Читать книгу Parrot Culture - Bruce Thomas Boehrer - Страница 8
ОглавлениеChapter 1
Invasion of the Parrots
Early in 327 B.C., after completing his conquest of the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great maneuvered his army across the Hindu Kush and into India. When he finally returned homeward, he brought with him, among other things, specimens of a rare, magical bird. Alexander’s major ancient biographer, Arrian, writing some four and a half centuries after the event (c. A.D. 130–140), mentions it as follows: “Nearchus [Alexander’s friend and the admiral of his fleet] describes, as something miraculous, parrots, as being found in India, and describes the parrot, and how it utters a human voice. But I having seen several, and knowing others acquainted with this bird, shall not dilate on them as anything remarkable…. For I should only say what everyone knows” (8.15.8–9). Nearchus’ eyewitness account of the birds is lost,1 and already, in Arrian’s treatment of them, we can see the original wonder they elicited give way to something more like ennui. What was marvelous for a Greek of the fourth century B.C. has become old news for a Roman citizen of the second century A.D. But by discrediting Nearchus, Arrian points to what has changed between Alexander’s day and his own. If things that once seemed miraculous have now devolved into the commonplace, this can only be because Nearchus’ birds were indeed extraordinary—at least enough so for the people of ancient Greece and Rome to want to own them. Before the birds of India can become boring in Europe, they must first become familiar.
This book is about the group of birds thus introduced to Europe, from India, by Alexander and his followers: the order of parrots, called Psittaciformes by biologists. It is also about the process that has rendered these birds commonplace and that now, ironically, bids fair to make them rarer than ever before. The story of their acquisition by the peoples of Europe is lengthy and involved, covering nearly two and a half millennia, and yet in the end it may be as simple as Arrian’s dismissive remarks. At first parrots are exotic and astonishing, credited with marvelous abilities and even associated with the gods themselves. Then they become trivial and ordinary and even annoying. Now they are becoming extinct. Whether or not they actually do so will say as much about us and the world we have created as it does about them.
There is a great deal we do not know about Alexander’s campaign in India; in some cases we do not even know what route he took as he moved through the region. But as it happens, we have a good idea what kinds of parrot he encountered there.2 India is home to only a handful of the parrot species that have proven most popular with bird-owners over the centuries. One of these, and one of only three species that seem to have reached ancient Europe, is a true parakeet (not to be confused with the budgies known by that name in American pet stores). The bird is about two feet in length if you count its foot-long tail, with feathers of a pleasing powder-green color highlighted by a broad collar of black and rose-pink, and a very large, plum-colored beak. As with all parrots, its upper beak is hinged, and its feet are four-toed and zygodactylic—that is, arranged in yokelike fashion, with the outer toes pointing backward and the inner toes pointing forward, giving it the avian equivalent of an opposable thumb. Although it does mimic human speech in captivity, by current standards it is not a terribly gifted talker. Its native range extends from Jalalabad in the northwest to the Mekong Delta in the southeast. Biologists have given it the scientific name Psittacula eupatria (Forshaw 324–35). In English we call it the Alexandrine parakeet.
I think it fitting that this bird bears the name of Alexander the Great, for the story of parrots in the west is connected, from its very beginning, with Europe’s conquest and absorption of other territories. The first part of that story, which is the subject of this chapter, coincides with the initial phase of European military expansion from Alexander to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the late fifth century. During this period—as again later—parrots serve, among other things, to mark European civilization’s successful confrontation with the world beyond its frontiers. This fact helps to explain both the wonder with which Alexander’s Greeks first encounter these birds in India and the casual dismissal the same birds receive from Arrian, for any successful act of conquest and absorption demands that one reduce the foreign to the familiar. Indeed, that very reduction is contained within the name of the Alexandrine parakeet, which transforms it from an exotic beast into part of the legacy of Europe’s first great conqueror.
* * *
Alexander was the only European ruler to establish a military presence in India before the Renaissance. After his death, the classical world’s contact with south and east Asia was mediated by the merchants and peoples of the Silk Road, a lengthy, convoluted network of trade routes that connected Rome in the west with the Han Dynasty of China in the east. Although the great empires at this road’s extremities never met directly, a wide range of goods, parrots among them, traveled it in both directions. Indeed, given the brevity of the ancient European incursion into India, it makes sense that luxury goods from south and east Asia should prove attractive in classical Rome. For apart from their use-value, these goods also perform a kind of symbolic reconquest of lost territory. Lacking an actual Roman administrative presence in India, one might nonetheless recover a piece of India, in the form of its exotic goods, for display within Rome itself. Given the wonder with which Alexander’s Greeks first encountered India’s parrots, the birds naturally become prime candidates for this kind of reacquisition.
And from the first, these birds were associated specifically with India. In fact, no records of parrot species like the African gray and the Senegal survive from classical Europe. These species were both plentiful in sub-Saharan Africa, theoretically well within the trading range of the Roman Empire at its height. But for whatever reason, the “psittacus” of ancient Greece and Rome was understood to be an Indian bird: either the rose-ringed parakeet, the Alexandrine parakeet, or another related species. This fact would lead to a good deal of geographical confusion in the late fifteenth century, when European explorers searching for a sea route to the East Indies encountered parrots in the New World and thus mistook the Americas for Asia. But in the meantime, the peoples of ancient Europe associated parrots specifically with the luxury and wonder of the East.
