134 THE BIRDS OF VIRGIL. 



translated by corvus the Greek word Kopi^, which is not generally 

 accepted as meaning a Rook. This is the word which the Greek 

 historian Polybius uses for those naval machines invented by 

 the Eomans, in the first war with Carthage, for grappling with 

 a hooked projecting beak the galleys of the enemy ; and the 

 rook's bill is much less suited to give a name to such an engine 

 than that of the crow or raven, which has the tip of the upper 

 mandible sharply bent downwards, like that of most flesh-eating 

 birds.^ Still I must hold it probable that Aratus was here using 

 the word for the rook, as he makes it gregarious, and so, I 

 think, did the Alexandrian scholar Theon, who wrote a commen- 

 tary on his poem. The only other possibility is that he was 

 thinking of the Alpine Chough, a bird which he might possibly 

 have known, and one of thoroughly social habits. But that 

 Virgil, though he too probably knew this bird, was not thinking 

 of it when he wrote the lines just quoted, I feel tolerably sure ; 

 he would most likely have used the word graculus rather than 

 corvus, which latter never seems to have been applied like 

 monedula and "graculus to the smaller birds of the group, such 

 as the Alpine Chough and the Jackdaw. 



The second difficulty lies in the fact that the Rook is now only 

 a bird of passage in Italy, never stopping to breed in the south- 

 ern part of the peninsula, and very rarely in the northern; while 

 Virgil speaks of the corvi in the last-quoted passage as loving to 

 revisit their nests. But this difficulty has been overcome by the 

 delightful discovery that the rooks still stay and breed in the 



^ Sundevall ( Thierarten des Aristoteles, p. 1 23) pronounces Kopci( to have 

 been our Baven, 



