Abigail Oulton
Dr. Patricia Lennox
Myths and Fables
February 17, 2010
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.”( Halliday, 247).
As a Greek slave in the centuries just before the dawn of Rome, Aesop knew the tales of the Greek gods. They had become fairly secular beings, fit to be used for teaching tools and even occasional satire. Credited with didactic and somewhat cynical fables, Aesop also 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.[1] In ancient Greece, the prophetic flights and songs of birds were interpreted in formal ceremonies. 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.
The birds 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). Consistently, the slave who was so bold with the criticisms in some of his tales was also ingenious in using the cultural assumptions of his audience to his advantage. 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. He was so effective that the Romans continued retelling and translating his stories when they rose to power after his death. The Romans adopted the Greek deities, leaving their personalities and symbols intact while changing their names. This paper will explore the roles of the peacock, the eagle, the crow, the dove, the hen, the swallow, and the partridge in communicating Aesop’s messages to his contemporary audience.
The first bird of note, the peacock, was associated with Hera, the jealous wife of the king of the gods. 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 having such 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 tell of her punishing 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]
Another prominent bird, the eagle, is traditionally the sign of Zeus, king of the gods. [3] 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 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 not so straightforward as that of the eagle. Aesop was Greek; 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.[4] 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. As one reads other fables about the crow’s hardy and earthy beauty, one suspects that this is indeed the familiar of Minerva, the Roman virgin goddess of wisdom and feminine intuition. Minerva was the Roman equivalent of Athena, and they shared the symbol of the owl. It is mentioned that Minerva, though not Athena, could sometimes be associated with the crow as well. That Aesop did not author all of the fables he is credited with is a well-known fact. As the Romans had such a fondness for his tales, it is possible that some of the later crow fables were written by Romans and so reflect their slightly different ideas of the gods. At the time, I am not sure how one would go about researching this; the order in which the fables were created is a mystery as far as I can tell.
A much more apparent connection exists between the goddess of love and the bird she is associated with. Aphrodite embodies the type of passionate love that even she understands to be fleeting. Appropriately her bird, the dove, also focuses 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.
Unlike the dove, some birds do not have obvious 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.[5] 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 qualities without the interference of man. [6] 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, her stories seem to imply, and some risks pay off in the end.
The final bird to be explored here is the partridge. The partridge is always involved in discovering misrecognition. Misrecognition refers to 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.
Aesop’s use of gender is deliberate in the aforementioned partridge’s tale. The delicate female partridge is appalled by the violence of the male roosters. Their ways are different from those that she knows, and it takes time for her to understand them. Aesop may have been drawing attention to the differences between the sexes and the miscommunications that can result. He may also have been suggesting that women would support men’s decisions more if the men took the time to educate them, though the partridge is observant enough to figure out the pattern for herself. Is Aesop commenting on the nature of women? The female hen is overly generous when giving of her talents. She can produce golden eggs that make her master happy, so she produces them regularly. She also can hatch eggs and nurture them, so she is more than happy to display her abilities by hatching snake eggs. Her weakness becomes her downfall. In the same way, the female dove is rash when her decisions are guided by desire. Eager to be recognized for her fertility, she brags about her children without thinking about the situation she has borne the children into. Similarly, her weakness and need for a drink to quench her thirst lead her to fly into a wall when she mistakes a mural for a real fountain. These negative images are contradicted by that of the clever female swallow whose fearlessness saves her life.
And what does the use of gender say about the gods? Hera, the controlling and powerful goddess, is typically portrayed as a male peacock. The myths claim that Zeus came to her in the form of a peacock to woo her, and choosing to portray an arrogant character as a colorful male peacock certainly makes more sense than choosing to portray her as a female peacock. That said, Hera possessed remarkable power over Zeus. She was his wife, but she was also his sister. On top of this, she had conceived two children completely without the assistance of Zeus or any other male. Her importance and superiority traditionally would have been perceived as male traits. In the case of the eagle, the gender of one eagle is different from that of another. Zeus’ moods could fluctuate from feminine kindness to masculine ferocity. Zeus gave birth to Athena, though in a non-traditional way, and he would sometimes defer to Hera’s will. He could fill either of the traditional gender roles, depending on his mood. In writing about eagles of different genders, Aesop reveals that he is writing about different birds each time he mentions a species. As such, the personalities of the birds are not individualized. The correlation between a bird and a deity or stock character is not an anomaly; that bird shares its given personality with the others of its species, and so its metaphor can be extended to all others of the same kind. The fact that parallels exist even with individual characters provides evidence that Aesop crafted his characters purposefully and carefully.