So, from Alexander’s day forward, parrots serve as an exotic fixture of the classical world, and the records of Greek and Roman civilization reflect this fact in three main ways: through the writing of philosophers interested in natural history, through the work of literary artists, and through what remains of the Greco-Roman visual and spectacular arts. To begin with the first of these, ancient philosophers take a keen interest in parrots and begin trying to make sense of them as soon as they appear in Europe. Aristotle provides the first widely accepted scientific mention of the birds—although his is not quite the earliest mention of them by a western author. His History of Animals (344–342 B.C., with probable later additions) concludes a discussion of the eared owl by noting that “in general all the crook-taloned birds are short-necked and flat-tongued and given to mimicry. For such too is the Indian bird, the parrot, that is said to be human-tongued (and it becomes even more outrageous after drinking wine)” (597b.25–30). This brief remark is likely a later addition to Aristotle’s work, either by the philosopher himself or by another hand. In any case it is grounded in hearsay rather than direct experience. The allegation of drunkenness, as one classicist has remarked, is “a criticism no bird ever deserved from a human being” (Dalby 193). But hearsay or not, Aristotle’s mention of parrots proves most durable, both in its details (the observation about wine is echoed for centuries to come) and in its general features.
Among the latter, Aristotle’s tendency to anthropomorphize parrots proves especially influential, most obviously in the remark about wine. Parrots may eat fermented fruit in the wild, and in past centuries have been fed a mixture of wine-soaked bread called “parrot soup,” but when given a choice, they don’t seem given to drink. I’ve even put the matter to the test (purely in the interests of scholarship, of course) by tempting my two Amazon parrots with a small but discerning selection of red and white wines, including an Australian chardonnay, a Chilean cabernet, an Oregon pinot noir, and a vernaccia from San Gemignano. They turned up their beaks at the lot.
But beyond the question of parrots and alcohol, Aristotle describes the bird as “human-tongued,” while nonetheless noting that other birds, too, are capable of mimicry. This fact implies a lasting distinction; mynahs, jackdaws, and jays may be able to imitate human speech, but historically the parrot emerges as western culture’s articulate bird par excellence, its eloquence rendering it by coincidence more human than the rest. Why should this be so? In part, perhaps, this status derives from the exceptional degree of the parrot’s ability as mimic, which extends in present-day cases to the singing of opera and the conduct of seemingly meaningful conversation.3 But other things, too, render many parrot species exceptional. Their gaudy appearance immediately captures attention, as does their exoticism (from the western point of view, at least). Their longevity endows them with a life-cycle of human proportions. Around A.D. 425, the historian Olympiodorus wrote with wonder about a parrot “with whom he had lived for twenty years, so that it had learned almost every human action that could be imitated” (Müller 4:65; my translation). And then there is their obvious intelligence. In Aristotle, for the first time, we see certain of these factors (the articulateness and exoticism) combine to produce a bird that also seems to participate, to a limited extent, in the human condition.
So if it becomes possible to view parrots as in some ways almost human, it also becomes possible, in the process, to view them as possessing, and as typifying, a supposedly inferior humanity. In the context of ancient imperial aspirations, the parrot can emerge by this calculus as a sort of servant-figure, offering a symbolic compensation for the existence of unconquered foreign lands (we don’t have India, but its birds pay us homage) and also offering an apparently natural model for the inferiority of foreign and subordinate peoples (they’re more like parrots than like us and therefore should obey us). Following Aristotle in this spirit, Pliny the elder declares in his Natural History (completed A.D. 77) that
above all else, parrots mimic the human voice and indeed are even capable of conversation. India sends us the bird, which the Indians call “siptacis.” Its entire body is green, set off with a vermilion collar about its neck. It salutes emperors and repeats the words it hears, being especially outrageous in its speech when drunk with wine. Its head is as hard as its beak, and is beaten with an iron rod when one teaches the bird to speak, for it feels no other blows. When it flies down from a perch, it catches and supports itself with its beak, making itself lighter because of the weakness of its feet. (10.58.117; my translation)
The description here is sketchy, but it seems to be aimed at depicting parrots as miniature people. Aristotle’s anecdote about psittacine drunkenness persists, supplemented by other observations that implicitly cast the bird as a servant. It greets emperors, sports a collar about its neck that might call to mind the similar collars worn by Roman slaves, and sustains regular beatings with an iron rod, without which it would prove impervious to learning. And in fact, far from being a confirmable detail, this last point—like Aristotle’s charges of drunk and disorderly behavior—flies in the face of experience. Parrots are wild animals at heart even now, when many are bred in captivity, and they most certainly were so in Pliny’s day. Training them well cannot be done by physical violence, which will drive them into terror and psychosis. To teach a parrot to talk, one must on the contrary form a close personal bond with it, and the resulting intimacy can easily defy any distinction between master and pet. Over the years I have taught various parrots to whistle, speak, and sing. In turn, they have encouraged me to cluck, squawk, and hiss—responses to which I now find myself instinctively resorting in sometimes inappropriate circumstances, as for instance during faculty meetings. But for Pliny, the articulate birds of India exist in large part to confirm the cultural ideals of the Roman imperium, and these have more to do with hierarchy and subordination than with intimacy and mutuality.
Likewise, in another passing mention of the birds (Letters 4.2.3), Pliny notes that the unscrupulous advocate Marcus Aquilius Regulus has lost his son, whom he treated while alive with “a disgusting show of indulgence, quite unnatural in a parent…. Now that his son is dead he mourns with wild extravagance. The boy used to possess a number of Gallic ponies for riding and driving, also dogs of all sizes, and nightingales, parrots, and blackbirds; Regulus had them all slaughtered round his pyre. That was not grief, but parade of grief.” Pliny disapproves of the ostentation with which Regulus mourns his son, but the funerary slaughter of animals nonetheless makes sense in a mental environment that views them as living property. The inappropriateness of such slaughter in this case becomes a matter of decorum, not of social, political, ethical, or ecological principle. Regulus is guilty not of despotism or cruelty or wanton destructiveness, but of bad taste.
