The most antique of domesticated birds is the goose, and Homer was acquainted with no other. Penelope kept a flock of twenty,[[147]] mainly, it would seem, for purposes of diversion, since the loss of them through the devastations of an eagle is treated from a purely sentimental point of view. They were fed on wheat, the ‘height of good living,’ in Homeric back-premises. The court-yard, too, of the palace of Menelaus sheltered a cackling flock,[[148]] the progenitors of which Helen might have brought with her from Egypt, where geese were prehistorically reared for the table. That the bird occurs only tame in the Odyssey, and only wild in the Iliad, constitutes a distinction between the poems which can scarcely be without real significance. The species employed, in the Second Iliad, to illustrate, by the tumult of their alighting on the marshy banks of the Cayster, the clangorous march-past of the Achæan forces, has been identified as Anser cinereus, numerous specimens of which fly south, in severe winters, from the valley of the Danube to Greece and Asia Minor.
[147]. Odyssey, xix. 536.
[148]. Ib. xv. 161.
The familiar cocks and hens of our poultry-yards are, in the West, post-Homeric. Their native home is in India; but through human agency they were early transported to Iran, where the cock, as the bird that first greets the light, acquired in the eyes of Zoroastrian devotees, a pre-eminently sacred character. His introduction into Greece was a result of the expansion westward of the Persian empire. No cocks are met with on Egyptian monuments; the Old Testament leaves them unnoticed; and the earliest mention of them in Greek literature is by Theognis of Megara, in the middle of the sixth century B.C.[[149]] Pigeons, on the other hand, are quite at home in Homeric verse. They are of two kinds. One is the rock-pigeon, called from its slate-coloured plumage peleia (πελόs = dusky), and described as finding shelter in rocky clefts, and evading pursuit by a rapid, undulating flight.[[150]] Its frequent recurrence in similes can surprise no traveller who has observed the extreme abundance of Columba livia all round the coasts of the Ægean.[[151]] The second Homeric species of Columba is the ring-dove, once referred to as the habitual victim of the hawk. Tame pigeons are ignored, and were, indeed, first seen in Greece after the wreck of the Persian fleet at Mount Athos in 492 B.C.[[152]] Yet dove-culture was practised as far back as the oldest records lead us in Egypt and Persia. The dove was marked out as a ‘death-bird’ by our earliest Aryan ancestors, and figures in the Vedas as a messenger of Yama. But Homer, unconcerned, as usual, with animal symbolism, makes no account, if he had ever heard, of its sinister associations.
[149]. Hehn and Stallybrass, Wanderings of Plants and Animals, pp. 241-43.
[150]. Buchholz, Realien, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 120.
[151]. Lindermayer, Die Vögel Griechenlands, p. 120.
[152]. Hehn and Stallybrass, op. cit. p. 257.
Among Homeric wild animals, the first place incontestably belongs to the lion, and the Iliad, in especial, gives extraordinary prominence to the king of beasts. In savage grandeur he stalks, as it were, through the varied scenery of its similitudes, indomitable, fiercely-despoiling, contemptuous of lesser brute-forces. His impressive qualities receive no gratuitous enhancement; he rouses no myth-making fancies; there is no fabulous ‘quality of mercy’ about him, nor of magnanimity, nor of forbearance; he is simply a ‘gaunt and sanguine beast,’ a vivid embodiment of the energy of untamed and unsparing nature.
He is not brought immediately upon the scene of action; the Homeric poems nowhere provide for him a local habitation; it is only in the comparatively late Hymn to Aphrodite that a place is specifically assigned to him among the feral products of Mount Ida. His portraiture, nevertheless, in the similes of the Iliad is too minute and faithful to leave any shadow of doubt of its being based upon intimate personal acquaintance. The poet must have witnessed with his own eyes the change from majestic indifference to bellicose frenzy described in the following passage; he must have caught the greenish glare of the oblique feline eyes, noted the preparatory tail-lashings, and mentally photographed the crouching attitude, and the yawn of deadly significance, that preceded the fierce beast’s spring.