Pity the wryneck – a species of long-tongued woodpecker – in ancient Greece: it had the great misfortune to be considered an essential part of a sex toy. The poor bird was spread-eagled and bound to the four spokes of a wheel, which, when spun, whistled in a way thought sure to arouse desire in its recipient. We remember its fate today when we jinx people: the word jinx being derived from its Greek name, iunx.
Pity, too, the pigeon squab on a Roman farm, force fed two or three times a day and confined to a caged nest with its legs broken to ensure it couldn't be – as one contemporary vividly put it – liberated ‘from the slavery of fat'.
But if such lesser cruelties seem to carry echoes of the greater ones in the Roman arena, they are far from defining the role birds played in the lives – intellectual, practical, emotional and otherwise – of men and women in the classical world. As Jeremy Mynott shows in this superb book, birds were everywhere: on the table, of course, but also in houses, both as pets and as co-habitants in nests under the eaves; in medicine and magic; in sports and entertainments; in marking time, in military planning, in communication.
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