Swan Songs
Author(s): W. Geoffrey Arnott
Source: Greece & Rome, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Oct., 1977), pp. 149-153
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/642700
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SWAN SONGS
By W. GEOFFREY ARNOTT
The silver Swan who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
'Farewell all joys, O death come close my eyes,
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.'
(Anon,, set to music by Orlando Gibbons)
The legend of the dying swan's melancholy song is given its first
expression in extant Greek literature by Aeschylus in 458 B.C.
it has obsessed poets, commentators, and natural historians ever
since. Poets like Tennyson may sing of the dying swan's 'music
strange and manifold', unaffected by the scoffing doubts express
by ancient scientists and modern editors of classical texts. But do
dying swans really 'sing'? The answer has been known now for ov
a century and a half, and is mentioned briefly in one or two wor
on ancient zoology such as C. J. Sundevall's Die Thierarten des
Aristoteles (Stockholm, 1863), p. 152, and 0. Keller's Die anti
Tierwelt (Leipzig, 1913; reprinted 1963), ii.215. English comm
tators on ancient texts and D'Arcy Thompson's standard Gloss
of Greek Birds (second edition, London and Oxford, 1936;
reprinted 1966), however, tend either to neglect or unscientifical
to dismiss the correct explanation.' For this reason a restateme
of the facts both ancient and modern seems advisable.
First, the legend itself. It appears first in Aeschylus' Agamemnon
1444 f., where Clytemnestra compares to a swan the now dead
Cassandra who has 'sung her last fatal lament'. In Plato's Phaedo
84 e-85 a Socrates is made to say that although swans sing in earlier
life, they never do this so much or so beautifully as at the approach
of death. Thereafter the legend quickly became a literary commonplace.2
The author of the tenth book of the History of Animals
attributed to Aristotle confirmed what Plato had written and added
that 'dying swans in fact fly out into the open sea, and people sailing
along the Libyan coast have come across many swans singing
with a mournful voice, and they could see that several of them
were dying' (615b 2-5). By the third century B.C. the phrase 'to
sing one's swan song' had already become a proverb (Chrysippus
in Athenaeus, 14.616 b; cf. Polybius, 30.4.7 and 31.12.1, and the
paroemiographers). Most of the classical references to the legend
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150 SWAN SONGS
add little or nothing to the
Aristotelian corpus. In the
Artemidorus introduced a
with later poets (witness th
beginning of this paper): th
until the approach of deat
Some ancient writers, of c
legend, thereby revealing a
reliance on their own powe
Alexander of Myndos, of w
century A.D. only a few fr
careful and accurate observ
to point out the field mark
(Athenaeus, 9. 392 c) and s
legend of the dying swan
followed many dying birds
the elder, who was a conte
the legend as false, on the
that he or others had pres
half later Aelian qualifies o
Hist. 1.14) with a defensive
himself had never heard a s
has either.'
Which view is correct: that of the believers, like Plato and the
Aristotelian corpus, or that of the sceptics, like Alexander of
Myndos and Pliny? Before this question is, I trust, conclusively
answered, it will be useful first to see it in its correct historical
and geographical context, so far as the limitations on our information
allow us to do so. To this end several points of varying
degrees of importance need to be made.
The first point is one depressingly true for many species of
Greek birds. The recent draining of many wetland habitats has led
to a substantial decline in the numbers of swans to be seen in
Greece. At the same time there is no evidence that the patterns of
swan behaviour in ancient Greece differed in any vital way from
that of their modern descendants. The same two species of swan
are still to be found. These are (1) the mute swan (Cygnus olor),
which today breeds as a wild bird only in Eastern Thrace but as
recently as the beginning of this century was reported to breed
as far south as Attica and Euboea; elsewhere in Greece and the
islands it may occasionally be seen on passage and as a winter
visitor. The other species is (2) the whooper swan (C. cygnus),
which in most years is an uncommon passage migrant and a
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SWAN SONGS 151
winter visitor, although in
influx may be quite sizeab
Although the references t
indicate that they were see
than they are in Greece tod
familiar to-say-the averag
are to the average modern
accustomed as he is to seein
surface of urban park lakes
gotten that the domesticat
certainty only to the tenth
may have attempted it. In
mute swan was always a tot
casual observer.4
This relative unfamiliarity with swans at close quarters may help
to account for occasional startling errors over simple details of
description. Euripides, for example, at Ion 163 gives his swan a
'bright red foot'. Even Samuel Johnson, whose references to birds
are often as inaccurate as they are dogmatic, got this fact right,
noting the 'black feet' of cygnets.5 But Johnson was describing
domesticated birds in the menagerie at Versailles; Euripides
presumably lacked an equivalent opportunity.
Either because of this relative unfamiliarity, or because the
distinctions in appearance and behaviour between the mute swan
and the whooper seemed to the ancient world to be of no significance,
no Greek or Roman writer ever differentiated between the
two species. Any modern bird-watcher can easily list the major
points of distinction: shape and coloration of bill, the cant of the
neck when the swans are swimming, the noises made by the two
species. The mute swan, as its name indicates, is normally silent,
but when breeding it can produce a variety of snorts and hisses.
