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three together. In the course of the protracted journey which they had then to undergo, the old people succumhed to fatigue and died, and the boy showed them no light regard, but huried them in himself, having cut off his head with a sword. Then, as the Brachmanes tell us, the all-seeing sun, in admiration of this surpassing act of piety, transformed the boy into a bird which is most beautiful to behold, and which lives to a very advanced age. So on his head there grew up a crest which was, as it were, a memorial of what he had done at the time of his flight. The Athenians have also related, in a fable, marvels somewhat similar of the crested lark; and this fable Aristophanes, the comic poet, appears to me to have followed when he says in the Birds, "For thou wert ignorant, and not always bustling, nor always thumbing Æsop, who spake of the crested lark, calling it the first of all birds, born before ever the earth was; and telling how afterwards her father became sick and died, and how that, as the earth did not then exist, he lay unburied till the fifth day, when his daughter, unable to find a grave elsewhere, dug one for him in her own head."[1]
- ↑ Lines 470-75:—
"You're such a dull incurious lot, unread in Æsop's lore,
Whose story says the lark was born first of the feathered quire,
Before the earth; then came a cold and carried off his sire:
Earth was not: five days lay the old bird untombed: at last the son
Buried the father in his head, since other grave was none."Dr. Kennedy's translation.
