We may conclude then that Virgil’s corvus is our old friend the Rook, even if some Latin authors use the word equally for Rook, Crow, and Raven. Pliny for example tells us (N. H. x. 124) that the corvus can be taught to speak (fancy a bird talking Latin, that stiff and solemn speech!), that he eats flesh for the most part, and that he sometimes makes his nest in elevated buildings; feats which we are not used to associate with Rooks. In fact it is plain that Pliny, who was more of a learned book-reader than a careful observer of the minutiæ of nature, was not quite clear in his notions about the big black birds. But if we can be pretty sure about corvus, what is Virgil’s cornix, stalking on the shore in solitary state, and uttering admonitory croaks from the hollow holm-oak? If we consult dictionaries we shall learn that cornix is the Crow or Rook, “a smaller bird than corvus.” Where did the dictionaries get this authority for making confusion worse confounded? If Virgil distinguished corvus and cornix, and if corvus is the rook, then cornix must be the crow or the raven, and in fact the word probably stands for both. I should incline on the whole to the raven, seeing that at the present day it is much the commoner bird of the two in Italy. Alpine choughs and jackdaws are not wont to stalk about alone; and though the larger chough (our Cornish chough) might do so, and is to be found in the mountain districts of Italy, he cannot well be the bird generally understood by cornix. Could a chough learn to talk with his long thin red bill? But Pliny knew of a talking cornix; “while I was engaged upon this book,” he says, “there was in Rome a cornix from the south-west of Spain, belonging to a Roman knight, which was of an amazingly pure black, and could say certain strings of words, to which it frequently added new ones.”
Swans are frequently mentioned by Virgil, as by other Latin and Greek poets. This splendid bird must have been much commoner then throughout Europe than it is now, and accordingly attracted much attention. It doubtless abounded in the swampy localities of the north of Italy, and at the mouths of the great rivers of Thrace and Asia Minor, as well as in the north of Europe, where it came to be woven into many a Teutonic fable. Homer has frequent and beautiful allusions to it; and the town of Clazomenae, at the mouth of the river Hermus, has a swan stamped upon its coins.
This Swan of the old poets is without any doubt the whooper (Cycnus musicus), whose voice and presence are still well known in Italy and Greece. Virgil had seen it at Mantua, on the watery plain of the Mincius:
Pascentem niveos herboso flumine cycnos.[73]
And in an admirable simile in the eleventh book of the Aeneid, he likens the stir and dissension in the camp of Turnus, when the news suddenly arrives that Aeneas is marching upon them, to the loud calls of this bird:
Hic undique clamor
Dissensu vario magnus se tollit ad auras:
Haud secus atque alto in luco cum forte catervae
Consedere avium, piscosove amne Padusae
Dant sonitum rauci per stagna loquacia cycni.[74]