bird and a self-satisfied one at that. The partridge is always involved in discovering misrecognition[1]. Consistently, the Greek slave who was so bold with the criticisms in some of his tales was also ingenious in using the cultural assumptions of his audience. The birds in Aesop’s fables were crafted alluding to well-known deities and stock characters, pulling in the familiar to add further credibility to his morals.

In both Greek and Roman times, the peacock was associated with the jealous wife of the king of the gods. Whether she is called Hera or Juno, this goddess is known for her near-constant wrath and the creative punishments she devises for her wayward husband’s mistresses. Curiously, however, the peacock fables appear to focus on male birds. In one case, the peacock chides the crane for her modest plumage. In another, he announces that he feels he deserves to be king of the birds on account of his great beauty. In both cases, wiser birds rebuke him. Aesop’s peacock is as vain and self-satisfied. Hera is equally vain and self-satisfied; many of her myths involve herpunishing mortals and lower goddesses for laying with her husband. Her punishments are creative and cruel, dispite the fact that the other women frequently were powerless to resist Zeus, a problem that she never had[2].

Traditionally[3], the eagle is the sign of Zeus, the king of the gods. Appropriately, fables involving eagles paint them as unpredictable characters. When a tortoise and a jackdaw both attempt to throw off their identities to be more like the eagle, the former ends up dead and the latter gets captured by a shepherd. The eagle can be selfish, stealing the fox-pups of her friend to feed to her[4] eaglets. The eagle can be arrogant, dismissing the protests of a beetle who is trying to defend a rabbit. In both cases, the eagle suffers as a consequence of her actions. The foolish eagle misdirects a gift offering; the noble eagle saves the life of a ploughman who saved his; the just eagle punishes a braggart cock. While there seems to be little consistency in these acts, they do all illustrate qualities attributed to the king of the gods.

The case of the crow is a curious one. As one reads about the crow’s hardy and earthy beauty, one really suspects that this is indeed the familiar of Minerva. While the Romans associated the crow with the goddess of knowledge, the Greeks connected crows to Apollo, and it is Apollo’s personality that Aesop’s crows display. Both god and bird show insight when critiquing others, but they are frequently careless when dealing with their own situations[5]. When the dove brags about how many children she has, it is the crow who reminds her that she hatches her children into slavery. Similarly, when the swallow boasts of her beauty and wails about being raped and having her tongue cut out, it is the crow who wonders at her ability to speak so without a tongue. However, he rashly picks up a snake to eat, only to dies when it bites him. The crow also finds that he cannot pray to any of the gods as he has stolen from each of their sacrificial alters. This is a situation that Minerva would never have found herself in; the crow is thoroughly Grecian.

Aphrodite embodies the type of passionate love that even she understands to be fleeting. Appropriately her bird, the dove, is also focused on instant gratification. Proud of her fertility, she brags about how many chicks she has, only to be reminded that she is a captive and so can only offer her children a life of slavery. Thirsty, she flies at a fountain and in her rush fails to notice that it is only a mural on a wall. When she hits the wall, she is stunned by the impact long enough for the painter to capture her for his dinner. Her impulsiveness, like Aphrodite’s, can also be a positive trait. There is a fable in which she notices a drowning ant. Unable to let the need of the ant go unmet in that moment, she rescues him. Later, the ant saves her from a bird-catcher out of gratitude.

For some birds, I could not find correlations to any major dieties. These include the rather popular jackdaw who seems to always be getting into trouble for trying to be something he is not, the nightingale who always has good ideas at the wrong times and places, and the partridge who discovers the usefulness of conformity. However, Aesop still uses thems, and the personality that he assigns each would have been decided in part by the perceptions he already had of each. Such perceptions, if they existed, may have been drawn from his experiences with myths and diviners in society.

The hen is one bird that doesn’t show up specifically in any of the deity tales. However, Aesop’s hens are consistently overly generous[6]. In two famous stories, the hen is killed by her greedy master or mistress. She is either a reliable egg-layer or a layer of golden eggs. By sharing her gift, in either case, with one who is driven by self-interest, she exposes herself to danger, and is indeed killed. Another tale demonstrates the hen’s Orgon-esque[7] qualities without the interference of man. The hen comes across a nest of snake’s eggs and decides to hatch them, thus giving life to future hen-killers. Though she isn’t associated with any goddess, the hen is never-the-less an unmistakable sketch of one who gives without disgression: a stock character charlatin and a warning to the audience.

The swallow is always a bold bird. The trait sometimes gets her into a bit of trouble and sometimes works to her advantage. The overly zealous swallow once started to sing before winter was over, and she froze to death in the cold. When the hen hatched the snake’s eggs, it was the swallow who asked her why she would nurture the children of her enemy. A snake ate her children while she was living at court, though she was particularly saddened that such tragedy should befall her in a place dedicated to helping victims of violence. Finally, there are two stories about the swallow living close to men for protection. It works; they grow accustomed to her and they do not use mistletoe birdlime to poison her as they did the other birds who were too afraid to follow her example. It is admirable to be bold within reason, one might read in her stories, and some risks pay off in the end.

