The basilisks were called kings of serpents because all other serpents and snakes, behaving like good subjects, and wisely not wishing to be burned up or struck dead, fled the moment they heard the distant hiss of their king, although they might be in full feed upon the most delicious prey, leaving the sole enjoyment of the banquet to the royal monster.

The Roman naturalist Pliny thus describes him:  “He does not impel his body, like other serpents, by a multiplied flexion, but advances lofty and upright.  He kills the shrubs, not only by contact, but by breathing on them, and splits the rocks, such power of evil is there in him.”  It was formerly believed that if killed by a spear from on horseback the power of the poison conducted through the weapon killed not only the rider, but the horse also.  To this Lucan alludes in these lines: 

   “What though the Moor the basilisk hath slain,
    And pinned him lifeless to the sandy plain,
    Up through the spear the subtle venom flies,
    The hand imbibes it, and the victor dies.”

Such a prodigy was not likely to be passed over in the legends of the saints.  Accordingly we find it recorded that a certain holy man, going to a fountain in the desert, suddenly beheld a basilisk.  He immediately raised his eyes to heaven, and with a pious appeal to the Deity laid the monster dead at his feet.

These wonderful powers of the basilisk are attested by a host of learned persons, such as Galen, Avicenna, Scaliger, and others.  Occasionally one would demur to some part of the tale while he admitted the rest.  Jonston, a learned physician, sagely remarks, “I would scarcely believe that it kills with its look, for who could have seen it and lived to tell the story?” The worthy sage was not aware that those who went to hunt the basilisk of this sort took with them a mirror, which reflected back the deadly glare upon its author, and by a kind of poetical justice slew the basilisk with his own weapon.

But what was to attack this terrible and unapproachable monster?  There is an old saying that “everything has its enemy”—­and the cockatrice quailed before the weasel.  The basilisk might look daggers, the weasel cared not, but advanced boldly to the conflict.  When bitten, the weasel retired for a moment to eat some rue, which was the only plant the basilisks could not wither, returned with renewed strength and soundness to the charge, and never left the enemy till he was stretched dead on the plain.  The monster, too, as if conscious of the irregular way in which he came into the world, was supposed to have a great antipathy to a cock; and well he might, for as soon as he heard the cock crow he expired.

The basilisk was of some use after death.  Thus we read that its carcass was suspended in the temple of Apollo, and in private houses, as a sovereign remedy against spiders, and that it was also hung up in the temple of Diana, for which reason no swallow ever dared enter the sacred place.