Killing Two Birds with One Stone: An Egg-Sighting Study of Ancient and Modern Ornithological Knowledge as Told Through the Birds Featured in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Birds were incredibly important in ancient Rome, inasmuch as, through their flight, they were thought to link the human world to the heavens. This significance is reflected in the works of such ancient scholars as Pliny, Varro, and Columella, who record avian character traits in their life histories of these flying figures. Although this “scientific" information proves useful, some of the best information pertaining to the ancient understanding of birds actually comes from Roman literature as exemplified especially in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a mythological history of the universe from chaos to Ovid’s own times. My own study, a combined effort in Biology and Classics, compares the descriptions of birds presented by ancient scholars to examples offered by Ovid, while also investigating how well this ancient information holds up in comparison with the observations of modern ornithological science. In my thesis, I discuss the eagle (aquila), the dove (columba), the owl (bubo), and the hoopoe (epops). For this presentation, I will limit my focus solely to the hoopoe. Ovid invokes the hoopoe in the twisted tale of King Tereus, his wife Procne, and her sister Philomela. After a discussion of the story and the bird’s life history, I will present my own theories as to why Tereus was transformed specifically into a hoopoe.