"Protinus arbutea postes ter in ordine tangit
Fronde ter arbutea limina fronde notat.
Spargit aquis aditus, et aquæ medicamen habebant,
Extaque de porca cruda bimestre tenet."
The usual conjurings are added, and the incident ends thus—
"Post illud, nec aves cunas violasse feruntur,
Et rediit puero qui fuit ante color."
Quintus Serenus, when the strix atra presses the child, recommends as an amulet, garlic, of which we have seen that the strong odour puts the monstrous lion to flight.
The same maleficent and demoniacal nature is shared in by the bats and the vampires, which I recognise in the "two winged ones entreated not to suck" of a Vedic hymn.[328]
Of analogous nature were the Stymphalian birds, which obscure the sun's rays with their wings, use their feathers as darts, devour men and lions, and are formidable on account of their claws—
"Unguibus Arcadiæ volucres Stymphala colentes" (Lucretius);
which Hêraklês, and afterwards the Argonauts, by the advice of the wise Phineos, put to flight with the noise of a musical instrument, and by striking their shields and spears against each other. The bird of Seleucia which Galenus describes as "of an insatiable appetite, malignant, astute, a devourer of locusts," also has the same diabolical nature. If our identification of the locust with the moon be accepted, to kill the locust, its shadow alone sufficed. But inasmuch as the locusts are considered destroyers of corn, the birds of Seleucia, which come to devour them, are held to be beneficent, and the ministers of Zeus.
The gryphes are represented as of double nature, now propitious, now malignant. Solinus calls them, "Alites ferocissimæ et ultra rabiem sævientes." Ktesias declares that India possesses gold in mountains inhabited by griffins, quadrupeds, as large as wolves, which have the legs and claws of a lion, red feathers on their breasts and in their other parts, eyes of fire and golden nests. For the sake of the gold, the Arimaspi, one-eyed men, fight with the griffins. As the latter have long ears, they easily hear the robbers of the gold; and if they capture them, they invariably kill them. In Hellenic antiquity, the griffins were sacred to Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance, and were represented in sepulchres in the act of pressing down a bull's head; but they were far more celebrated as sacred to the golden sun, Apollo, whose chariot they drew (the hippogriff, which, in mediæval chevaleresque poems, carries the hero, is their exact equivalent). And as Apollo is the prophetical and divining deity, whose oracle, when consulted, delivers itself in enigmas, the word griffin, too, meant enigma, logogriph being an enigmatical speech, and griffonnage an entangled, confused, and embarrassing handwriting.
Finally, the siren, or mermaid, who had a woman's face, and ended now as a bird, now as a fish; and who, according to Greek grammarians, had the form of a sparrow in its upper parts and of a woman in the lower, seems to be a lunar rather than a solar animal. The sirens allure navigators in particular, and fly after the ship of the cunning Odysseus, who stuffs his ears; for which reason they throw themselves in despair into the sea. The sirens are fairies like Circe; hence Horace[329] names them together—