For its part, Pliny’s discussion of parrots in the Natural History is echoed and enlarged by later writers of natural history such as Apuleius (c. A.D. 165) and Solinus (early third century A.D.). For instance, Apuleius observes that
the parrot is a bird of India. Its height is very slightly smaller than that of doves, but its color is not that of doves, for it is not milk-white or lead-grey or both, or speckled pale yellow, but the parrot’s color is green from its innermost feathers to its outermost wing-tips, except that it is distinguished by its neck alone. For its neck is collared and crowned with a crimson band as bright as a circle of twisted gold. Its beak is of the first order of hardness; when it flies down in excitement upon a rock from a very high perch, it catches itself with its beak as with an anchor. But the hardness of its head is equal to that of its beak. When it is compelled to imitate our language, its head is struck repeatedly with an iron rod so that it might begin to perceive the authority of its teacher; in teaching, this is called a ferrule.
However, as a young bird it learns quickly until it reaches two years of age, while its mouth is soft so that it might be adapted to speech, and while its tongue is tender so that it might be taught to echo; but an old bird, when captured, is intractable and forgetful. In truth, a parrot is more easily brought to learn human speech when it eats nuts and when its feet, like those of a man, bear five little toes. For that is not a characteristic of all parrots, but it is proper to all of them to have a broader tongue than other birds, and they pronounce human words with their more open plectrum and palate. Indeed, what the parrot has learned, it sings, or rather speaks, so similarly to us that if you were to hear its voice, you would think it a person. On the other hand, if you were to hear a crow, it would approximate, not speak, the words. Yet both the crow and the parrot say nothing more than what they have learned. If you teach it to curse, it will curse by day and by night, making a great clamor with its railing; this is a song to it, and it thinks it is singing. When it has run through all the curses it has learned, then it starts the song all over again. If you want it not to speak, its tongue must be cut out, or it must be sent back to its forests as soon as possible. (12; my translation)
To my mind, this is the best description of parrots to survive from ancient times, and it corrects a certain amount of the misinformation that precedes it. For instance, although Apuleius, like Pliny, maintains that parrots must be beaten while learning to talk, he nonetheless connects their acquisition of language more realistically to positive reinforcement with food. Also, he notes the dramatic difference between language acquisition in young parrots and in older specimens that have matured in the wild—a difference of which neither Aristotle nor Pliny seems aware. Moreover, his allusion to the raucous and repetitive character of parrot chatter, now detached from rumors of avian alcoholism, suggests familiarity. Still, Apuleius’ fondness for parrots with five toes betrays an innocence of the birds’ anatomy, there being no such thing as a five-toed parrot; however, a five-toed parrot is more like a human being than is a four-toed parrot, so it might stand to reason that the former would have a better command of human speech. And as a general rule, Apuleius follows Aristotle and Pliny in presenting the birds from an anthropomorphic viewpoint. In repeating Pliny’s remarks about parrot-training, he draws a direct connection between the beating of animals and the beating of schoolchildren, and in echoing Pliny’s description of the colorful band that encircles the necks of most Indian parrot-species, Apuleius depicts this marking both as a collar and as a crown. This last point comes as a surprise in a passage that generally follows Aristotle and Pliny by presenting parrots as inferior and subordinate creatures. It suggests a second vein of classical nature-writing on parrots, to which I will turn in a moment. As for Solinus’ later work, it combines Pliny’s observations with those of Apuleius, adding that the birds’ articulateness “made the Romaines to have so much pleasure and delight in [them], that the barbarous people made a merchandise of their Poppinieyes” (sig. 2E1v).
In Aristotle, Pliny, and their followers, we can see the beginnings of a western tendency to treat parrots not just as a material but also as a conceptual resource. They prove valuable, in other words, not only because of their rarity, but because they exemplify both nature’s subservience to culture and the subservience of certain social groups (slaves, women, the poor, barbaric foreigners, etc.) to others. Submitting as it does to human rule, echoing the “Hail, Caesar!” of the governed, the parrot seems to provide a basis in nature for the acquiescence of social inferiors to their so-called betters. This acquiescence, in turn, helps explain the literary impulse to trivialize and denigrate the very qualities that rendered parrots marvelous and valuable in the first place.
Alongside this impulse, however, there also persists a fascination with the beauty, rarity, and exoticism of parrots, which leads some authors to associate these birds not with the low and the commonplace, but rather with the exalted and the sacred.
This tendency originates in the very first surviving reference to parrots by a western author, predating Aristotle by roughly fifty years. Sometime after 398 B.C., Ktesias of Cnidus, who had just returned to his home in Greece after seventeen years as a physician to the king of Persia, composed a geographical account of India which now survives only in an abstract made by Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, in the late ninth century A.D. This brief narrative is full of fabulous, incredible material, among which Ktesias mentions “the kind of bird called the parrot … : it has a tongue and voice like the human, is of the size of a hawk, has a red bill, is adorned with a beard of a black colour, while the neck is red like cinnabar, it talks like a man in Indian, but if taught Greek can talk in Greek also” (1.3). Ktesias was describing a bird the Greeks hadn’t yet generally seen, and given the fantastic content of his work, it may have been easy to dismiss his report out of hand. Yet he seems to be referring to a species of parrot otherwise unreported by classical authors: the blossom-headed parakeet (Psittacula roseata), whose neck and entire head are a deep and pleasing violet. In any case, Ktesias describes a bird that does not mimic but instead “talks like a man,” and he thus gives later authors a precedent for viewing parrots not as minions or toys but as marvels, worthy of wonder and even veneration.
