And feet with claws, and their great bellies fledged
They make lament upon the wondrous trees.
The Romans liked Herodotus and his story as well as they pleased the Greeks, and Pliny heard or invented additional particulars. He insists that only one phenix exists at a time, clothed in gorgeous feathers and carrying a plumed head; and at the close of its long life it builds a nest of frankincense and cassia, on which it dies. From the corpse, as Pliny asserts, is generated a worm that develops into another phenix. This young phenix, when it has grown large enough, makes it its first duty to lay its father’s body on the altar in Heliopolis; and Tacitus adds that its body is burned there. The implication in most accounts is that the bird is male (the Egyptians are said to have believed all vultures female), and doubtless the whole conception is a primitive phase of the nature-worship out of which developed the more formal Osiris-legend.
But the picture has many variants. One is that the phenix subsists on air for 500 years, at the end of which, lading its wings with perfumed gums gathered on Mt. Lebanon (!) it flies to Heliopolis and is burned—itself now, not its parent—into fragrant ashes on the altar of the Sun temple. On the next morning appears a young phenix already feathered, and on the third day, its pinions fully grown, it salutes the priest and flies away. Here we come to the best remembered feature of the mystery, caught and kept alive for us by the poets, such as John Lyly,[[49]] who in 1591 reminded the world that—
There is a bird that builds its neast with spice,
And built, the Sun to ashes doth her burne,
Out of whose sinders doth another rise,
And she by scorching beames to dust doth turne.
De Kay[[18]] discourses on these notions in his Bird Gods:
“In the oldest tombs, discovered lately on the upper Nile by Jacques de Morgan and others, the phenix is seen rising from a bed of flames, which may well mean the funeral pyre of the defunct. The inscriptions in question are so early that they belong to a period when the ceremonial of the mummy had not become universal in Egypt, and the conquerors of Egypt, probably a swarm of metal-using foreigners from the valley of the Euphrates, who crossed from Arabia and the Red Sea, were still burning the bodies of their chiefs and kings. The phenix of these inscriptions may indicate the soul of the departed rising from its earthly dross as the soul of Herakles, according to the much later legend in its Greek form, rose from his funeral pyre to join the gods of Olympus.”