Phoenix

The phoenix was a legendary bird, associated above all with Egypt and the city of Heliopolis, that was said to live for centuries and then be succeeded by a new bird born from the remains of the old. Greek and Roman writers disagreed on its colour, its lifespan and even whether it burned, but all of them agreed that there was only ever one phoenix at a time.

Herodotus and the Bird of Heliopolis

The oldest detailed account is by Herodotus, who reports what the people of Heliopolis told him (Histories 2.73). He had not seen the bird himself, except in paintings. It came to Egypt only rarely, once in five hundred years, when its father died. Its plumage was partly golden and partly red, and in shape and size it was most like an eagle.

The Heliopolitans described the bird’s journey in this way: it travels from Arabia to the temple of the Sun, carrying its father encased in myrrh, and buries him there. In the telling Herodotus heard, the bird first shapes an egg of myrrh as heavy as it can carry, tests the weight, then hollows it out, places its father inside and seals the opening with more myrrh, so that the egg weighs the same as before. Herodotus adds that what they said the bird did seemed to him incredible.

The Long Life of the Phoenix

Lines attributed to Hesiod, quoted by Plutarch (On the Obsolescence of Oracles 11), use the bird as a measure of long life: a crow lives nine generations of men, a stag four times as long as a crow, a raven three times as long as a stag, and the phoenix nine times as long as a raven, while the Nymphs, daughters of Zeus, outlive ten phoenixes. Pliny the Elder (Natural History 10.2), following the senator Manilius, describes a bird the size of an eagle with a golden neck, a purple body and a blue tail set with rose-coloured feathers, and gives it a life of 540 years. In this account the old bird, sacred to the Sun in Arabia, builds a nest of cassia and sprigs of incense and dies upon it; from its marrow a small worm grows that becomes the new bird, whose first act is to carry the whole nest to the city of the Sun and lay it on the altar there. Tacitus (Annals 6.28), recording a reported appearance of the bird in Egypt in the reign of Tiberius, says that most authorities gave its cycle as five hundred years, though some claimed 1,461; in his version too the young bird, once grown, carries its father’s body with a load of myrrh to the altar of the Sun. The old figure of “over 1400 years” that was sometimes repeated for the phoenix comes from this longer reckoning.

The Rebirth in Ovid

By the time of Ovid the story had changed. In the Metamorphoses (15.391–407) there is one bird, which the Assyrians call the phoenix, that lives for five hundred years and does not feed on grain or herbs but on drops of frankincense and the juice of amomum. At the end of its life it builds a nest in the top of a swaying palm, fills it with cassia, spikenard, cinnamon and myrrh, lies down on it and dies among the perfumes. From the body of its father a new phoenix is born, destined to live as long. When it is strong enough, it lifts the nest, which is both its cradle and its father’s tomb, and carries it to the city of Hyperion, the Sun, where it lays it before the doors of the temple.

Ovid does not say that the bird is burned. In his version death and birth are both natural, and the nest of spices is the link between one phoenix and the next.

Fire and Other Details

Later writers add other features. Claudian, in his short poem The Phoenix, describes a bird that lives a thousand years, with legs of Tyrian purple and wings of flower-like blue dappled with gold. When its time comes it builds a pyre of dry herbs and the precious wood of Saba, and the fire that consumes it also gives birth to the new bird, which then carries its father’s remains to the temple of the Sun in Egypt. This is the origin of the better-known image of a bird that rises from its own ashes. Philostratus, in his Life of Apollonius (3.49), says that the phoenix visits Egypt every five hundred years, that it shines like gold and resembles an eagle in size and appearance, and that it builds its nest from spices near the springs of the Nile.

The ancient writers therefore do not agree on the length of its life or the colour of its feathers. Herodotus gives gold and red, Pliny gold, purple and blue, Claudian purple and blue with gold; Ovid gives no colour at all. A lifespan of 500 years is the figure in Herodotus, Ovid, Tacitus and Philostratus; Pliny says 540, Claudian a thousand.

Where the Bird Belongs

The phoenix is not strictly a creature of Greek myth. It comes from Egyptian and Arabian lore, as Herodotus received it at Heliopolis, the city of the Sun, and the Greek and Roman accounts keep the connection with the Sun in the destination of the bird’s journey. In every account there is one phoenix at a time, and its life is a cycle of centuries rather than a single event.

See Also: Helios, Hyperion, Sun