On this point, his attitude opposes the tradition of nature-writing descending from Aristotle and Pliny, and the Greek historian/philosopher Plutarch (A.D. 45–125), for one, clearly understands as much. In his massive and influential Moralia appear two essays, entitled “Beasts Are Rational” and “Whether Land or Sea Animals Are Cleverer,” which together make an unusual case for displaying respect to the creatures of the natural world. There Plutarch claims that beasts reason, that they teach their young as humans do, and that they are capable of personal attachments and loyalties. Then, taking dead aim at Aristotle’s insistence that the “power [of speech] is peculiar to man” (History of Animals 536b.1–2), he adds that
as for starlings and crows and parrots which learn to talk and afford their teachers so malleable and imitative a vocal current to train and discipline, they seem to me to be champions and advocates of the other animals in their ability to learn, instructing us in some measure that they too are endowed both with rational utterance and with articulate voice; for which reason it is quite ridiculous to admit a comparison of them with creatures who have not enough voice even to howl or groan. (972f-973a)
Plutarch’s reading of avian mimicry stands in sharp contrast to other treatments of the subject and draws attention to the uncertain meaning of such behavior. For Aristotle, Pliny, and Apuleius it emerges as a marker of difference, demonstrating how short all birds fall of possessing full human consciousness. Hence Apuleius stresses the mindless and repetitive character of parrot chatter, while Aristotle and Pliny describe it as a kind of verbal license and associate it with strong drink. In each of these cases, psittacine mimicry figures as an index of mindlessness; what matters most is not the similarity of parrot speech to human language, but the intellectual difference that underlies the two. But for Plutarch, as for Ktesias before him, the speech of birds suggests their abiding affinity with humankind. They remind us of humanity’s intimate connection to the surrounding world even as they lay claim to their own peculiar dignity.
In similar spirit, Aelian’s On the Characteristics of Animals (c. A.D. 200) associates parrots with the marvels of eastern royalty and spirituality. Aelian remarks that
in the royal residences in India where the greatest of the kings of that country lives, there are so many objects for admiration that neither Memnon’s city of Susa with all its extravagance, nor the magnificence of Ecbatana is to be compared with them…. The remaining splendours it is not the purpose of this narrative to detail; but in the parks tame peacocks and pheasants are kept, and they live in the cultivated shrubs to which the royal gardeners pay due attention…. There too Parrots are kept and crowd around the king. But no Indian eats a Parrot in spite of their great numbers, the reason being that the Brahmins regard them as sacred and even place them above all other birds. And they add that they are justified in so doing, for the Parrot is the only bird that gives the most convincing imitation of human speech. (13.18)
In its way, this description proves as influential among later writers as do those of Aristotle and Pliny. Among other things, its association of parrots with royal opulence and its treatment of them as objects of religious veneration find unexpected parallels in the Middle Ages. Although he writes roughly half a century after Arrian, Aelian does not wholly share his predecessor’s cavalier view of the parrot world; instead, he voices something very much like the admiration and wonder that Arrian has already rejected as naive.
Elsewhere, in contrast, Aelian seems more cavalier about the birds in question, noting that they “learn like children” and that while they speak in captivity, in the wild they “are unlearned and cannot talk” (16.2). Recent historians have traced a connection between the growth of opposition to animal cruelty and the decline of corporal punishment in the classroom over the past four centuries (Thomas 45). In Aelian’s comparison of parrots to children, and in Pliny’s and Apuleius’ observation that the birds must be beaten when taught to speak, we encounter traces of older views on both subjects.4 But in general, the natural historians of Greece and Rome seem to be of two minds about the parrots of India, inclined both to extol them as miraculous and to dismiss them as pedestrian, to associate them with gods and kings on the one hand and with servants and children on the other. The tension between these attitudes remains constant, in various ways, to the present day.
While the practitioners of ancient science were busy studying parrots, others embraced the birds with enthusiasm. When Alexander the Great died, his officers divided his empire into a series of smaller kingdoms, and the richest of these, Egypt, went to his former lieutenant Ptolemy. By 285 B.C., the aging Ptolemy decided to share the realm with his son, also named Ptolemy, and to celebrate the accession of Ptolemy II he produced an immense public pageant. Among the costly fabrics, the incense, the massed soldiers, the banqueting, and the other splendors of this affair, there appeared columns of servants carrying parrots in cages (Athenaeus 5.201b). Apart from the obvious luxury of this spectacle, it conveyed a political point, for the elder Ptolemy had accompanied Alexander to India and back. The birds that returned with him served as a reminder of that connection, and perhaps as a way of linking the new Ptolemy with Alexander’s achievements.
If this was the intended effect of the display, it seems to have worked, at least in the long run. Alexandria became the center of the parrot trade for the classical Mediterranean (Wotke 931), and parrots became a popular marker of privilege in ancient society, increasingly associated with kings and emperors. When the news spread that Julius Caesar’s adopted nephew Octavian had defeated Mark Antony at the battle of Actium (31 B.C.), thereby ensuring that he would become the emperor Augustus, at least one parrot appeared among his well-wishers, greeting him with the words “Hail Caesar, conqueror and leader!” (Macrobius 3.30; my translation). This was a calculated appeal to the victor’s largesse, of course; it takes a long time to teach a parrot to say anything, so the bird’s greeting offered powerful evidence of its owner’s loyalty. In this case, the ploy worked, and Octavian bought the bird from its owner for a handsome sum. But another fortune-hunter used a raven for the same purpose, with less than ideal results:
It happened that a man appeared before Caesar with a raven, which he had taught to say, “Hail Caesar, conqueror and leader!” Caesar, marveling, bought the dutiful bird for twenty thousand coins. But a companion of the bird’s trainer, who had received nothing of this generosity, declared that the trainer had another bird, too, which Caesar demanded to see as well. When brought forward, it greeted him with the words “Hail Antony, conqueror and leader!” (Macrobius 3.30; my translation)
The bird-trainer evidently had been hedging his bets.