A shriller note, which can be loud and resonant, has occasionally
been heard from truly wild (as opposed to semi-domesticated)
mute swans in the breeding season. In flight, however, the powerful
wing-beats of the mute swan produce a loud musical throb
which I myself have heard clearly at a distance of 600 yards, and
which is alleged to be audible for up to a mile. The whooper swan,
on the other hand, calls both on land and in flight with a long
bugle-like note, the second syllable higher pitched than the first,
repeated several times in succession. The musicality of this note
is a matter of opinion; one authority has compared it to 'silver
bells', another to the sound of 'a clarionet when blown by a
novice in music.'6 The wing-beats of the whooper in flight, however,
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152 SWAN SONGS
lack the resonance of the
swish common to many la
The total failure by ancie
two species of swan accoun
versy in their description
swan's loud or musical voic
in mind. This is sometime
addition of a diagnostic fe
singing or calling in fligh
314 ff.; Virgil, Aen. 7.700
complain that swans 'croa
ravens and jackdaws are
or produce a proverb that
(Gregory Naz. Epist. 114;
their experiences equally c
the mute swan. Aristoph
word for his description o
flight (Av. 769 ff.), but h
in the same bird the whoo
So much for the music of
mute swan dies just as it l
the mute, has a remarkabl
breastbone;" and when it d
collapsing lungs produces
quite slowly'.9 In modern
was first attested by the
at the beginning of the ni
recently observed also in o
convoluted tracheae. The
once shot a whistling swa
subspecies of the Eurasia
of Natural History, 'and
to hear a plaintive and mu
lasted until the bird reached the water.'1
Legends relating to natural history can sometimes be shown to
have grown out of-and embroidered-a single observation of a
phenomenon. Is it legitimate therefore to guess that one Greek
hunter, at an indefinable time before Aeschylus wrote his Agamemnon,
succeeded in shooting a whooper swan, and described to his doubtless
unbelieving fellows the melancholy music that came from the dying
bird's trachea? Perhaps so, perhaps not; but in either event one
pleasant irony remains. Plato's account of the legend at Phaedo 84
e-85 a, which has been pilloried as a fanciful fiction by most
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SWAN SONGS 153
scholars from Pliny and Alex
right up to the present day (
an audacious invention of 'G
out to be precisely accurate i
NOTES
1. Thompson's Glossary, s.v. KYKNOL includes in its entry a useful bibliogr
references to the legend in ancient authors and of more modern discussions from
sixteenth century onwards. Cf. also Erasmus, Adagia 1.2.54 and 3.3.97; H. O. L
Zoologie der alten Griechen und R6mer (Gotha, 1856), pp. 384 ff.-a work of re
able achievement for its time; Gossen in RE s.v. Schwan, 782 ff.; N. Douglas, B
Beasts of the Greek Anthology (London, 1928), pp. 106 ff., J. Andre Les Nom
d 'oiseaux en latin (Paris, 1967), s.v. cygnus, olor. Discussions about swans and t
songs in modern commentaries of classical authors are legion; I have found the f
most useful: Allen, Halliday, Sikes on Hornm. Hymn to Apollo 21.1; Page on Alcm
The Partheneion 100 f., Wilamowitz on Eur. Heracles 110.
2. e.g. Aelian, N.A. 2.32. 5.34, 10.36; [Aesop], Fab. 247 and 277 Hausrath, Dionysius,
De Aucupio 2.20; [Moschus], Ep. Bion. 14 ff.; Oppian, Cyn. 2.548; Plutarch, Mor. 161 c;
Cicero, De Oratore 3.2.6, Tusc Disp 1.30.73; Martial, 13.77; Ovid, Met. 14. 429 f., Her.
7.1 f. Seneca, Phaedra 302; Statius, Silv. 2.4.10.
3. 0. Reiser, Ornis balcanica iii. Griechenland und die griechischen Inseln (Vienna,
1905), pp. 492 f.; A. Kanellis and others, Catalogus Faunae Graeciae, pars ii: Aves
(Thessaloniki, 1969), p. 35. Orn. Soc. Turkey, Bird Report 1970-73, p. 45.
4. Domesticated stock was not in fact introduced into Greece until 1967 (Kanellis,
loc. cit.).
5. Boswell's Life, on 22 Oct. 1775.
6. P. Pallas, Zoographia rossico-asiatica (St. Petersburg, 1811), ii.212 ff.; and T. Bewick
History of British Birds6 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1826), ii.268; respectively.
7. As do also the Homeric Hymn to Apollo 21.1 ff. (on which see the Allen-HallidaySikes
commentary), and Virgil Aen 1.393 ff. References to the music of the mute swan's
wings alone, without any alleged vocal accompaniment, can be found in Pratinas, fr. 1.5
Bergk, and Anacreontea, 60A Edmonds; cf. Philostratus, Imag. 1.9.
8. Cf. especially P. A. Johnsgard, Waterfowl, Their Biology and Natural History
(Lincoln, Nebr., 1968), pp. 31 f., and Handbook of Waterfowl Behaviour (London,
1965), p. 25.
9. H. F. Witherby and others, Handbook of British Birds (London, 1940) iii.169.
10. Loc. cit. in n. 6 above.
11. Cf. S. B. Wilmore, Swans of the World (Newton Abbot and London, 1974), p
129 f., from whom this quotation is taken.
12. Cited by Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudoxia Epidemica iii.27.
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