l 9 2 BIRDS IN LEGEND 



ing the carcase is still of the same weight. Having thus com- 

 pleted the embalming, he transports him into Egypt and to the 

 temple of the Sun. (Euterpe, Book II.) 



Herodotus seems to have been most interested in the 

 odorous embalming, quaintly referred to in a 17th- 

 century song — 



Have you e'r smelt what Chymick Skill 

 From Rose or Amber doth distill? 

 Have you been near that Sacrifice 

 The Phoenix makes before she dies? 



And it will be noticed that this observant reporter says 

 nothing of the quality that has given the bird its present 

 popularity as a type of recovery from disaster — its ability 

 to "rise from its ashes," which, indeed, appears to have 

 been a later conception. 



Greeks of that day probably accepted this story from 

 Herodotus without much demur or criticism, for they 

 had their own traditions of wonderful birds — the 

 Stymphalids, for example. These were gigantic and 

 terrible fowls that lived along the river Stymphalus, in 

 northern Arcadia — a region of savage mountains that 

 the Athenians knew little about. They were believed to 

 be man-eating monsters with claws, wings, and beaks of 

 brass, and feathers which they shot out like arrows. 

 "Heracles scared them with a brazen rattle, and succeeded 

 in killing part and in driving away the rest, which settled 

 on the island of Artias in the Black Sea, to be frightened 

 away after a hard fight by the Argonauts." So Seyfert 

 summarizes their history; and an illustration on an an- 

 tique vase in the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows a 

 flock of them looking much like pelicans. 



Pausanias visited the curious River Stymphalus and 



