Parrot Culture. Bruce Thomas Boehrer

a complex geometrical pattern enclosing a series of illustrations that relate to the worship of the god Dionysus: musical instruments and theater masks reflecting the god’s status as patron of music and the drama; bunches of grapes referring to his invention of wine; and so forth. Among these images there appears a pair of rose-ringed parakeets harnessed to a miniature cart loaded with farm implements (Figure 2). The farm tools are a seasonal reference; other birds appear on the mosaic as emblems of autumn, winter, and spring, and the parrots in their turn represent summer. But they also illustrate the tradition that Dionysus himself visited, and in some accounts conquered and governed, India. This tale was influential enough to prompt Alexander, during his own invasion of India, to seek out a local shrine that he believed to have been dedicated to the god (Arrian 5.2.5–7), and the parrots on the Dionysus Mosaic serve as reminders of this geographical association.

      Yet at the same time that this mosaic associates parrots with the pagan gods, it also transforms them into toys, harnessed like draft animals to a diminutive wagon. This motif of birds in harness is a fairly common one in Roman visual art: a “jeu d’esprit” (Toynbee 280) that Roman painters and their audiences seem to have found oddly engaging. For instance, another such image survives in which a parrot pulls a chariot guided by a grasshopper.⁵ In illustrations of this sort we see parrots taking their place, very early on, in the cultural province of the Cute, where they have remained, to one extent or another, ever since.

      Less cute—but just as enduring—is the use ancient satirists made of the birds. Where patronage poets like Crinagoras and Martial employed them to flatter the powerful, writers of social invective used them to denounce the contemptible, thus paving the way for centuries of parrot-insults to come. Perhaps the earliest pioneer in this vein was the Greek Callimachus (fl. 280–240 B.C.), who employed an otherwise-lost fable of Aesop’s as mordant social commentary:

      Just is Zeus, yet unjust was his ruling when he deprived the animals of their speech, and—as though we were not in a position to give part of our voice to others—[diverted it], to the race of men [defective in this way?]. Eudemos, therefore, has a dog’s voice, and Philton a donkey’s, [the orators] that of a parrot, and the tragedians have a voice like the dwellers in the sea. And for this cause, Andronicus, all men have become loquacious and wordy. Aesop of Sardis told this, whom the Delphians did not receive well when he recited his tale. (Iambus 2.4–17)

      Even in the fragmentary form in which it has survived, one can see why this tale might have displeased the Delphians. It introduces, for perhaps the first time in European history, the enduring tendency to compare mindless chatter to the mimicry of a parrot. And at the same time, it also implements a startling (and perhaps even more insulting) reversal of roles. The parrot’s chatter, which early nature writers like Pliny and Apuleius present as an imperfect imitation of human speech, reemerges here as an object of human imitation. As a result, the rhetoricians of ancient Alexandria—as famed in their day for babbling nonsense as are certain politicians in our own—function as a cheap copy of the animal world. Nature is more cultured than culture.

      Such patterns of association seem to have caught on quickly in ancient satire. As a result, by A.D. 62 the poet Persius poses a question that has already become rhetorical:

      I have not bathed my lips in the horse’s spring, Helicon, nor do I recall dreaming on two-headed Parnassus in order to spring up so suddenly as a poet…. Who instructed the parrot to say hello, and who taught the magpie to attempt our language? That master of arts and patron of ingenuity, the belly, an expert at mimicking the voices denied to him. Because of him, if any hope of deceitful money glittered, you would think that crow-poets and magpie-poetesses warbled Pegasean nectar. (Prologue 1–3, 8–14)