Initially, I theorized that the characterizations of the bird species’ were perhaps rooted in the meanings of the birds according to the practice of augury, divination through observation of birds. In my research, however, I discovered very little explicitly identifying the omens associated with each species. What I did find were birds being mentioned in association with deities: “In the book Ancient Greek Divination, the author focuses on exploring the etymology of all words connected to augury.[8] She says, “The fact that the title and cognate words survived for hundreds of years suggests that birds were always perceived as one of the most important means of conveying information from the divine world to the mortal world- appropriately so, given that birds literally move between the earthly and heavenly spheres” (Johnston, 129). In Aesop’s fables, the birds deliver information to adult readers regarding the personalities of their gods, the characteristics of their peers, and the potential consequences of certain behaviors. For contemporary readers, each tale directly preaches its moral, but beyond that it subtly transmits a cultural tradition that colors our perception. We see patriotic eagles, proud peacocks, love doves. We see mysterious bats, cunning hawks, innocent swans and foolish larks. The messages of the birds travel, not only from the heavens to the Earth, but from past times into the present.

Sources Cited

Aesop. The Complete Fables. trans. Robert Temple. London: Penguin Classics, 1998.

Beny, Roloff and Arianna Stassinopoulos. The Gods of Greece. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. Publishers, 1983.

Fontaine, Jean De La. "Selected Fables." trans. Christopher Wood. Selected Fables. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 20-23, 26-27, 38-41, 66-69, 110-111, 160-163.

France, Marie De. "Fables." trans. Harriet Spiegel. Fables. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. 2-7, 42-49, 122-129.

Johnston, Sarah Iles. Ancient Greek Divination. New York: A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication, 2008.

Schwab, Gustav. Gods and Heroes: Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece. New York: Pantheon Books, 1946.

Sources Referenced

Aesop. The Complete Fables. trans. Robert Temple. London: Penguin Classics, 1998.

Beny, Roloff and Arianna Stassinopoulos. The Gods of Greece. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. Publishers, 1983.

Berchman, Robert M. Mediators of the Divine: Horizons of Prophecy, Divination, Dreams and Theurgy in Mediterranean Antiquity. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998.

Fontaine, Jean De La. "Selected Fables." trans. Christopher Wood. Selected Fables. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 20-23, 26-27, 38-41, 66-69, 110-111, 160-163.

France, Marie De. "Fables." trans. Harriet Spiegel. Fables. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. 2-7, 42-49, 122-129.

Greek Gods. 16 February 2010 .

Halliday, W. R. Greek Divination: A Study of its Methods and Principles. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 1913.

Johnston, Sarah Iles. Ancient Greek Divination. New York: A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication, 2008.

McTigue, Bernard. The Medici Aesop. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1989.

Roman Gods. 16 February 2010 .

Rose, H.J. Gods and Heroes of the Greeks. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1957.

Schwab, Gustav. Gods and Heroes: Myths and Epics of Ancient Greece. New York: Pantheon Books, 1946.

Ustinova, Yulia. Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Vaahtera, Jyri. Roman Augural Lore in Greek Historiography: A Study of the Theory and Terminology. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001.

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[1] An anthropological category of social conformity in which there is an unspoken ritual that never-the-less holds the weight of a law. The partridge, innocent of these rituals, stumbles into situations that force her to recognize them. For example, she is initially upset to find herself treated somewhat violently by a group of roosters. She then realizes that they treat each other the same way, and she is soothed knowing that their behavior indicated that they had accepted her as one of them.

[2] Hera was Zeus’ sister, equal in power and temper. Many of the other women he pursued were tricked or coerced into submitting to him.

[3] To punish Prometheus for stealing fire on behalf on mankind, Zeus chained him to a mountain, decreed that he should stay there for 30,000 years minimum, and sent an eagle every day to devour his liver (which regenerated so as to prologue the torture. The end of the tale is quite interesting: “Heracles laid his club and his lion’s skin on the ground before him, bent his bow, launched an arrow, and shot the cruel bird from the liver of its anguished host. Then he loosed the chains, delivered Prometheus, and led him away. But to satisfy the conditions stipulated by Zeus, he brought Chiron, the centaur, as a substitute, for even though Chiron had claim to immortality, he offered to die in the Titan’s stead... Prometheus, who had been sentenced to the cliff for a far longer time, had always to wear an iron ring, set with a chip from the stony wall of the Caucasus, so that Zeus could boast that his enemy was still forged to the mountain” (Schwab, 36). What is curious here is how willing Zeus appears to be to boast falsely. The centaur is not his enemy, nor is Prometheus chained to the mountain so much as a piece is chained to him!

[4] Note the gender difference. As with the peacock, the bird is a different gender from the deity. In the case of the eagle, the gender of one eagle is different from that of another. It follows that Aesop is writing about different birds each time he mentions a species, and so the correlations between the birds and the gods are drawn from the personalities of the species instead of the personalities of individual anomalies.

[5] The first three romantic pursuits of Apollo ended with the women turning into a tree, an unheeded prophet, and a disembodied voice respectively. In reference to Apollo: “The god who embodies light and truth and beauty wreaks destruction in the world of love and the feminine. The dominance of an exclusive masculinity, detached and dispassionate, is Apollo’s dark side” (Beny, 59).

[6] To lift a phrase, she “gives too much to the wrong people” (Dr. Bruce Grant 2.16).

[7] From Molière’s Tartuffe

[8] “Oiōnoskopeia,” as she would call it in Greek. The most frequent legend about the establishment of the practice speaks of a man who goes into a vineyard. He sees a bird of good omen flying to one side of the field, so he looks to that side of the field. The bird begins to fly on one half of that side, so he looks only to that half. The bird then begins to fly over a certain quarter, and so this continues until the man finds a giant bunch of grapes where the bird indicated good fortune awaited him.