The phoenix, perhaps, is of more interest.  Of “that famous bird of Arabia,” PLINY writes as follows, prefixing his description of it with the cautious remark, “I am not quite sure that its existence is not all a fable.”  “It is said that there is only one in existence in the whole world, and that that one has not been seen very often.  We are told that this bird is of the size of an eagle, and has a brilliant golden plumage around the neck, while the rest of the body is of a purple colour; except the tail, which is azure, with long feathers intermingled of a roseate hue; the throat is adorned with a crest, and the head with a tuft of feathers.  The first Roman who described this bird . . . was the senator Manilius....  He tells us that no person has ever seen this bird eat, that in Arabia it is looked upon as sacred to the sun, that it lives five hundred and forty years, that when it becomes old it builds a nest of cassia and sprigs of incense, which it fills with perfumes, and then lays its body down upon them to die; that from its bones and marrow there springs at first a sort of small worm, which in time changes into a little bird; that the first thing that it does is to perform the obsequies of its predecessor, and to carry the nest entire to the city of the Sun near Panchaia, and there deposit it upon the altar of that divinity.

“The same Manilius states also, that the revolution of the great year is completed with the life of this bird, and that then a new cycle comes round again with the same characteristics as the former one, in the seasons and the appearance of the stars. . . .  This bird was brought to Rome in the censorship of the Emperor Claudius . . . and was exposed to public view....  This fact is attested by the public Annals, but there is no one that doubts that it was a fictitious phoenix only."[1]

[1] PLINY:  Natural History, bk. x. chap. ii. (BOSTOCK and RILEY’S trans., vol. ii., 1855, PP. 479-481).

The description of the plumage, etc., of this bird applies fairly well, as CUVIER has pointed out,[2] to the golden pheasant, and a specimen of the latter may have been the “fictitious phoenix” referred to above.  That this bird should have been credited with the extraordinary and wholly fabulous properties related by PLINY and others is not, however, easy to understand.  The phoenix was frequently used to illustrate the doctrine of the immortality of the soul (e.g. in CLEMENT’S First Epistle to the Corinthians), and it is not impossible that originally it was nothing more than a symbol of immortality which in time became to be believed in as a really existing bird.  The fact, however, that there was supposed to be only one phoenix, and also that the length of each of its lives coincided with what the ancients termed a “great year,” may indicate that the phoenix was a symbol of cosmological periodicity.  On the other hand, some ancient writers (e_.g_.  TACITUS, A.D. 55-120) explicitly