      Yet Persius, unlike Callimachus, seems to view himself as a parrot and the objects of his scorn as crows and magpies. His is a literary world afflicted with the defects of the patronage system, in which legions of aspiring poetasters give vent to verbal excess in the name of inspiration. Indeed, some of that excess finds its way cleverly into Persius’ own poem, which mockingly coins inflated poetic phrases like “the horse’s spring” (“fonte Caballino,” for Helicon), “two-headed Parnassus,” and “Pegasean nectar.” Such stuff, the poem implies, is the province of lesser talents: imperfect imitators who are to Persius what crows and magpies are to the parrot. As for the inspiration to which they lay claim, it’s obvious nonsense, and it marks the bad poets indelibly as such: writers whose sense of reality is as defective as their sense of diction. Persius himself, on the other hand, emerges as the dominant figure of his poem not only because of his ability as a mimic, but because his motivation for writing is so refreshingly parrot-like. When set against grandiose vaporizings about poetic afflatus and Pegasean nectar, his cheerful claim that “I’m only in this for the money” provides not just a much-needed dose of realism, but a genuine ethical improvement.

      But among classical writers, it is Ovid (43 B.C.–A.D. 18) whose satirical use of parrots proves most outrageous and enduring. This use occurs in the sixth poem of book 2 of his Amores: a sixty-two-line elegy for the death of his girlfriend’s rose-ringed parakeet. Beginning the exercise in a heroic vein, Ovid summons all feathered creatures to join in the obsequies for Corinna’s pet:

      Parrot, winged mimic from the dawn-lands of India, has died: come in flocks, ye birds, to his funeral. Come, pious poultry, and beat your breasts with your wings, and rend your tender cheeks with the unyielding claw…. As for the Ismarian tyrant’s crime, which you, Philomela, lament, that same lament has been satisfied in its own time; turn now to the sad last rites of a rare bird. Your cause of grief for Itys is great, but it is ancient history. (2.6.1–4, 7–10; my translation)

      Both Ovid’s occasion and his tone here suggest mockery. Certainly—to compare early things with late—that is how the same subject matter functions in Evelyn Waugh’s gleeful trashing of all things American, The Loved One (1948). Waugh’s protagonist, the English expatriate Dennis Barlow, embraces a career as a pet undertaker in Los Angeles, which career culminates in a parrot funeral reminiscent of Ovid’s elegy: “Mr. Joyboy would have an open casket. I advised against it and, after all, I know. I’ve studied the business. An open casket is all right for dogs and cats who lie down and curl up naturally. But parrots don’t. They look absurd with a head on a pillow. But I came up against a blank wall of snobbery” (140). Waugh’s humor arises from the discordant juxtaposition of human obsequies with pet care, and this is what Ovid offers us as well, two thousand years earlier.

      Moreover Ovid—like Persius with his Pegasean nectar—is clearly engaged in literary parody. And in Ovid’s case, the literary victim has a name. By composing a dirge for the death of his beloved Lesbia’s pet sparrow, Catullus (c. 58–55 B.C.) influenced generations of Roman love-poets to come with his tender evocation of intimate feelings: “Lament, o Venuses and cupids, and whoever is most charming among men. My girlfriend’s sparrow is dead, that sparrow, my girlfriend’s delight, whom she loved more than her eyes…. It now travels by an obscure way to that place from which no one knows how to return” (3.1–5, 11–12; my translation). This kind of tremulous emotion, however, could not have been farther from Ovid’s approach to love and sex. Where Catullus and his imitators leave the reader “convinced of the sincerity and the seriousness of their love and their bitterness at finding that [its] fulfillment is impossible” (Du Quesnay 7), Ovid seems to relish the role of the lover, which he presents not as an emotional abyss but as a game of seduction. Against this background his grief for Corinna’s parrot sounds derisive rather than genuine, marking the distance between his experience and his predecessors’ innocence. For instance, Ovid’s language is a little too grandiose, a little too exaggerated, for the sentiments it conveys. Catullus keeps his verses strictly in the personal register, describing Lesbia’s feelings for her sparrow and recalling her behavior with it in intimate detail: “For it was sweet as honey and knew her as well as a girl knows her mother, nor would it move from her bosom, but hopping about this way and that it would chirp to its mistress alone” (3.6–10). Ovid, by contrast, presents the loss of Corinna’s parrot as an event of epic magnitude, grander than Philomela’s rape or Procne’s murder of her own son, Itys. (Likewise, he compares the bird’s proverbial friendship with the turtle-dove to Pylades’ friendship