Not to be outdone by such yokels, Greek and Roman poets also began to employ the parrot in the endless derby for imperial patronage. Writing in the first century B.C., the Greek Crinagoras set the tone here with an effusive epigram:
The parrot that talks with human voice, taking leave of his wicker cage, flew to the woods on his many-coloured wings, and ever assiduous in greeting famous Caesar, did not forget that name even in the mountains. All the birds, sharpening their wits to learn, strove among each other which should be the first to say “Chaire” [Hail] to the god. Orpheus made the beasts obey him in the hills, and now every bird tunes its voice for thee, Caesar, unbidden. (9.562)
The parrot’s praises are a projection of the poet’s own sycophantic ambitions, which others strove to outdo in their turn. Petronius (d. A.D. 66), for instance, amidst his duties as Roman magistrate and party-companion of the emperor Nero, took time to compose an epigram spoken by a parrot whose wondrous abilities associated it not only with the Latin language but with the gods themselves: “My birthplace was India’s glowing shore, where the day returns in brilliance with fiery orb. Here I was born amid the worship of the gods, and exchanged my barbaric speech for the Latin tongue. 0 healer of Delphi, now dismiss thy swans; here is a voice more worthy to dwell within thy temple” (18). And, capping these performances in turn, in A.D. 85 the poet Martial flattered the emperor Domitian by composing a deft couplet uttered by a parrot that had taught itself to sing Caesar’s praises.
Like the philosophers of their day (and Martial, at least, had clearly been reading Pliny), these poets seem torn between wonder at the parrot’s powers of speech and an urgent desire to put the bird in its place. As an eastern miracle, it becomes a proper companion for Caesar and Apollo, even displacing the sungod’s swans. But it is also in dire need of domestication, exchanging its “barbaric speech” for Latin, learning to praise Caesar or to name others at Caesar’s direction. As it happens, this exquisite combination of eminence and inferiority gives perfect expression to the circumstances of a poet in pursuit of royal patronage. The parrot’s marvelous eloquence sets it apart from other beasts, thereby marking the poet’s own aspirations to distinction and uniqueness. But its status as a pet of the powerful marks, at the very same time, the humiliation of the poet’s own life of service. Like the parrot, the poet is an articulate beast torn between two incompatible images of himself.
In practice, this conflict could lead to painful consequences. Despite the advantages of his friendship with Nero, and despite—perhaps even because of—his own energy and talent, Petronius was eventually forced to commit suicide by his imperial patron. Likewise, despite their beauty and value, Marcus Aquilius Regulus had his son’s parrots slaughtered at his funeral pyre. To serve well, one must please well. That, at least, is one implication of a fable by Aesop (c. 600 B.C., with many later attributions, of which this tale is one) that again casts a parrot in the role of household servant, having to deal with the inevitable politics of the workplace:
A man who had bought a parrot let it fly freely in his house. The parrot, who was tame, jumped up and perched in the hearth, and from there began to cackle in a pleasant way. A house-ferret, seeing him there, asked him who he was and from whence he came. He replied:
“The Master went out to buy me.”
The house-ferret replied:
“And you dare, most shameless creature—newcomer!—to make such sounds, whereas I, who was born in this house, am forbidden by the Master to cry out, and if sometimes I do, he beats me and throws me out of the door.”
The parrot replied:
“Oh, go for a long walk [i.e., get lost]! There is no comparison to be made between us. My voice doesn’t irritate the Master as yours does.”
This fable concerns all malevolent critics who are always ready to throw the blame on to others. (355)
Figure 1. A wall painting from Roman North Africa, depicting a parrot with cherries
And for the most part, parrots seem to have pleased the ancient Greeks and Romans surpassingly, so much so that one classicist has claimed “there was a fashionable cult of parrots in Imperial Rome” (Douglas 90). No doubt the birds were popular, and not just for their voices. They seem to have been a standard feature of public ceremonies, along with “white blackbirds, and other unusual things of that sort” (Varro 3.9.17). Pliny records that a talking raven received a public funeral in Rome in A.D. 36 (Natural History 10.122–123); no such accounts of public parrot funerals survive, but the raven’s example suggests their possibility. And the stunning appearance of parrots made them a standard subject of pictorial representation, so that they begin to turn up regularly in the ancient visual arts. Often they appear simply as eye candy, as in a wall painting from El-Djem in Tunisia that depicts a parrot on a tree branch, reaching forward with its beak to grasp a cluster of cherries (Figure 1). In like spirit, a mosaic from Naples shows two parrots and a dove perched on a bowl of water, being eyed covetously from below by a cat; among his other fantasies, Pliny believed that parrots and doves enjoyed a special friendship (Pliny 10.207).
But elsewhere, painters and artisans encourage the association of parrots with India and its mythic wonders, which they transform in the process into a species of household ornament. The silver-gilt Dish of Lampsacus, for instance, is decorated with an elaborate relief depicting at its center an enthroned female figure whose headdress and clothing identify it as India personified (Toynbee 59–60). Surrounding this figure is a variety of exotic fauna, including apes, leopards, and, immediately to the left of the figure, a parrot. The result is an allegorical grouping in which the beasts of India serve as attendants upon a queen or goddess representing the region as a whole. As a luxury item, the dish embodies a desire to possess the exotic, even if only at second hand, and to turn it into domestic property.
Figure 2. Detail of the Dionysus Mosaic from Cologne, showing two parrots harnessed to a miniature cart (courtesy of the Romisch-Germanisches Museum, Cologne)
Then again, there is the so-called Dionysus Mosaic, now in the Römisch-Germanisch Museum in Cologne. This decorative pavement formed part of a Roman villa dating from the third century A.D. It consists of a complex geometrical pattern enclosing a series of illustrations that relate to the worship of the god Dionysus: musical instruments and theater masks reflecting the god’s status as patron of music and the drama; bunches of grapes referring to his invention of wine; and so forth. Among these images there appears a pair of rose-ringed parakeets harnessed to a miniature cart loaded with farm implements (Figure 2). The farm tools are a seasonal reference; other birds appear on the mosaic as emblems of autumn, winter, and spring, and the parrots in their turn represent summer. But they also illustrate the tradition that Dionysus himself visited, and in some accounts conquered and governed, India. This tale was influential enough to prompt Alexander, during his own invasion of India, to seek out a local shrine that he believed to have been dedicated to the god (Arrian 5.2.5–7), and the parrots on the Dionysus Mosaic serve as reminders of this geographical association.
