48 BIRDS IN LEGEND 



yellow feathers of which "royal" cloaks were made; the 

 Inca "emperors" of Peru, before the Spanish conquest, re- 

 served to themselves the rose-tinted plumage of an 

 Andean water-bird; an African chief affected the long 

 tail-plumes of the widowbird — and so forth. 



Only one of these locally revered birds entices me to 

 linger a moment — the nightingale, beloved of English 

 poets, whose oriental equivalent is the Persian bulbul. 

 The mingled tragedies of the nightingale and the swallow 

 form the theme of one of the most famous as well as 

 sentimental legends of Greek mythology. These myths, 

 strangely confused by different narrators, have been un- 

 ravelled by the scholarly skill of Miss Margaret Verrall 

 in her Mythology of Ancient Athens; 108 and her analysis 

 throws light on the way the Greek imagination, from pre- 

 historic bards down to the vase-decorators of the classic 

 era, and to the dramatists Sophocles, ^Eschylus, and 

 Aristophanes, dealt with birds — a very curious study. 

 Miss Verrall reminds us that a word is necessary as to 

 the names of the Attic tale. "We are accustomed, bur- 

 dened as we are with Ovidian association, to think of 

 Philomela as the nightingale. Such was not the version 

 of Apollodorus, nor, so far as I know, of any earlier 

 Greek writer. According to Apollodorus, Procne became 

 the nightingale ('a^Swv) and Philomela the swallow (x^8cov) 

 It was Philomela who had her tongue cut out, a tale that 

 would never have been told of the nightingale, but which 

 fitted well with the short restless chirp of the swallow. 

 To speak a barbarian tongue was 'to mutter like a 

 swallow.' " 



But there has arisen in Persia a literature of the night- 

 ingale, or "bulbul," springing from a pathetic legend — 

 if it is not simply poetic fancy — that as the bird pours 

 forth its song "in a continuous strain of melody" it is 



