PHOENIX, in antiquity, a famous bird, which is generally looked upon by the moderns as fabulous. The ancients speak of this bird as single, or the only one of its kind; they describe it as of the size of an eagle; its head finely crested with a beautiful plumage, its neck covered with feathers of a gold colour, and the rest of its body purple, only the tail white, and the eyes sparkling like stars: they hold, that it lives 300 or 600 years in the wilderness; that when thus advanced in age, it builds itself a pile of sweet wood and aromatic gums, and fires it with the waiting of its wings, and thus burns itself; and that from its ashes arises a worm, which in time grows up to be a phoenix. Hence the Phœnicians gave the name of phœnix to the palm-tree; because when burnt down to the root it rises again fairer than ever.
In the sixth book of the Annals of Tacitus, sect. 28, VOL. XVI. Part II.
it is observed that, in the year of Rome 787, the phoenix revisited Egypt; which occasioned among the learned much speculation. This being is sacred to the sun. Of its longevity the accounts are various. The common persuasion is, as we have mentioned above, that it lives 500 years; though by some the date is extended to 1461. The several eras when the phoenix has been seen are fixed by tradition. The first, we are told, was in the reign of Sesostris; the second in that of Amasis; and, in the period when Ptolemy the third of the Macedonian race was seated on the throne of Egypt, another phoenix directed its flight towards Heliopolis. When to these circumstances are added the brilliant appearance of the phoenix, and the tale that it makes frequent excursions with a load on its back, and that when, by having made the experiment through a long tract of air, it gains sufficient confidence in its own vigour, it takes up the body of its father and flies with it to the altar of the sun to be there consumed; it cannot but appear probable, that the learned of Egypt had enveloped under this allegory the philosophy of comets.