Nor does Ovid simply inflate Catullus’ diction. He also exaggerates the structure of his poem so that where Catullus offers a delicate eighteen-line lyric, Ovid responds with a full-scale formal elegy. This extends from a call to the proper mourners (“Come, pious poultry”), through an outburst against divine injustice (“The best things are often carried off by greedy hands” [2.6.39]), to a death-bed (death-perch?) scene in which the expiring bird, sensing that its hour is at hand (or at wing?), squawks out a desolate “Corinna, farewell!” (2.6.48). This moment of high bathos, in turn, gives way to a formal consolation in which the parrot finds its place in Elysium, within “a grove of black ilex” (2.6.49) designated as “the good birds’ home” (2.6.51). As the classicist John Ferguson has remarked of Ovid’s poem, “the whole thing is amusing and utterly unfeeling” (353). It’s also brilliantly pitched, employing the death of a natural mimic as the occasion for a barbed exercise in literary mimicry.
Even so, Ovid handles his subject so deftly as to leave many readers doubtful of his insincerity. Even a near-contemporary of Ovid seems to have taken his poem quite seriously. I refer in this case to the poet Statius (c. A.D. 40–96), who produced his own parrot-elegy (Silvae 2.4) in obvious (but to my mind misguided) imitation of the master. Silvae 2.4 bewails the demise of a parrot belonging to Statius’ patron Atedius Melior, and this shift away from parody turns his poem into a fawning thing. Yet his obsequiousness extends still further, for the poem is not just a token of respect to Statius’ patron, but also, in a way, an act of literary ancestor-worship. Imitating Ovid as he does, Statius abandons the attitude of irreverence essential to satire, and he replaces it with a bookish kind of bowing and scraping:
Flock hither all ye scholar fowl, to whom Nature has given the noble privilege of speech; let the bird of Phoebus [the raven] beat his breast, and the starling, that repeats by heart the sayings it has heard, and magpies transformed in the Aonian contest [the maidens who challenged the Muses and were turned into magpies], and the partridge, that joins and reiterates the words it echoes, and the sister that laments forlorn in her Bistonian bower [Philomela]: mourn all together and bear your dead kinsman to the flames. (2.4.16–23)
In Statius, the parrot has ceased to be a vehicle for satire and has become once again an instrument of flattery, including the sincere form of flattery born of imitation. For poets, as for natural historians, the bird remains both a servile and a transcendent creature. Efforts to fix its meaning in one category or the other seem hopeless.
Yet while poets and painters pursue their work, parrots become subject to still another strange tension, this time centering on the dinner-table. We eat many things in America today, but parrots are not among them. Not that one would expect the parrots to complain, of course. Given all of the other indignities to which they had already been exposed in ancient Europe—capture, transportation and sale, beating with iron rods, satirical mockery, and so forth—it seems only fair that people should at least refrain from eating them. And their chances at first seem good in this respect. As we’ve seen, Aelian notes in his description of India that “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.” This standard of treatment might give reasonable cause for optimism. After all, parrots have a number of qualities that could well be expected to save them from meeting their maker on a bed of wild rice. They are rare. They are beautiful. They are associated with the gods. They are intelligent and amusing. They are not eaten in their native land. They are popular as pets. And most of all, they are articulate.
Rarity alone might discourage one from eating an animal for practical reasons; to eat it is to risk losing its kind. The birds’ beauty might appeal to one’s aesthetic sense; their association with the gods to one’s sense of holy dread; their intelligence to one’s potential respect for other sentient beings; the fact that they are not eaten to one’s respect for tradition. As pets, they enter into a special relationship with their owners that cuts across the barrier of species, placing them in a sense inside the human family unit. By defining our pets as “surrogate family members” (Shell 123), we turn them into honorary human beings, under the safeguard of the prohibition against cannibalism.
In the case of parrots, this protection is extended still further by the ability to speak, which redoubles the kinship between owner and beast. The Beat novelist and composer Paul Bowles, writing in 1953 of his own longstanding attachment to parrots, noted that for the Central American Indians “the parrot can be a temporary abode for a human spirit” (159). For others, too, the parrot’s voice presents a special challenge to the distinction between people and animals. In eating such a bird, we seem to be eating a piece of ourselves.
And on the whole western society has proven reluctant to treat parrots as foodstuffs. But if we were therefore to consider them completely exempt from the demands of the table, we would ignore the invincible perversity of human nature. In fact, people—Europeans among them—have eaten parrots, in most cases as a matter of necessity. The peoples of pre-Columbian America consumed the birds, as did those of West Africa, and T’ang China (Schafer 100), and as did some European explorers faced with starvation. In the nineteenth century, parrot pie became a classic pioneer dish in the Australian outback.
But the ancient Romans are to my knowledge unique among western peoples in treating the parrot as a culinary delicacy rather than as an entree of last resort. They have even left us recipes for preparing the birds. Here is one from Apicius’ celebrated cookbook, On the Art of Cookery (late third century A.D.):
For Flamingo [and Parrot] in phoenicoptero [flamingo style]
Scald the flamingo, wash and dress it, put it in a pot, add water, salt, dill, and a little vinegar, to be parboiled. Finish cooking with a bunch of leeks and coriander, and add some reduced must to give it color. In the mortar crush pepper, cumin, coriander, laser root, mint, rue, moisten with vinegar, add dates, and the fond of the braised bird, thicken, [strain] cover the bird with the sauce and serve. Parrot is prepared in the same mariner. (231–232)
Never having tried this dish, I can hazard no opinion as to its quality. Nor is it clear just how widely such recipes were made in their own day. But used they were, specifically by the rich and privileged.
We know, for instance, that parrots were a part of the diet of the late Roman boy-emperor Elagabalus (A.D. 218–222). As one historian noted in tight-lipped disgust, he even fed parrots to his lions; as for his palace staff, he regaled them with “huge dishes filled with mullets’ innards, flamingoes’ brains, partridge eggs, thrushes’ brains, and the heads of parrots, pheasants and peacocks” (Lives of the Later Caesars, Elagabalus 21.2; 20.6). Such banquets seem to have earned him little admiration; on the contrary, they survive as evidence of his softness, profligacy, and corruption. Eating parrot and similar things, Elagabalus transforms himself into an emblem of epicurism run amuck.
He makes a lasting impression in the process. Nearly fourteen hundred years after the young emperor’s death, Ben Jonson recalls Elagabalus’ dining habits in his dramatic masterpiece, the comedy Volpone (1606). There Jonson’s depraved, eponymous protagonist attempts to seduce the virtuous Celia in part through a miscalculated appeal to her sense of gourmandise:
The heads of parrats, tongues of nightingales,
The braines of peacoks, and of estriches
Shall be our food. (3.7.200–204)
But Jonson is a latecomer with his loathing of psittacophagy. Within two centuries of Elagabalus’ demise, his eating habits were the stuff of legend, appearing in the verse satire Against Eutropius by the late Roman poet Claudian (A.D. 370–c. 404). This is a venomous political lampoon aimed at its title character, the powerful eunuch, consul, and chamberlain of the eastern Roman emperor Arcadius, whom Claudian imagines summoning his favorites to a council of war as follows: “Their hunger is only aroused by costly meats, and they tickle their palates with foods imported from overseas, the flesh of the many-eyed fowl of Juno, or of that coloured bird brought from farthest Ind that knows how to speak” (2.328–331).
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