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Dr. E. Hopkinson



ye Senators ! 0 unhappy Rome! What does this portend ? On what ev


times have we fallen, when we see our wives nursing puppy dogs on their laps

and our men carrying Parrots in their hands ! ’ In how great esteem were

these birds then held, is shown by the fact that the poet Ovid wrote an elegy*

on Corinna’s dead Parrot, while later on Statius glorified another in a similar

way. Then, as now, only the young were selected for instruction. So we

learn from Apuleius and we may assume that frequently mentioned Ringneck

was the only species known in ancient days. Kiranides describes one of these,

but one in which the ring was lacking [ i.e . a hen or young bird. — E. H.].

Aelian tells us that in India there were many Parrots, which were held sacred

by the Brahmans, because they could imitate human speech, and which were

therefore neither killed nor captured by the Indians. By the time of the

Emperor Nero Parrots had been discovered (‘ bei Tergedum ’) on the Nile, and

were probably afterwards imported in gradually increasing numbers from

Africa into Europe, as has been the case with many of our domestic animals

and birds, which originally came from foreign parts. The notorious glutton,

the Emperor Heliogabalus, Aelius Lampridius relates, had dressed Parrot

heads served at his banquets and even fed his lions on Parrots and Peacocks.

From this it is clear that these birds must have been then imported in vast

numbers.”


We will now leave the Parrots awhile and return to vol. iv,

and what Dr. Buss has to say there on other birds in the days of

Borne, just incidentally referring to what every school-boy knows,

another item on the imperial and plutocratic menus of the time—

Nightingale tongues. He continues thus :


“In their parks the Romans kept various kinds of ornamental fowl —

Flariringos, Purple Gallinules, Cranes and other Water and Game Birds, for in

those days it was the larger sorts which were the special favourites and the

Parrots were the only representatives of our present day chamber birds. The

methods and objects too of the bird-fanciers of those days were radically

different from those of to-day. The inherent roughness and unbounded love of

gain in the Romans of the Decline made them see only one objective in the

pets they kept and reared, namely the filling of their own bellies. To quote an

instance of this horrid characteristic of theirs, we hear that it gave the actor

Aesop the greatest pleasure to eat the best singing and talking birds, because

they were like men, and that on one occasion he had prepared a dish, the

contents of which were nothing but the most famous feathered singers and

talkers. The price of each of these was 6000 sestertia, so that the cost of the

whole dish must have come to about 100,000 S. His son was an even worse

waster than he was, for not only did he buy only the costliest birds, but would

only drink wine in which pearls of price had been dissolved. The gor¬

mandising Emperor, Heliogabalus, regaled himself at his banquets on the

combs of living cocks and the tongues of Peafowl and Parrots. The self-

indulgence of the Romans led to even the smallest birds being made to



* “ ‘ Psittacus, Eois imitatrix ales ab oris, Occidit.’



