he met with no bogey-animals. For him neither beast nor bird had any mysterious significance. He attributed to encounters with particular species no influence, malefic or beneficial, upon human destiny. Of themselves, they had, in his view, no concern with it, although ordinary animal instincts might, under certain conditions, be so directed as to be expressive to man of the will of the gods. In the Homeric scheme, birds and serpents exclusively are so employed, without, however, any departure from the order of nature. Thus, by night near the sedgy Simoeis, a heron, Ardea nycticorax, disturbed by the approach of Odysseus and Diomed, assured them, by casually flapping its way eastward, that their expedition had the sanction of their guardian-goddess.[[170]] The choice of the bird was plainly dictated by zoological considerations alone; it had certainly no such recondite motive as that suggested by Ælian,[[171]] who, with almost grotesque ingenuity, argued that the owl, as the fowl of Athene’s special predilection, could only have been deprived of the privilege of acting as her instrument on the occasion through Homer’s consciousness of its reputation as a bird of sinister augury—
Ignavus bubo, dirum mortalibus omen—
the truth being that both kinds of association—the mythological and the superstitious—were equally remote from the poet’s mind.
[167]. Von der Mühle, Beiträge zur Ornithologie Griechenlands, p. 123; Buchholz, Homerische Realien, Bd. i. Abth. ii. p. 202.
[168]. Tozer, Researches, vol. ii. p. 82.
[169]. Descriptio Græciæ, lib. vi. cap. 8; viii. cap. ii.
[170]. Iliad, x. 274.
[171]. De Naturâ Animalium, lib. x. fr. 37.
Similarly, the portent of
An eagle and a serpent wreathed in fight