2i6 THE BOOK OF BIRDS 



seem to have been held in much respect by the Greeks. 



The adjectives usually applied to it are either scornful or 

 ill-natured. But the Athenians did go so 

 far as to stamp the figure of this round- 

 eyed bird on certain of their coins.' 



Among the Romans, its reputation 

 was of the worst kind. If it strayed 

 into a house, it was thought to have 



rr^rrr^s designs upon the baby asleep in its 



ENGRAVED WITH THB cradlo, Or to presago some coming mis- 



ATHENIASr OWL. ' 1 O O 



fortune to one of the household. "Any 

 unlucky Owl which blundered into a Roman house was 

 nailed, alive and struggling, to the house-door, to avert 

 the evil that it would have wrought." 



In some of the most notable disasters in Roman history, 

 an Owl figures as the harbinger — at least so averred the 

 story-tellers. One of these events was the death of Julius 

 Caesar under the daggers of the assassins. Another was 

 the fatal battle of Carrhse, when Crassus and his legions 

 were worsted by the fleet hordes of Parthians, he himself 

 being slain soon after. 



The Owl, as messenger of misfortune, figures frequently 

 in the writings of the poets, both ancient and modern. 

 Shakespeare mentions this bird a remarkable number 

 of times, and mostly in connection with impending 

 trouble. 



It is a pleasant change to find, in at least one old book, 

 an account of a people who regarded the Owl in a very 

 difierent way. In the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 

 that quaint gossipy traveller of the fourteenth century 



1 A die for making tliese coins, and showing clear and sliarp-cut the figure 

 and face of an Owl, was found in Egypt in 1904. It probably dates from several 

 centuries before Christ. It is now in the Museum at Athens. 



