only}
after a time. Unless he knew it was the case, could any one suppose it
possible that the bird of Juno, which carries stars on its tail, and the
{eagle}, the armour-bearer of Jove, and the doves of Cytherea, and all
the race of birds, are produced from the middle portion of an egg? There
are some who believe that human marrow changes into a serpent,[44] when
the spine has putrefied in the enclosed sepulchre.

"But these {which I have named} derive their origin from other
particulars; there is one bird which renews and reproduces itself. The
Assyrians call it the Phoenix. It lives not on corn or grass, but on
drops of frankincense, and the juices of the amomum. This {bird}, when
it has completed the five ages of its life, with its talons and its
crooked beak constructs for itself a nest in the branches of a holm-oak,
or on the top of a quivering palm. As soon as it has strewed in this
cassia and ears of sweet spikenard and bruised cinnamon with yellow
myrrh, it lays itself down on it, and finishes its life in the midst of
odours. They say that thence, from the body of its parent, is reproduced
a little Phoenix, which is destined to live as many years. When time has
given it strength, and it is able to bear the weight, it lightens the
branches of the lofty tree of the burden of the nest, and dutifully
carries both its own cradle and the sepulchre of its parent; and, having
reached the city of Hyperion through the yielding air, it lays it down
before the sacred doors in the temple of Hyperion.

"And if there is any wondrous novelty in these things, {still more} may
we be surprised that the hyaena changes its sex,[45] and that the one
which has just now, as a female, submitted to the embrace of the male,
is now become a male itself. That animal, too, which feeds upon[46] the
winds and the air, immediately assumes, from its contact, any colour
whatever. Conquered India presented her lynxes to Bacchus crowned with
clusters; {and}, as they tell, whatever the bladder of these discharges
is changed into stone,[47] and hardens by contact with the air. So
coral, too, as soon as it has come up to the air becomes hard; beneath
the waves it was a soft plant.[48] "The day will fail me, and Phoebus
will bathe his panting steeds in the deep sea, before I can embrace in
my discourse all things that are changed into new forms. So in lapse of
time, we see nations change, and these gaining strength, {while} those
are falling. So Troy