"All affirm that it exists;
Where it is no one can tell."[324]
In point of fact, no man has ever seen them; a few deities or heroes alone approached them; their seat is in the sky, where, according to their several natures and the different places occupied by the sun or the moon in the sky, they attract, ravish, seduce, enchant, or destroy.
The phœnix is, beyond all doubt, the eastern and western sun; hence Petrarch was able to say with reason,
"Nè 'n ciel nè 'n terra è più d'una Fenice,"
as there is not more than one sun; and we, like the ancient Greeks, say of a rare man or object, that he or it is a phœnix. Tacitus, who narrates, in the fourteenth book, the fable of the phœnix, calls it animal sacrum soli; Lactantius says that it alone knows the secrets of the sun—
"Et sola arcanis conscia Phœbe tuis,"
and represents it as rendering funereal honours to its father in the temple of the sun; Claudian calls it solis avem and describes its whole life in a beautiful little poem.
It is born in the East, in the wood of the sun, and until it has assumed its whole splendid shape it feeds upon dew and perfumes, whence Lactantius—
"Ambrosios libat cœlesti nectare rores
Stellifero teneri qui cecidere polo.
Hos legit, his mediis alitur in odoribus ales,
Donec maturam proferat effigiem."
It then feeds upon all that it sees. When it is about to die it thinks only of its new birth—