Yet at the same time that this mosaic associates parrots with the pagan gods, it also transforms them into toys, harnessed like draft animals to a diminutive wagon. This motif of birds in harness is a fairly common one in Roman visual art: a “jeu d’esprit” (Toynbee 280) that Roman painters and their audiences seem to have found oddly engaging. For instance, another such image survives in which a parrot pulls a chariot guided by a grasshopper.5 In illustrations of this sort we see parrots taking their place, very early on, in the cultural province of the Cute, where they have remained, to one extent or another, ever since.
Less cute—but just as enduring—is the use ancient satirists made of the birds. Where patronage poets like Crinagoras and Martial employed them to flatter the powerful, writers of social invective used them to denounce the contemptible, thus paving the way for centuries of parrot-insults to come. Perhaps the earliest pioneer in this vein was the Greek Callimachus (fl. 280–240 B.C.), who employed an otherwise-lost fable of Aesop’s as mordant social commentary:
Just is Zeus, yet unjust was his ruling when he deprived the animals of their speech, and—as though we were not in a position to give part of our voice to others—[diverted it], to the race of men [defective in this way?]. Eudemos, therefore, has a dog’s voice, and Philton a donkey’s, [the orators] that of a parrot, and the tragedians have a voice like the dwellers in the sea. And for this cause, Andronicus, all men have become loquacious and wordy. Aesop of Sardis told this, whom the Delphians did not receive well when he recited his tale. (Iambus 2.4–17)
Even in the fragmentary form in which it has survived, one can see why this tale might have displeased the Delphians. It introduces, for perhaps the first time in European history, the enduring tendency to compare mindless chatter to the mimicry of a parrot. And at the same time, it also implements a startling (and perhaps even more insulting) reversal of roles. The parrot’s chatter, which early nature writers like Pliny and Apuleius present as an imperfect imitation of human speech, reemerges here as an object of human imitation. As a result, the rhetoricians of ancient Alexandria—as famed in their day for babbling nonsense as are certain politicians in our own—function as a cheap copy of the animal world. Nature is more cultured than culture.
Such patterns of association seem to have caught on quickly in ancient satire. As a result, by A.D. 62 the poet Persius poses a question that has already become rhetorical:
I have not bathed my lips in the horse’s spring, Helicon, nor do I recall dreaming on two-headed Parnassus in order to spring up so suddenly as a poet…. Who instructed the parrot to say hello, and who taught the magpie to attempt our language? That master of arts and patron of ingenuity, the belly, an expert at mimicking the voices denied to him. Because of him, if any hope of deceitful money glittered, you would think that crow-poets and magpie-poetesses warbled Pegasean nectar. (Prologue 1–3, 8–14)
Yet Persius, unlike Callimachus, seems to view himself as a parrot and the objects of his scorn as crows and magpies. His is a literary world afflicted with the defects of the patronage system, in which legions of aspiring poetasters give vent to verbal excess in the name of inspiration. Indeed, some of that excess finds its way cleverly into Persius’ own poem, which mockingly coins inflated poetic phrases like “the horse’s spring” (“fonte Caballino,” for Helicon), “two-headed Parnassus,” and “Pegasean nectar.” Such stuff, the poem implies, is the province of lesser talents: imperfect imitators who are to Persius what crows and magpies are to the parrot. As for the inspiration to which they lay claim, it’s obvious nonsense, and it marks the bad poets indelibly as such: writers whose sense of reality is as defective as their sense of diction. Persius himself, on the other hand, emerges as the dominant figure of his poem not only because of his ability as a mimic, but because his motivation for writing is so refreshingly parrot-like. When set against grandiose vaporizings about poetic afflatus and Pegasean nectar, his cheerful claim that “I’m only in this for the money” provides not just a much-needed dose of realism, but a genuine ethical improvement.
But among classical writers, it is Ovid (43 B.C.–A.D. 18) whose satirical use of parrots proves most outrageous and enduring. This use occurs in the sixth poem of book 2 of his Amores: a sixty-two-line elegy for the death of his girlfriend’s rose-ringed parakeet. Beginning the exercise in a heroic vein, Ovid summons all feathered creatures to join in the obsequies for Corinna’s pet:
Parrot, winged mimic from the dawn-lands of India, has died: come in flocks, ye birds, to his funeral. Come, pious poultry, and beat your breasts with your wings, and rend your tender cheeks with the unyielding claw…. As for the Ismarian tyrant’s crime, which you, Philomela, lament, that same lament has been satisfied in its own time; turn now to the sad last rites of a rare bird. Your cause of grief for Itys is great, but it is ancient history. (2.6.1–4, 7–10; my translation)
Both Ovid’s occasion and his tone here suggest mockery. Certainly—to compare early things with late—that is how the same subject matter functions in Evelyn Waugh’s gleeful trashing of all things American, The Loved One (1948). Waugh’s protagonist, the English expatriate Dennis Barlow, embraces a career as a pet undertaker in Los Angeles, which career culminates in a parrot funeral reminiscent of Ovid’s elegy: “Mr. Joyboy would have an open casket. I advised against it and, after all, I know. I’ve studied the business. An open casket is all right for dogs and cats who lie down and curl up naturally. But parrots don’t. They look absurd with a head on a pillow. But I came up against a blank wall of snobbery” (140). Waugh’s humor arises from the discordant juxtaposition of human obsequies with pet care, and this is what Ovid offers us as well, two thousand years earlier.
