previous next

CHAP. 14. (12.)—CROWS. BIRDS OF ILL OMEN. AT WHAT SEASONS THEY ARE NOT INAUSPICIOUS.

Crows, again, have another kind of food. Nuts being too hard for their beak to break, the crow flies to a great height, and then lets them fall again and again upon the stones or tiles beneath, until at last the shell is cracked, after which the bird is able to open them. This is a bird with a very ill-omened garrulity, though it has been highly praised by some.1 It is observed, that from the rising of the constellation Arcturus until the arrival of the swallow, it is but rarely to be seen about the sacred groves and temples of Minerva; in some places, indeed, not at all, Athens for instance.2 In addition to these facts, it is the only one that continues to feed its young for some time after they have begun to fly. The crow is most inauspicious at the time of incubation, or, in other words, just after the summer solstice.

1 "Curse on your ill—Betiding croak." See "The Farmer's Wife and the Raven," in Gay's Fables.

2 Aristotle says, that it was never to be seen in the Acropolis or Citadel of Athens.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Latin (Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff, 1906)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

hide References (1 total)
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: