Of equal value with your many trifles,
And peacocks, which you breed up for their feathers.
And Anaxandrides, in his Melilotus, says—
Is't not a mad idea to breed up peacocks,
When every one can buy his private ornaments?
And Anaxilaus, in his Bird Feeders, says—
Besides all this, tame peacocks, loudly croaking.
Menodotus the Samian also, in his treatise on the Treasures in the Temple of the Samian Juno, says: "The peacocks are sacred to Juno; and perhaps Samos may be the place where they were first produced and reared, and from thence it was that they were scattered abroad over foreign countries, in the same way as cocks were originally produced in Persia, and the birds called guinea-fowl (μελεαγρίδες) in Ætolia." On which account Antiphanes, in his Brothers by the same Father, says—
They say that in the city of the Sun
The phœnix is produced; the owl in Athens;