Moreover Ovid—like Persius with his Pegasean nectar—is clearly engaged in literary parody. And in Ovid’s case, the literary victim has a name. By composing a dirge for the death of his beloved Lesbia’s pet sparrow, Catullus (c. 58–55 B.C.) influenced generations of Roman love-poets to come with his tender evocation of intimate feelings: “Lament, o Venuses and cupids, and whoever is most charming among men. My girlfriend’s sparrow is dead, that sparrow, my girlfriend’s delight, whom she loved more than her eyes…. It now travels by an obscure way to that place from which no one knows how to return” (3.1–5, 11–12; my translation). This kind of tremulous emotion, however, could not have been farther from Ovid’s approach to love and sex. Where Catullus and his imitators leave the reader “convinced of the sincerity and the seriousness of their love and their bitterness at finding that [its] fulfillment is impossible” (Du Quesnay 7), Ovid seems to relish the role of the lover, which he presents not as an emotional abyss but as a game of seduction. Against this background his grief for Corinna’s parrot sounds derisive rather than genuine, marking the distance between his experience and his predecessors’ innocence. For instance, Ovid’s language is a little too grandiose, a little too exaggerated, for the sentiments it conveys. Catullus keeps his verses strictly in the personal register, describing Lesbia’s feelings for her sparrow and recalling her behavior with it in intimate detail: “For it was sweet as honey and knew her as well as a girl knows her mother, nor would it move from her bosom, but hopping about this way and that it would chirp to its mistress alone” (3.6–10). Ovid, by contrast, presents the loss of Corinna’s parrot as an event of epic magnitude, grander than Philomela’s rape or Procne’s murder of her own son, Itys. (Likewise, he compares the bird’s proverbial friendship with the turtle-dove to Pylades’ friendship with Orestes.) As Catullus understands, the relationship between a pet bird and its owner is too fragile a subject to sustain the weight of heroic allusions. For a poet intent upon making that relationship look ridiculous, however, such allusions are perfectly chosen.
Nor does Ovid simply inflate Catullus’ diction. He also exaggerates the structure of his poem so that where Catullus offers a delicate eighteen-line lyric, Ovid responds with a full-scale formal elegy. This extends from a call to the proper mourners (“Come, pious poultry”), through an outburst against divine injustice (“The best things are often carried off by greedy hands” [2.6.39]), to a death-bed (death-perch?) scene in which the expiring bird, sensing that its hour is at hand (or at wing?), squawks out a desolate “Corinna, farewell!” (2.6.48). This moment of high bathos, in turn, gives way to a formal consolation in which the parrot finds its place in Elysium, within “a grove of black ilex” (2.6.49) designated as “the good birds’ home” (2.6.51). As the classicist John Ferguson has remarked of Ovid’s poem, “the whole thing is amusing and utterly unfeeling” (353). It’s also brilliantly pitched, employing the death of a natural mimic as the occasion for a barbed exercise in literary mimicry.
Even so, Ovid handles his subject so deftly as to leave many readers doubtful of his insincerity. Even a near-contemporary of Ovid seems to have taken his poem quite seriously. I refer in this case to the poet Statius (c. A.D. 40–96), who produced his own parrot-elegy (Silvae 2.4) in obvious (but to my mind misguided) imitation of the master. Silvae 2.4 bewails the demise of a parrot belonging to Statius’ patron Atedius Melior, and this shift away from parody turns his poem into a fawning thing. Yet his obsequiousness extends still further, for the poem is not just a token of respect to Statius’ patron, but also, in a way, an act of literary ancestor-worship. Imitating Ovid as he does, Statius abandons the attitude of irreverence essential to satire, and he replaces it with a bookish kind of bowing and scraping:
Flock hither all ye scholar fowl, to whom Nature has given the noble privilege of speech; let the bird of Phoebus [the raven] beat his breast, and the starling, that repeats by heart the sayings it has heard, and magpies transformed in the Aonian contest [the maidens who challenged the Muses and were turned into magpies], and the partridge, that joins and reiterates the words it echoes, and the sister that laments forlorn in her Bistonian bower [Philomela]: mourn all together and bear your dead kinsman to the flames. (2.4.16–23)
In Statius, the parrot has ceased to be a vehicle for satire and has become once again an instrument of flattery, including the sincere form of flattery born of imitation. For poets, as for natural historians, the bird remains both a servile and a transcendent creature. Efforts to fix its meaning in one category or the other seem hopeless.
Yet while poets and painters pursue their work, parrots become subject to still another strange tension, this time centering on the dinner-table. We eat many things in America today, but parrots are not among them. Not that one would expect the parrots to complain, of course. Given all of the other indignities to which they had already been exposed in ancient Europe—capture, transportation and sale, beating with iron rods, satirical mockery, and so forth—it seems only fair that people should at least refrain from eating them. And their chances at first seem good in this respect. As we’ve seen, Aelian notes in his description of India that “no Indian eats a Parrot in spite of their great numbers, the reason being that the Brahmins regard them as sacred and even place them above all other birds.” This standard of treatment might give reasonable cause for optimism. After all, parrots have a number of qualities that could well be expected to save them from meeting their maker on a bed of wild rice. They are rare. They are beautiful. They are associated with the gods. They are intelligent and amusing. They are not eaten in their native land. They are popular as pets. And most of all, they are articulate.
Rarity alone might discourage one from eating an animal for practical reasons; to eat it is to risk losing its kind. The birds’ beauty might appeal to one’s aesthetic sense; their association with the gods to one’s sense of holy dread; their intelligence to one’s potential respect for other sentient beings; the fact that they are not eaten to one’s respect for tradition. As pets, they enter into a special relationship with their owners that cuts across the barrier of species, placing them in a sense inside the human family unit. By defining our pets as “surrogate family members” (Shell 123), we turn them into honorary human beings, under the safeguard of the prohibition against cannibalism.
In the case of parrots, this protection is extended still further by the ability to speak, which redoubles the kinship between owner and beast. The Beat novelist and composer Paul Bowles, writing in 1953 of his own longstanding attachment to parrots, noted that for the Central American Indians “the parrot can be a temporary abode for a human spirit” (159). For others, too, the parrot’s voice presents a special challenge to the distinction between people and animals. In eating such a bird, we seem to be eating a piece of ourselves.
