and while its tongue is tender so that it might be taught to echo; but an old bird, when captured, is intractable and forgetful. In truth, a parrot is more easily brought to learn human speech when it eats nuts and when its feet, like those of a man, bear five little toes. For that is not a characteristic of all parrots, but it is proper to all of them to have a broader tongue than other birds, and they pronounce human words with their more open plectrum and palate. Indeed, what the parrot has learned, it sings, or rather speaks, so similarly to us that if you were to hear its voice, you would think it a person. On the other hand, if you were to hear a crow, it would approximate, not speak, the words. Yet both the crow and the parrot say nothing more than what they have learned. If you teach it to curse, it will curse by day and by night, making a great clamor with its railing; this is a song to it, and it thinks it is singing. When it has run through all the curses it has learned, then it starts the song all over again. If you want it not to speak, its tongue must be cut out, or it must be sent back to its forests as soon as possible. (12; my translation)
To my mind, this is the best description of parrots to survive from ancient times, and it corrects a certain amount of the misinformation that precedes it. For instance, although Apuleius, like Pliny, maintains that parrots must be beaten while learning to talk, he nonetheless connects their acquisition of language more realistically to positive reinforcement with food. Also, he notes the dramatic difference between language acquisition in young parrots and in older specimens that have matured in the wild—a difference of which neither Aristotle nor Pliny seems aware. Moreover, his allusion to the raucous and repetitive character of parrot chatter, now detached from rumors of avian alcoholism, suggests familiarity. Still, Apuleius’ fondness for parrots with five toes betrays an innocence of the birds’ anatomy, there being no such thing as a five-toed parrot; however, a five-toed parrot is more like a human being than is a four-toed parrot, so it might stand to reason that the former would have a better command of human speech. And as a general rule, Apuleius follows Aristotle and Pliny in presenting the birds from an anthropomorphic viewpoint. In repeating Pliny’s remarks about parrot-training, he draws a direct connection between the beating of animals and the beating of schoolchildren, and in echoing Pliny’s description of the colorful band that encircles the necks of most Indian parrot-species, Apuleius depicts this marking both as a collar and as a crown. This last point comes as a surprise in a passage that generally follows Aristotle and Pliny by presenting parrots as inferior and subordinate creatures. It suggests a second vein of classical nature-writing on parrots, to which I will turn in a moment. As for Solinus’ later work, it combines Pliny’s observations with those of Apuleius, adding that the birds’ articulateness “made the Romaines to have so much pleasure and delight in [them], that the barbarous people made a merchandise of their Poppinieyes” (sig. 2E1v).
In Aristotle, Pliny, and their followers, we can see the beginnings of a western tendency to treat parrots not just as a material but also as a conceptual resource. They prove valuable, in other words, not only because of their rarity, but because they exemplify both nature’s subservience to culture and the subservience of certain social groups (slaves, women, the poor, barbaric foreigners, etc.) to others. Submitting as it does to human rule, echoing the “Hail, Caesar!” of the governed, the parrot seems to provide a basis in nature for the acquiescence of social inferiors to their so-called betters. This acquiescence, in turn, helps explain the literary impulse to trivialize and denigrate the very qualities that rendered parrots marvelous and valuable in the first place.
Alongside this impulse, however, there also persists a fascination with the beauty, rarity, and exoticism of parrots, which leads some authors to associate these birds not with the low and the commonplace, but rather with the exalted and the sacred.
This tendency originates in the very first surviving reference to parrots by a western author, predating Aristotle by roughly fifty years. Sometime after 398 B.C., Ktesias of Cnidus, who had just returned to his home in Greece after seventeen years as a physician to the king of Persia, composed a geographical account of India which now survives only in an abstract made by Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, in the late ninth century A.D. This brief narrative is full of fabulous, incredible material, among which Ktesias mentions “the kind of bird called the parrot … : it has a tongue and voice like the human, is of the size of a hawk, has a red bill, is adorned with a beard of a black colour, while the neck is red like cinnabar, it talks like a man in Indian, but if taught Greek can talk in Greek also” (1.3). Ktesias was describing a bird the Greeks hadn’t yet generally seen, and given the fantastic content of his work, it may have been easy to dismiss his report out of hand. Yet he seems to be referring to a species of parrot otherwise unreported by classical authors: the blossom-headed parakeet (Psittacula roseata), whose neck and entire head are a deep and pleasing violet. In any case, Ktesias describes a bird that does not mimic but instead “talks like a man,” and he thus gives later authors a precedent for viewing parrots not as minions or toys but as marvels, worthy of wonder and even veneration.
On this point, his attitude opposes the tradition of nature-writing descending from Aristotle and Pliny, and the Greek historian/philosopher Plutarch (A.D. 45–125), for one, clearly understands as much. In his massive and influential Moralia appear two essays, entitled “Beasts Are Rational” and “Whether Land or Sea Animals Are Cleverer,” which together make an unusual case for displaying respect to the creatures of the natural world. There Plutarch claims that beasts reason, that they teach their young as humans do, and that they are capable of personal attachments and loyalties. Then, taking dead aim at Aristotle’s insistence that the “power [of speech] is peculiar to man” (History of Animals 536b.1–2), he adds that
as for starlings and crows and parrots which learn to talk and afford their teachers so malleable and imitative a vocal current to train and discipline, they seem to me to be champions and advocates of the other animals in their ability to learn, instructing us in some measure that they too are endowed both with rational utterance and with articulate voice; for which reason it is quite ridiculous to admit a comparison of them with creatures who have not enough voice even to howl or groan. (972f-973a)
Plutarch’s reading of avian mimicry stands in sharp contrast to other treatments of the subject and draws attention to the uncertain meaning of such behavior. For Aristotle, Pliny, and Apuleius it emerges as a marker of difference, demonstrating how short all birds fall of possessing full human consciousness. Hence Apuleius stresses the mindless and repetitive character of parrot chatter, while Aristotle and Pliny describe it as a kind of verbal license and associate it with strong drink. In each of these cases, psittacine mimicry figures as an index of mindlessness; what matters most is not the similarity of parrot speech to human language, but the intellectual difference that underlies the two. But for Plutarch, as for Ktesias before him, the speech of birds suggests their abiding affinity with humankind. They remind us of humanity’s intimate connection to the surrounding world even as they lay claim to their own peculiar dignity.
In similar spirit, Aelian’s On the Characteristics of Animals (c. A.D. 200) associates parrots with the marvels of eastern royalty and spirituality. Aelian remarks that
in the royal residences in India where the greatest of the kings of that country lives, there are so many objects for admiration that neither Memnon’s city of Susa with all its extravagance, nor the magnificence of Ecbatana is to be compared with them…. The remaining splendours it is not the purpose of this narrative to detail; but in the parks tame peacocks and pheasants are kept, and they live in the cultivated shrubs to which the royal gardeners pay due attention…. There too Parrots are kept and crowd around the king. But no Indian eats a Parrot in spite of their great numbers, the reason being that the Brahmins regard them as sacred and even place them above all other birds. And they add that they are justified in so doing, for the Parrot is the only bird that gives the most convincing imitation of human speech. (13.18)
In its way, this description proves as influential among later writers as do those of Aristotle and Pliny. Among other things, its association of parrots with royal opulence and its treatment of them as objects of religious veneration find unexpected parallels in the Middle Ages. Although
