Peacock
animal · 7 works · 7 mentions · 7 anchored passages
peacock · peacocks · the peacock · peacock's tail · swan
spoken of as
1 expressionPeacocks2 mentions
Pericles (Greek) · Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa (Sanskrit)
The comic poets took up this story and bespattered Pericles with charges of abounding wantonness, connecting their slanders with the wife of Menippus, a man who was his friend, and a colleague in the generalship, and with the bird-culture of Pyrilampes, who, since he was the comrade of Pericles, was accused of using his peacocks to bribe the women with whom Pericles consorted.
in the texts
Atharvaveda (Paippalāda)
The peacock, named as the natural predator of the scorpion, invoked within the food-chain logic of the scorpion-medicine charm.
The peacock eats the scorpion;
Orations
A richly plumed bird described for its beauty and display, contrasted with the plain owl.
Yet how is it that they do not rather admire the peacock, so beautiful and so richly coloured, and especially when it is preening itself and displaying the beauty of its feathers — when it shows off before the female, raising its tail and spreading it all about itself like a fair vaulted chamber, or like a painted heaven dappled with stars, marvellous too in the rest of its body, very nearly the c …
Yet the birds have no wish to look upon the peacock while it adorns itself with all this, nor, when they hear the voice of the nightingale singing at dawn, are they at all moved towards her;
De Rerum Natura
Bird cited for its light-reactive iridescent tail.
The peacock's tail, filled with the copious light,
Changes its colours likewise, when it turns.
Pericles
Birds bred by Pyrilampes, allegedly used to bribe women on Pericles's behalf.
The comic poets took up this story and bespattered Pericles with charges of abounding wantonness, connecting their slanders with the wife of Menippus, a man who was his friend, and a colleague in the generalship, and with the bird-culture of Pyrilampes, who, since he was the comrade of Pericles, was accused of using his peacocks to bribe the women with whom Pericles consorted.
De Anima
The peacock (and, secondarily, the swan) into which Homer and poets generally were claimed to be reincarnated.
granting that the poets pass into peacocks or into swans — if there is a comely voice even to swans — what animal will you put upon a just man, an Aeacus?
De Pallio
Bird whose iridescent, ever-changing plumage exemplifies natural precedent for changing dress.
although for the peacock too the plumage is its dress — and indeed of the choicest kind — nay, more pressing than every purple where his necks bloom, and more gilded than every fringe where his back gleams, and looser than every trailing robe where his tail lies, many-coloured and party-coloured and changing-coloured, never the same, always another, even if always the same when another — to be cha …
Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa
Birds repeatedly invoked as a marker of monsoon joy throughout Rāma's nature description.
"Thrilled, having caught the fragrance of Ketaka blossoms, the great elephants in the forest waterfalls, disturbed by the thunderous sounds, cry out together with the maddened peacocks.
"A maddened king elephant, walking the path and following the mountain forest, having set out and then heard the thunderclap of the clouds, eager for battle and suspecting it to be a rival bull, has turned back.
peacocks dance;