HKB
were now withdrawn, justice prevailed, and being questioned for crimes long since sufficiently manifest, she executed with her own hand that vengeance, which was rather too slow than too severe,
In the Consulship of Paulus Fabius and Lucius Vitellius, after a long vicissitude of ages, the phoenix arrived in Egypt, and furnished the most learned of the natives and Greeks with matter of large and various observations concerning that miraculous bird. The circumstances in which they agree, with many others, that, however disputed, deserve to be known, claim a recital here. That it is a creature sacred to the sun, and in the fashion of its head, and diversity of feathers, distinct from other birds, all who have described its figure, are agreed; about the length of its life, relations vary. It is by the vulgar tradition fixed at five hundred years: but there are those, who extend it to one thousand four hundred and sixty-one; and assert that the three former phoenixes appeared in reigns greatly distant, the first under Sesostris, the next under Amasis; and that one was seen under Ptolomy the third King of Egypt of the Macedonian race, and flew to the city of Heliopolis, accompanied by a vast host of other birds gazing upon the wonderful stranger. But these are, in truth, the obscure accounts of antiquity: between Ptolomy and Tiberius the interval was shorter, not two hundred and fifty years: hence some have believed that the present was a spurious phoenix, and derived not its origin from the territories of Arabia, since it observed nothing of the instinct which ancient tradition attributes to the genuine: for that the latter having completed his course of years, just before his death builds a nest in his native land, and upon it sheds a generative power, from whence arises a young one, whose first care, when he is grown, is to bury his father: neither does he undertake it unadvisedly, but by collecting and fetching loads of myrrh, tries his strength in great journeys; and as soon as he finds himself equal to the burden, and fit for the long flight, he rears upon his back his father's body, carries it quite to the altar of the sun, and then flies away. These are uncertain tales, and their uncertainty heightened by fables; but that this bird has been sometimes seen in Egypt, is not questioned.