Cranes
animal · 7 works · 7 mentions · 8 anchored passages
cranes · the cranes · a crane's throat · crane · dispersed clamour of the cranes
in the texts
Birds
A migratory bird treated first as a seasonal omen announcing sowing time and later, in a comic escalation, as one of the labor forces of thirty thousand that helped build the city's wall.
Thirty thousand cranes came from Libya with a supply of stones, intended for the foundations.
Does the screaming crane migrate to Libya, —it warns the husbandman to sow, the pilot to take his ease beside his tiller hung up in his dwelling, and Orestes to weave a tunic, so that the rigorous cold may not drive him any more to strip other folk.
Nicomachean Ethics
A long-necked bird invoked as a comparison in the gourmand's wish.
This is why a certain gourmand wished that his throat might be longer than a crane’s, showing that his pleasure lay in the sensation of contact.
Letters
Migratory birds used as a figure for foresight and escape from winter hardship.
We have not so much as the cranes have, the power to escape the hardships of winter;
On the Nature of the Gods
Migratory birds described flying in a self-organizing triangular formation.
that the cranes, when, seeking warmer regions, they cross the seas, make the form of a triangle?
Orations
Migratory birds cited as an example of natural seasonal adaptation for food.
and the cranes visit the sown land, bearing winter moderately, and for the sake of food.
De Rerum Natura
Migratory birds cited for their harsh collective clamor, contrasted with the swan.
Than that dispersed clamour of the cranes
Among the southwind's aery clouds.
Cyropaedia
Birds used as a point of comparison for the speed of Cyrus's express system.
They say, moreover, that sometimes this express does not stop all night, but the night-messengers succeed the day-messengers in relays, and when that is the case, this express, some say, gets over the ground faster than the cranes.