To conclude, in Aesop’s fables the birds deliver information to adult readers by referencing the personalities of their gods. Each species of bird acts according to an expected personality that implies either a deity or stock character that would be well known to the Greeks. Furthermore, the Romans were able to continue using the fables for instruction as they referenced many of the same deities and characters. The fables seek to deliver insight regarding the characteristics of people and the potential consequences of certain behaviors, lessons that translate across languages and times. 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. These epithets that we have were passed down to us, thanks in part to Aesop. The messages of the birds travel, not only from the heavens to the Earth, but from past times into the present. At the end of the fable of The Man and the Shrew, it is printed: “Minor actions may often teach major lessons and obvious motives may reveal hidden ones” (McTigue 1989: 116). Where is this more true than in the case of fables?
Appendix of Fables
Crow
The Dove and the Crow (McTigue 1989: 144)
The Boastful Swallow and the Crow (Aesop 1998: 256)
The Crow and the Snake (McTigue 1989: 123)
The Sick Crow (McTigue 1989: 157)
Dove
The Dove and the Crow (McTigue 1989: 144)
The Thirsty Dove (McTigue 1989: 143)
The Ant and the Dove (McTigue 1989: 64)
Eagle
The Tortoise and the Eagle (McTigue 1989: 85)
The Eagle, the Jackdaw and the Shepherd (Aesop 1998: 5)
The Eagle and the Fox (McTigue 1989: 20)
The Eagle and the Beetle (McTigue 1989: 21)
The Eagle with Clipped Wings and the Fox (Aesop 1998: 6)
The Ploughman and the Eagle (Aesop 1998: 64)
The Two Cocks and the Eagle (Aesop 1998: 18)
Hen
The Woman and the Hen (McTigue 1989: 48)
The Hen Who Laid Golden Eggs (McTigue 1989: 160)
The Hen and the Swallow (McTigue 1989: 140)
Jackdaw
The Jackdaw and the Pigeons (McTigue 1989: 124)
The Eagle, the Jackdaw and the Shepherd (Aesop 1998: 5)
The Jackdaw and the Birds (Aesop 1998: 119)
The Jackdaw and the Ravens (Aesop 1998: 118)
Nightingale
The Nightingale and the Swallow (Aesop 1998: 9)
The Nightingale and the Sparrow Hawk (McTigue 1989: 24)
The Nightingale and the Bat(McTigue 1989: 99)
Partridge
The Roosters and the Partridge (McTigue 1989: 32)
The Wasps, the Partridges, and the Farmer (McTigue 1989: 76)
The Bird-Catcher and the Partridge (Aesop 1998: 211)
Peacock
The Peacock and the Crane (Aesop 1998: 244)
The Peacock and the Jackdaw (McTigue 1989: 77)
Raven
The Crow and the Raven (McTigue 1989: 121)
The Coward and the Ravens (Aesop 1998: 37)
The Raven and the Fox (Aesop 1998: 122)
The Raven and the Snake (Aesop 1998: 123)
The Travelers and the Raven (Aesop 1998: 191)
The Jackdaw and the Ravens (Aesop 1998: 118)
Swallow
The Young Wastrel and the Swallow (Aesop 1998: 183)
The Hen and the Swallow (McTigue 1989: 140)
The Swallow and the Serpent (Aesop 1998: 254)
The Nightingale and the Swallow (Aesop 1998: 9)
The House-Martin and the Birds (Aesop 1998: 255)
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.
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
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.
[1] Aesop did not title his fables, and different translators changes the names slightly with each re-telling. At the end of this paper you will find an appendix listing the fables I cite for each bird. The appendix lists the title given to each fable in the version I use as well as the source referenced. The bird names are arranged alphabetically; the fables are listed in the order they appear in the paper.
[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] 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).
[5] To lift a phrase, she “gives too much to the wrong people” (Dr. Bruce Grant 2.16).
[6] From Molière’s Tartuffe
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