And on the whole western society has proven reluctant to treat parrots as foodstuffs. But if we were therefore to consider them completely exempt from the demands of the table, we would ignore the invincible perversity of human nature. In fact, people—Europeans among them—have eaten parrots, in most cases as a matter of necessity. The peoples of pre-Columbian America consumed the birds, as did those of West Africa, and T’ang China (Schafer 100), and as did some European explorers faced with starvation. In the nineteenth century, parrot pie became a classic pioneer dish in the Australian outback.
But the ancient Romans are to my knowledge unique among western peoples in treating the parrot as a culinary delicacy rather than as an entree of last resort. They have even left us recipes for preparing the birds. Here is one from Apicius’ celebrated cookbook, On the Art of Cookery (late third century A.D.):
For Flamingo [and Parrot] in phoenicoptero [flamingo style]
Scald the flamingo, wash and dress it, put it in a pot, add water, salt, dill, and a little vinegar, to be parboiled. Finish cooking with a bunch of leeks and coriander, and add some reduced must to give it color. In the mortar crush pepper, cumin, coriander, laser root, mint, rue, moisten with vinegar, add dates, and the fond of the braised bird, thicken, [strain] cover the bird with the sauce and serve. Parrot is prepared in the same mariner. (231–232)
Never having tried this dish, I can hazard no opinion as to its quality. Nor is it clear just how widely such recipes were made in their own day. But used they were, specifically by the rich and privileged.
We know, for instance, that parrots were a part of the diet of the late Roman boy-emperor Elagabalus (A.D. 218–222). As one historian noted in tight-lipped disgust, he even fed parrots to his lions; as for his palace staff, he regaled them with “huge dishes filled with mullets’ innards, flamingoes’ brains, partridge eggs, thrushes’ brains, and the heads of parrots, pheasants and peacocks” (Lives of the Later Caesars, Elagabalus 21.2; 20.6). Such banquets seem to have earned him little admiration; on the contrary, they survive as evidence of his softness, profligacy, and corruption. Eating parrot and similar things, Elagabalus transforms himself into an emblem of epicurism run amuck.
He makes a lasting impression in the process. Nearly fourteen hundred years after the young emperor’s death, Ben Jonson recalls Elagabalus’ dining habits in his dramatic masterpiece, the comedy Volpone (1606). There Jonson’s depraved, eponymous protagonist attempts to seduce the virtuous Celia in part through a miscalculated appeal to her sense of gourmandise:
The heads of parrats, tongues of nightingales,
The braines of peacoks, and of estriches
Shall be our food. (3.7.200–204)
But Jonson is a latecomer with his loathing of psittacophagy. Within two centuries of Elagabalus’ demise, his eating habits were the stuff of legend, appearing in the verse satire Against Eutropius by the late Roman poet Claudian (A.D. 370–c. 404). This is a venomous political lampoon aimed at its title character, the powerful eunuch, consul, and chamberlain of the eastern Roman emperor Arcadius, whom Claudian imagines summoning his favorites to a council of war as follows: “Their hunger is only aroused by costly meats, and they tickle their palates with foods imported from overseas, the flesh of the many-eyed fowl of Juno, or of that coloured bird brought from farthest Ind that knows how to speak” (2.328–331).
We know, from records like these, that in ancient times parrot was regarded as an upper-class delicacy like caviar, the food of only the highest stratum of Roman society. But the same records also show that even in classical Rome the practice of eating these birds suffered from a very mixed press. Psittacophagy is associated with the effete and idle rich, with jaded palates, and with something like oriental luxury. This last fact is ironic, given Aelian’s insistence that parrots were not eaten in ancient India. Elagabalus, for one, was closely connected with eastern forms of worship and culture, and for Claudian the eating of parrots seems somehow deeply un-Roman: something a degenerate eunuch would do at the court in Constantinople. This most distinctive of Roman dietary practices is already, at least for some Romans, outlandish and loathsome and beyond the pale.
So what should we make of this contradiction? The opponents of parrot-eating are perhaps easy enough to understand. They have no shortage of reasons to regard the parrot as forbidden flesh. Yet the very qualities that should have rendered it exempt from eating seem somehow to have attracted the parrot-eaters, who seized on it precisely because of its scarcity and beauty and association with foreign lands. And perhaps also because of its voice. It is as if some impulse compelled Roman society to kill and consume the very things it found miraculous.
Nor has that impulse disappeared, although it takes different forms in contemporary America. We still consume parrots, at least symbolically. A quick visit to online auctions yields mountains of parrotphernalia on sale to the highest bidder, including items depicting the macaws that have become the mascot for Corona beer. In convenience stores we can slake our thirst with cups of a fruit-slush drink called Parrot Ice. Psittacine-theme taverns and eateries range across the United States, from the Green Parrot Bar, founded in 1890 in Key West, Florida, to the Blue Parrot Restaurant in Avalon, California.
And the urge to kill remains with us too, as illustrated by the case of Chad Alvarez, a twenty-three-year-old senior at the University of Wisconsin. In May 1999, Alvarez, angry at fraternity brother Corey Greenfield for circulating an email at which he took offense, seized Greenfield’s Quaker parrot and placed it in the fraternity’s microwave oven, which he activated with sixty minutes on the timer. The bird, named Iago, exploded before other fraternity members could rescue it. According to Greenfield, the parrot had a vocabulary of about twenty words. When animal-rights activists responded to Alvarez’s deed with outrage, his attorney, Charles Giesen, declared, “Chad has never hurt anybody or anyone before in his life…. He’s a good kid” (Murphy). Two weeks earlier, Alvarez had been arrested on a charge of drunk driving, to which he had entered a plea of no contest. He also pled no contest to charges of theft and animal cruelty for cooking Iago (Chaptman).
