CHAPTER XIV
LEGENDS IN A HISTORICAL SETTING
It is not easy in preparing a book devoted mainly to fable and folklore to sort out material for a separate chapter on “legends.” A legend may be defined as a narrative of something thought of as having actually happened in connection with some real purpose or place, but which is unsupported by historical evidence. In many cases such narratives are quite incredible, but even so they may have a historically illustrative, a literary, or at least an amusing interest. Stories of a considerable number of well-known kinds of birds are in this way connected with actual persons, or with verifiable incidents of the past, and hence may be said to be “legends in an historical setting.” A fair example of them is the incident of the Capitoline geese.
Early in the third century before the Christian era a horde of Gaulish invaders under Brennus over-ran central Italy, and in 388 B.C. captured all of Rome itself except the lofty citadel called the Capitol, where a Roman general officer, Marcus Manlius, held out with a small garrison on the point of starvation. One night the besieging Gauls, having discovered an unguarded by-path, crept up the rocky steep, intending the surprise and capture of the almost worn-out defenders. “But,” says Plutarch,[[94]] in Dryden’s translation, “there were sacred Geese kept near the Temple of Juno, which at other times were plentifully fed, but at this time, by reason of the Corn and all other Provisions were grown strait, their allowance was shorten’d and they themselves in a poor and lean condition. This Creature is by nature of quick sense, and apprehensive of the least noise; so that besides watchful through hunger, and restless, they immediately discovered the coming of the Gauls; so that running up and down, with their noise and cackling they raised the whole camp.”
Manlius sprang from sleep, aroused a body of soldiers and repelled the attack. It was the beginning of an ultimate victory over the enemy. Rome was saved, and in recognition of it Manlius was given the honorary title Capitolinus, and for a long time afterward the incident was celebrated annually by a procession to the Capitol in which a golden goose was carried. Livy also tells us in his history that the prototype of this golden symbol was a single sentinel goose never seen before, hence a divine aid sent to Rome for the purpose by the gods. It is interesting to note that
These consecrated geese in orders
That to the capitol were warders
And being then upon patrol
With noise alone beat off the Gaul,
as Hudibras has it, were “sacred” to Juno, for this was before the time when she, having changed from the status of simple wife to Jupiter (and a model to human wives), had become the imperious and trouble-making empress of later days, and had discarded the motherly goose for the exotic, proud, and royally splendid peacock. This is a capital example of the adaptive character of the assignment of birds to the various demigods of the Roman pantheon; and it suggests the query whether in some principal cases reverence for the bird itself did not precede the conception of the divinity it afterward typified.
Another tale of birds acting as sentinels explains how the wren came to be so mortally hated by the Irish, whose cruel “hunting of the wren” is described in another chapter. According to Lady Wilde,[[60]] a student of Irish folklore, this hatred is owing to the fact that once when Irish troops were approaching to attack a part of Thomas Cromwell’s army (about 1650) “wrens came and perched on the Irish drums, and by their tapping and noise aroused the English soldiers, who fell on the Irish troops and killed all of them.” This is a variant of a legend far older than Cromwell’s campaigning; and it is not the true explanation of the antipathy the cruder Irish and Manxmen still feel toward this innocent little songster, while at the same time they have a peculiar tenderness for the robin.