as a painter before 399 B.C. Seneca relates a tale that Parrhasius bought one of the Olynthians whom Philip sold into slavery, 346 B.C., and tortured him in order to have a model for his picture of Prometheus; but the story, which is similar to one told of Michelangelo, is chronologically impossible. Another tale recorded of him describes his contest with Zeuxis. The latter painted some grapes so perfectly that birds came to peck at them. He then called on Parrhasius to draw aside the curtain and show his picture, but, finding that his rival's picture was the curtain itself, he acknowledged himself to be surpassed, for Zeuxis had deceived birds, but Parrhasius had deceived Zeuxis. He was universally placed in the very first rank among painters. His skillful drawing of outlines is especially praised, and many of his drawings on wood and parchment were preserved and highly valued by later painters for purposes of study. He first attained skill in making his figures appear to stand out from the background. His picture of Theseus adorned the Capitol in Rome. His other works, besides the obscene subjects with which he is said to have amused his leisure, are chiefly mythological groups. A picture of the Demos, the personified People of Athens, is famous; according to the story, which is probably based upon epigrams, the twelve prominent characteristics of the people, though apparently quite inconsistent with each other, were distinctly expressed in this figure.
PARRICIDE (probably for Lat. patricidia, from pater, father, and cacdere, to slay), strictly the murder of a parent; the term however has been extended to include the murder of any relative or of an ascendant by a descendant. The first Roman law against parricide was that of the Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis (c. 81 B.C.), which enacted that the murderer of a parent should be sewed up in a sack and thrown into the sea, and provided other punishments for the killing of near relatives. The Lex Pompeia de parricidiis (52 B.C.) re-enacted the principal provisions of the Lex Cornelia and defined parricide as the deliberate and wrongful slaying of ascendants, husbands, wives, cousins, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, stepfathers and mothers, fathers and mothers-in-law, patrons and descendants. For the murder of a father, mother, grandfather or grandmother, the Lex Pompeia ordained that the guilty person should be whipped till he bled, sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper and an ape, and thrown into the sea. Failing water, he was either to be torn in pieces by wild beasts or burned.
English law has never made any legal distinction between killing a parent or other relative and simple murder, and the Netherlands and Germany follow in the same direction. French law has been exceptionally severe in its treatment of parricide. Before the Revolution, the parricide if a male, had to make a recantation of his crime, and then suffered the loss of his right hand; his body was afterwards burned and the ashes scattered to the winds. If the parricide was a female she was burned or hanged. After the Revolution the penalty became simply one of death, but the compilers of the penal code adjudged this insufficient and reintroduced some of the previous provisions: the parricide was brought to the place of execution clad in a shirt, bare-footed, and the head enveloped in a black veil. While he was exposed on the scaffold, an officer read aloud the decree of condemnation; the culprit then had his right hand cut off, and was immediately afterwards executed. On the revision of the penal code in 1832 the cutting off of the right hand was omitted, but the other details remained. Other continental European countries, following the example of France, treat the crime of parricide with exceptional severity.
PARROT (according to Skeat, from Fr. Perrot or Pierrot, the diminutive of the proper name Pierre[1]), the name given generally to a large and very natural group of birds, which for more than a score of centuries have attracted attention, not only from their gaudy plumage, but, at first and chiefly, it would seem, from the readiness with which many of them learn to imitate the sounds they hear, repeating the words and even phrases of human speech with a fidelity that is often astonishing. It is said that no representation of any parrot appears in Egyptian art, nor does any reference to a bird of the kind occur in the Bible, whence it has been concluded that neither painters nor writers had any knowledge of it. Aristotle is commonly supposed to be the first author who mentions a parrot; but this is an error, for nearly a century earlier Ctesias in his Indica (cap. 3),[2] under the name of βίττακος (Bittacus), so neatly described a bird which could speak an “Indian” language—naturally, as he seems to have thought—or Greek—if it had been taught so to do—about as big as a sparrow-hawk (Hierax), with a purple face and a black beard, otherwise blue-green (cyaneus) and vermilion in colour, so that there cannot be much risk in declaring that he must have had before him a male example of what is now commonly known as the Blossom-headed parakeet, and to ornithologists as Palaeornis cyanocephalus, an inhabitant of many parts of India. After Ctesias comes Aristotle's ψιττάκη {Psittace), which Sundevall supposes him to have described only from hearsay. There can be no doubt that the Indian conquests of Alexander were the means of making the parrot better known in Europe, and it is in reference to this fact that another Eastern species of Palaeornis now bears the name of P. alexandri, though from the localities it inhabits it could hardly have had anything to do with the Macedonian hero. That Africa had parrots does not seem to have been discovered by the ancients till long after, as Pliny tells us (vi. 29) that they were first met with beyond the limits of Upper Egypt by explorers employed by Nero. These birds, highly prized from the first, reprobated by the moralist, and celebrated by more than one classical poet, in the course of time were brought in great numbers to Rome, and ministered in various ways to the luxury of the age. Not only were they lodged in cages of tortoise-shell and ivory, with silver wires, but they were professedly esteemed as delicacies for the table, and one emperor is said to have fed his lions upon them! With the decline of the Roman Empire the demand for parrots in Europe lessened, and so the supply dwindled, yet all knowledge of them was not wholly lost, and they are occasionally mentioned by one writer or another until in the 15th century began that career of geographical discovery which has since proceeded uninterruptedly. This immediately brought with it the knowledge of many more forms of these birds than had ever before been seen. Yet so numerous is the group that even now new species of parrots are not uncommonly recognized.
The home of the vast majority of parrot-forms is unquestionably within the tropics, but the popular belief that parrots are tropical birds only is a great mistake. In North America the Carolina parakeet, Conurus carolinensis, at the beginning of the 19th century used to range in summer as high as the shores of lakes Erie and Ontario—a latitude equal to the south of France; and even much later it reached, according to trustworthy information, the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi, though now its limits have been so much curtailed that its occurrence in any but the Gulf States is doubtful. In South America, at least four species are found in Chile or the La Plata region, and one, Conurus patagonus, is pretty common on the bleak coast of the Strait of Magellan. In Africa it is true that no species is known to extend to within some ten degrees of the tropic of Cancer; but Pionias robustus inhabits territories
- ↑ “Parakeet” (in Shakespeare, 1 Hen. IV. ii. 3, 88, “Paraquito”) is said by the same authority to be from the Spanish Periquito or Perroqueto, a small Parrot, diminutive of Perico, a Parrot, which again may be a diminutive from Pedro, the proper name. Parakeet (spelt in various ways in English) is usually applied to the smaller kinds of Parrots, especially those which have long tails, not as Perroquet in French, which is used as a general term for all Parrots, Perruche, or sometimes Perriche, being the ordinary name for what we call Parakeet. The old English “Popinjay” and the old French Papegaut have almost passed out of use, but the German Papagei and Italian Papagaio still continue in vogue. These names can be traced to the Arabic Babagbā; but the source of that word is unknown. The Anglo-Saxon name of the Parret, a river in Somerset, is Pedreda or Pedrida, which at first sight looks as if it had to do with the proper name, Petrus; but Skeat believes there is no connexion between them—the latter portion of the word being rið, a stream.
- ↑ The passage seems to have escaped the notice of all naturalists except W. J. Broderip, who mentioned it in his article “Psittacidae,” in the Penny Cyclopaedia (xix. 83).
